One morning, a pillar of black smoke stabbed the clear, blue sky.
I sipped coffee on the front porch and watched it billow, unfurl, and expand into a brown haze staining the sky over the town to the east, figuring its source for the intersection of Lohatchie’s Main Street and Banyan Road. That raised my hackles, though I couldn’t say why exactly. Nor could I guess the cause of the smoke. No one lived in Lohatchie anymore. Far as I knew, only me, Birch, Christopher, and Della lived within a fifty-mile radius of town, and the reanimated dead don’t set fires.
The front door creaked open then clicked shut behind me as I eyed the smoke. Della slid an arm around my waist, leaned into me as she sipped her coffee. “Spontaneous combustion?”
“Fires like that don’t set themselves,” I said.
“Wormfeeder cookout?”
“Only if the wormfeeders are the ones getting cooked. The dead may be dumb, but they know not to play with fire.”
I laced my arm around Della’s shoulders and kissed her on top of her head, inhaling the scent of sleep still lingering on her hair. Her body warmed me in the cool morning air.
“Well, if it’s not the dead and fires don’t start themselves,” she said, pausing to sigh, “we got company in town.”
“There goes the neighborhood,” I said.
Green and brown surrounded us. Sawgrass filled the spaces between cypress, mangrove, and mahogany trees, broken by colorful splashes of wildflowers, even a few orchids south of the house. The green buzzed and chirped, abundant with wildlife. The sawgrass swayed where unseen critters traveled. Less than a mile west of our place ran a river that flowed out to the coastal marsh, and the most motion around us came when the wind rustled the trees. A Toyota SUV in desperate need of a wash sat in front of the house, windshield still peppered with dead bugs from our last scavenging run into Lohatchie.
More and more time passed between each trip now. The town had little left to offer, and Birch’s garden out back brimmed with vegetables year round thanks to his clever planning. Christopher and I brought in plenty of fish and game, and in time, the apple, lemon, and orange trees we’d planted would add to the bounty. It amazed me how well we could live off the land in the absence of competition and civilization. Paradise. A pocket of vibrant life on a dead earth. My Lohatchie hideaway delivered all the things I’d hoped for when I first set my sights on her in the early days of the dead plague. The road here took its toll, sure enough, but this scrap of a home carved from the green wild worked a kind of healing magic on us all. After every terror and torture we’d survived, we needed it. Hell, we deserved it.
So that column of smoke dispersing itself toward the heavens?
That tightened my chest and put tension in my brow.
The sight of it gripped my heart in a stony fist.
It reminded me of another darkness, one spreading itself across the cosmos—one I hoped never to see or contact again. And until now, I believed in that possibility. But such is this world that no matter where you go, no matter how you live, the darkness always finds a way to catch up with you.
“I’ll wake Christopher,” Della said.
“Let him sleep a little longer. He’s a growing boy,” I said. “Nothing to gain by rushing. Enjoy the morning. No telling how things will look this time tomorrow.”
Della’s arm tightened around me. With Miami a year-and-a-half in our rear views and the Red Man destroyed, the dead he’d rallied to torment us lost their way. They still roamed the world, but with less aggression and no purpose. The souls inside them that looked out through the eyes that pocked their corpses seemed to be winding down and losing coherence. We’d almost come to take for granted the predictability and routine of life on the edge of the Everglades. I knew better, but it still stung for that pillar of smoke to shatter the illusion.
I finished off my coffee, hugged Della, then walked inside.
Birch slept on the sofa, his body so long, his feet hung over one arm. He laid so still with his arms folded over his chest it creeped me out. He looked dead. Worse, when I kicked the sofa leg and barked out his name, he didn’t move a muscle, only opened his eyes, rising from slumber instantly. He levered his legs around and sat up. Ran a hand across the gray stubble on his scalp, the dry skin of his palm scraping, then shot me a questioning look.
“There’s smoke in town. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Where there’s fire, there’s…” I said. “Well, me and Della think we got company. Better we scope it out before they find us here, so we keep this place our little secret.”
He nodded then stood and flashed me an open hand. Give me five to get ready.
Once we found time to heal, I’d hoped he’d find a way to regain his voice, lost when the Red Man ripped out his tongue, but he remained as silent as ever. I left him pulling on his boots.
My place outside Lohatchie, passed down from my great-grandfather, consisted of a living room, kitchen, two bedrooms, one bathroom, and a dirt-floor cellar, where we kept our guns, ammunition, and other weapons scavenged along our journeys. Funny how so much of it accumulated after we destroyed the Red Man and stopped getting into constant scraps with the dead. Without his influence, the wormfeeders lost their will and dispersed. St. Bianco, who possessed the power to still the living dead, did so for all those in the Red Man’s inner circle of ghouls at Acme Wonderland, but, I guess, he couldn’t swing it for all of South Florida. They still troubled us, but at least they no longer swarmed or forced us to fight for every inch of road. We ran circles around them now. If we avoided them, they ignored us. Whatever bond once drove them to hunt us no longer existed. We hardly ever fired a gun or bloodied a blade these days except when hunting. Other dangers existed out there, though, as they always had. I preferred to face them well-armed. I gathered handguns, rifles, and shotguns, a crossbow, knives, hatchets, a slingshot, with which Christopher could take a crow out of the sky, and lugged it all upstairs to load in the SUV.
Birch, returning from taking a leak on the edge of the wild, helped me load them.
I slammed the hatch shut.
Birch nodded to me. Good to go.
Christopher emerged from the house, dressed and ready to roll, except for his hair mussed in six different directions of bedhead mayhem. Della followed. They hesitated a moment to study the distant smoke. Christopher yawned, but then his eyes narrowed with irritation at the intrusion into our solitude. None of us relished routine more than him. That’s what the young need, if only for something to test and rebel against—and I’d noticed the signs of rebellion growing in him as he hit the age when boys commence figuring out how to become men. Good for him. We all took that path sooner or later, if we lived long enough.
We climbed into the SUV in silence.
I cranked the engine, circled us around, and rolled up the trail toward town.
~*~
The closer to Main Street we drove, the more wormfeeders we saw.
Only in ones and twos, though. They no longer traveled in mobs, flowing like rising whitewater.
They barely noted our passing. The numberless, unnatural eyes that pocked their bodies showed fewer signs of life with every passing day, as if the souls behind them clung to existence in a process of slow decay, their vitality fading, the hungry gleam they once turned on us dimming under a milky haze. They didn’t care anymore about what had once burned so fervently in them that it enabled them to persist after death, return to the world in borrowed flesh, and prey on the living. How that worked or what they hoped to gain, I still didn’t fully understand, but I gladly accepted their weakening.
I guided the Toyota along a side street lined with empty houses and parked half a block from the main road. We slipped out of the car, armed ourselves from the trunk, and then broke into two teams.
Birch and I strolled toward Main Street. Christopher and Della headed to the other end of the block to move in along Biscayne Road, parallel to Main Street, backing us up while keeping out of sight. The rank odor of burning rubber tainted the air, emanating from the heavy, greasy smoke forming a shroud over the town. At the corner, I crouched and peered around the side of a long-abandoned hardware store, most of its useful goods now stored at my place. Fire raged at the far end of Main Street. A car burned. In its open trunk a pile of tires seethed with heat and smoke. Maybe a quarter mile away, yet the heat tickled my cheeks. I withdrew, let Birch take a look.
“I didn’t see anyone,” I said when he pulled back and straightened.
He shook his head. Me neither.
“So why burn tires and a car in the middle of the road? No point other than to catch someone’s attention, I’d say, because it makes one hell of a mess. Impossible to ignore.” I scanned Birch’s impassive eyes, saw no objection. “Which means they’re assuming someone is here to see it. Or, worse, they know someone’s here to see it.”
Birch nodded.
I reached into my pocket and plucked out the handset from a pair of walkie-talkies Christopher had collected from the hardware store. I’d laughed at the time, but they’d come in handy hunting and even around the house. Smart kid, that one.
I kept my voice low as I held the transmit button and spoke into it: “Someone definitely set the fire on purpose. We can’t see anyone, though. You in position? Over.”
Seconds passed before Della came back. “We’re on the west corner of Banyan and Biscayne, a block down from Main. We don’t see anyone. No one living, at least, but we got a couple wormfeeders taking root in someone’s front yard across the street. Over.”
Taking root. What the wormfeeders did when they ran out of steam. Found a place out of the way then stood there and rotted to dust. It took a long time. I knew of “wormfeeder graveyards,” where they clustered like living grave markers waiting to disintegrate. It paid to stay alert around them, though, because sometimes they sprang back into action in a final burst of hunger.
“Watch ’em close. Don’t turn your backs on ’em,” I said. “Birch and I are taking a walk. Squawk if you see anyone living. Over and out.”
In silent agreement, Birch and I stepped around the corner, moved into the road, and walked right up the middle of Main Street at a Sunday-stroll pace. Birch carried a .45 in his right hand, low at his side, a .30 caliber rifle slung across his back. I cradled a 12-gauge shotgun in my arms, my 9mm holstered at my waist. We each wore a knife and a hatchet tucked into our belts. Walking up Main Street in plain sight might seem foolish, but time and again I’d found the direct approach worked best when confronting strangers. Anyone who knew enough about us to want us dead would’ve known where to find us. We had no living enemies, none we knew of at least, and it paid to make a show of ownership, striding through town like we alone belonged here, no one else.
The closer we moved to the fire, the worse the smoke and stink grew, until my eyes itched and watered. We halted about a hundred yards from the torched car, glanced around, saw no one. The car sat right in front of Mona and Joan’s, a diner and ice cream shop back in the day.
A voice I’d forgotten whispered in my memory.
French fries and strawberry shakes.
“Shit,” I said. “It can’t be. No fucking way it can be.”
Birch raised an eyebrow. I ignored him.
“All right, we saw your smoke signal. We came. We’re here,” I shouted over the crackling flame. “You going to make us wait all day?”
My gaze darted from one doorway to the next, one rooftop to another, from shadow to shadow, seeking a man I’d never expected to see again, near seven feet of muscle and meanness I’d watched die. Or at least thought I had. I held my breath, waiting for him to step out of a patch of gloom into the sun and firelight. Instead, a smaller, far-more surprising figure appeared.
A girl, maybe twelve, thin, gangly, wearing ill-fitting clothes, dirty brown hair tied back in a ponytail, ash smudged on her face, emerged from Mona and Joan’s. She eyed me and Birch with fear. The two of us stared back at her for long seconds as we processed the sight of her.
Finally, I said, “Hey, there. We won’t hurt you. Do you need some help?”
She nodded then vanished into Mona and Joan’s.
Birch raised his left hand, palm up, then snapped the first two fingers of his right hand against it.
A trap.
“Sure feels like it,” I said. “At the same time, it doesn’t.”
Birch raised both eyebrows at me for that.
I shrugged. “Feels like something else, that’s all.”
I reported to Della over the walkie then, with Birch’s silent resignation, approached the door to Mona and Joan’s. The fire warmed the back of my neck. Its smoke spilled around me. I covered my nose and mouth with my hand. Birch coughed then did the same. We waited a few moments for our eyes to adjust to the shade inside the diner then pushed the door open and entered, carrying our guns, ready.
“Hey, there, Lohatchie boy. Long time, no see,” a man said from the back of the diner.
That whispering voice given full volume.
Seated on one of the counter stools, he shifted his mass, putting his face into the light. I blinked several times, making sure I saw who I thought I saw. He looked scarred and thinner, no less powerful or muscular than I remembered, and at the same time, faded and withdrawn, his deep brown skin tinged gray as if he’d sunken deep inside himself, taking refuge in the shelter of physical prowess—but that had changed even more than I realized at first. I understood fully what my eyes told me when he stood. He had lost his left arm, from the shoulder, and a scarred, ragged stump protruded from his sleeveless, muscle shirt.
“Fuck,” I said. “Last I saw you, it looked like the wormfeeders had torn open half your chest.”
“Damn near did. Wound up smeared in so much dead gunk the others gave me up for lost and left me alone long enough to squirrel out of there. Hid out until the hornet’s nest shitshow we started ran its course. You’re one mean son of a bitch, Cornell. Anyone ever tell you that?”
“Who keeps track?”
Birch tapped my shoulder, glanced from me to the man and back again.
“Birch, meet Klug, aka the King Snake. Klug, meet Birch.”
Klug spun on his stool, showing off his cobra tattoo. It covered the back of his bald skull and ran down his neck, along his spine, and under his shirt. “Hey,” he said as he rounded to face us again. Birch said nothing. “Quiet type, huh?”
“Can’t speak. Someone took his tongue,” I said.
“Ouch, my sympathies, brother,” said Klug.
“Yeah, I’m sure he appreciates that. You two can be the charter members of the Lohatchie Lost Appendages club.” My shock surrendered to tension. I changed the pitch of the shotgun in my arms. Klug didn’t overlook it. “I suppose you set that fire for a reason.”
“Sure did, and you ain’t gonna need that scattergun,” he said.
“I have vivid memories of pinning you to a wall with a truck, then the two of us trying to get each other killed by wormfeeders while I stole the getaway keys from your pocket.”
“I remember that too. Wild times, man, wild times. The things we do to survive. Who can blame us?”
“You saying all is forgiven?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying. Not only that, but you were right.”
“I was?”
“Yes, sir. We should’ve stuck to the plan and broken out of that prison. You got no concept of the hell that place became after you ditched it with Della and Mason. One of those ‘life-altering’ experiences people used to jaw about back when there were still enough people to listen. As Warden Lane Grove might’ve said, ‘The scales fell from my eyes.’ That and months and months of surviving second to second without a left arm changed my outlook.”
“How so?”
Klug gestured to the girl. “You already met Chloe.”
“Hi,” she said, her voice shy, hesitant.
Two other children crept out from behind the counter. A black boy half Chloe’s age, clinging to a superhero plushie at odds with the defiant look on his face, and a black girl, almost a teen, wearing a belt of knives, her hair cropped close to her scalp. The two bore a family resemblance.
“Meet Merit and his sister, Tayna,” Klug said.
I nodded to each one and spoke their names. “I’m Cornell. This is Birch.”
“Hi,” they said.
“All of you now, come on,” Klug said.
“It’s like a damned clown car. How many you got hiding back there?” I said.
“Only them and Nina. Let’s go, girl. No one here’s going to bite you,” Klug said.
A girl of fifteen or sixteen and several months pregnant revealed herself, rising behind the counter as if she expected to need to take cover again at a moment’s notice. She wore a dirty, blue sundress and stared daggers at me with her brown eyes.
“I ain’t the father,” Klug said. “That was Rennie. Lost him about a month back.”
“What the hell is this, Klug? You running a mobile daycare?”
Klug chuckled. “Like a halfway house on wheels. Della still with you? If she is, they all could use a look over from a good nurse. Nina’s gonna need all the help she can get in a few months. It’s why I came here. That and my yearning for one last strawberry-and-banana milkshake. Not going to get that, though, am I?”
“I am at a loss,” I said.
“I was too for a long time,” Klug said. “Things changed the first time I found myself around kids who needed protecting.” A frown soured his haunted face. “None of those first ones are here. I did what I could. We can only do so much in this fucked-up world. We all got our limitations. We all come to the end of our road one day. I’m getting to mine. I thought, well, where in this whole, wide, savage world could I leave these four that they might have a chance without me? I figured if you were smart and tough enough to outdo me back in prison, you might have made it all the way to Lohatchie. I liked the idea of coming home too. Don’t have time to wander the neighborhood knocking on doors, so I figured I’d send up the signal. You’d have to come if you saw it because we can’t afford mysteries in our own backyard these days, right? I underestimated you once, not again.”
I found no words to respond. The children watched me with intense, curious stares. Klug had guided them to a turning point, but they didn’t know which direction their lives would take from here. Klug stared at me with different questions. The kind I thought could never even occur to a man like him, who’d lived his whole life by force, intimidation, and treachery before the dead plague, a man who did everything he could to deserve the name King Snake. Merit stepped forward to Klug’s side, reached up, and took Klug’s hand. Klug’s massive, knobby fingers wrapped around the boy’s with a gentle touch I’d have considered beyond his capacity. Like me, Della, Christopher, and Birch, though, Klug had defied the odds on more levels than one.
I raised the walkie to my mouth. “Della, meet us at Mona and Joan’s. We’re inside. We’ve got some kids who need a little nursing. Over.”
A crackle of static, then Della came back, “On our way. Over and out.”
~*~
“Got something to show you,” Klug said.
He gestured for us to go out the back door to the small parking lot behind the diner. The sickness inside him revealed itself when he rose from his stool. He hunched over, his right hand clutched against his belly, and winced at the pain from whatever ate away at him. He took a second to catch his breath then shuffled along to the door. Despite his frailness, my gaze roved over him, seeking weapons. I saw none, but old habits die hard, and trust doesn’t wink into existence because someone surrounds himself with children.
I traded glances with Della, who paused examining Nina long enough to notice how bad Klug looked. She’d already checked the other kids and given them clean bills of health, except for their hygiene, which we could remedy easily enough, but Nina filled her with concern, and that worried me. She nodded the okay for me to go, though, so I did. Birch came along behind me as I caught up to Klug. Christopher started to follow too, rising from where he sat playing cards with Merit, Tayna, and Chloe. I waved him off. I wanted him backing up Della, wanted to spare him whatever Klug had in mind, because I couldn’t imagine anything pleasant waiting for us.
Klug opened the back door. We stepped into the sunlight of a day on track for high heat and humidity, the kind of day when we got up early to finish all our chores so we could spend most of it in the shade of our porch. Across the parking lot stretched a garden of the rooted dead, casting shadows in unison like giant-sized sundials. I hadn’t been this way on our last few runs into town and had no idea so many had planted themselves here. They took no notice of us as far as I could tell. The breeze twitched their ragged clothing and disintegrating hair. Some of them swayed a little as it blew.
On the sidewalk that ran along the asphalt square sat a red cooler stained with dirt.
“Check this out,” Klug said.
He toed the edge of the cooler lid then flipped it open with a kick. I don’t know what I or Birch expected to see in there, but neither of us could’ve guessed the reality: a dead arm squirming on the cooler bottom, a dozen eyes blinking from its rotting flesh. The eyes squinted at the sunlight suddenly permitted into their nest. The cooler barely contained the big limb. It wriggled like a lizard dying staked to the ground by its tail, until the proverbial light bulb switched on in my head, and I directed my gaze at Klug’s stump.
“Fucking wild, right?” He laughed, but it turned into a horrible, hacking cough. It took him almost a minute of wheezing to get his breath back. “I keep it as a reminder of how easy it is to lose things we take for granted in this world. Get me? I have this connection to it, to the dead through it, like a window into what they know, what they want. Let me tell you, that shit has kept me up many a night. It don’t make a lick of sense, but it’s helped me stay a step ahead of them when it mattered. Like an early-warning system. Now, though… now, they don’t hardly seem to care much about anything. Like they’re winding down. You notice that?”
I gestured to the still figures that filled the parking lot. “I see it all the time.”
Klug looked over his shoulder. “Yeah, true. Maybe that’s what’s killing me. Whatever’s passing out of them is passing out of my arm and draining the life out of me too. Or maybe it’s just cancer eating my insides. Who knows? Don’t make it hurt any less or change the result. I got only so much strength inside me, and when it’s all eaten up, I’m gonna be right there with them.”
Klug flipped the cooler lid closed. It snapped back open, making all three of us jump.
“Oh, shit,” Klug said.
Pain burdened his voice. Like a knife thrust into him forced the words from his mouth.
The dead fingers of his severed arm curled over the lip of the cooler. The hand flexed, dragging itself up. It spread its fingers, opening its palm, full of winking eyes, and shook so forcefully the cooler rattled on the ground. Those eyes hadn’t paled at all, preserved and sustained, perhaps, by their link to Klug’s living energy.
In the parking lot, the wormfeeders roused. Despite their aimlessness and decay, the dead sometimes still traveled fast. In the blink of an eye, they turned to face us, then took rough, shambling steps in our direction. A few toppled over, their bodies incapable of motion on bones too brittle to support them and muscles, ligaments, and tendons long-since shriveled and snapped. One, whose feet seemed glued to the asphalt by putrescence, dropped as its ankles cracked. It tried to crawl, but then its wrists cracked too, leaving it stranded to wriggle on hot blacktop. The mob of them emitted a discordant, collective groan, as if anguished over the return to motion.
“The fuck is this?” I said.
Birch tugged on my shoulder, drawing me toward the door.
I resisted, fascinated by the dead uprooting themselves, wanting to understand what had sparked them back to motion. Birch pointed at Klug and yanked on me again.
Klug blinked his eyes several times and swayed on his feet. His jaw rose up and down, and his lips quivered. They looked like smears of ash. He couldn’t catch or hold a breath. For a moment, his hand clung to the side of his gut, where his pain seemed to originate, then it slid away and hung limp at his side. I still didn’t get what Birch had already sussed out.
“Birch’s right. Let’s get back in inside, Klug,” I said. Klug didn’t reply, didn’t move. I dropped my hand on his shoulder. “Let’s go, man. Come on!”
The King Snake heeled around to regard me with empty, glazed eyes. A gurgling moan escaped from his throat. A death rattle. He lunged his right hand at me, trying to grab my face. I fell back against Birch, ducking Klug’s reach. Birch and I bolted to the door, no need to drag me along now, the two of us bumping together as we rushed inside, and locked it shut behind us. Dead flesh pounded against the wood, but it held.
“Fuck me, did he just die on his feet while we were talking?”
Panting, his eyes wide, Birch nodded. Yeah, looks like it.
“Ain’t that a stitch?”
We hurried into the diner.
“Time for a hasty departure,” I said. “Gather everyone up. We’re going for the SUV.”
“Where’s Klug?” Tayna said. Her hands rested on the hilts of the knives strapped to her belt.
“Klug’s out back in the parking lot. He was a lot sicker than you knew. A man that strong can hide a sickness for a long time. Keep himself going like he’s better off than he really is. Then it catches up with him all at once. That’s what he did to get you all here, keep you safe. But he’s not sick anymore. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“Liar! I don’t believe you! You did something to him. He said you wouldn’t be happy to see him. You hurt him! What did you do?”
Tayna’s expression turned feral. She moved in a blur, unsheathing one of the knives at her waist and throwing it, missing my face by inches so the blade sunk itself into the wall behind me. She grabbed Merit’s hand and pulled him along as she dashed out the front door.
“Come back,” I called out.
Della and Christopher jumped up to run after them. I stopped them with news of the dead in the parking lot. “There could be others out there rousing for a last gasp. Seems like Klug’s death set them off somehow, like whatever life went out of him restarted their engines. We need to be careful.”
“So what’s the plan?” Christopher said.
“Della, Birch, you take Chloe and Nina to the SUV, lock them inside, and protect it. Christopher and I will find Merit and Tayna and meet you there,” I said. “Then we get the hell out of town.”
Christopher cracked the door and poked his head outside. “All clear.”
We exited Mona and Joan’s, the thud of dead fists against the back door fading behind us.
The heat and smoke from the fire turned the street to hell. That car would burn a long time.
Della and Birch led Chloe and Nina away toward the SUV, moving fast but with caution, keeping the two girls between them. I gestured to Christopher, and we walked the other way, rounding the fire as close as we dared as we crossed the street. I looked for signs of which way Merit and Tayna had run but saw no hint. They might as well have vanished like ghosts.
“Merit said they stashed their car nearby,” Christopher said.
“Did he say where?”
“No, only said his sister did the driving because Klug couldn’t anymore. Klug told them where to park because he grew up here.”
Weekends, holidays, Main Street in Lohatchie filled up with people running errands or enjoying the town, parents taking kids for ice cream, teenagers cruising, people on their weekly gossip-and-shop route. The parking lot out back of Mona and Joan’s and every other under-sized lot filled up fast on those days, which meant street parking for latecomers. Smart locals often went for that first anyway because two nearby streets offered easy parking in the shade while the sun cooked the public lots, and it gave them an edge on the traffic when it came time to leave. Klug had grown up here. He had to know about that.
“I got an idea where to look,” I said. “Follow me.”
Christopher walked beside me to the end of Main Street. The road continued, but shops gave way to houses. A mile farther down, if we were to walk that far, it gave way to nothing but sawgrass and trees, but no one ever parked down there. We passed the first residential side street, Finlay Road. No cars, only a handful of the dead rooted and rotted in front yards. On the second road, Chestnut Street, my guess paid off.
A Cadillac Town Car sat halfway down the block, neatly parked in the luxurious shade of an old red maple tree. The dead surrounded it, pressed against it, pawing at the windows, groaning, struggling to find a way inside, where Merit and Tayna clung to each other in the front seat. Why hadn’t they started the car and driven off, I wondered. Echoes of the past provided the answer. They didn’t have the keys; Klug did. Probably in his front shirt pocket like he’d had the truck keys so long ago back in the prison of Warden Lane Grove when I’d stolen them from him and escaped.
The yards along Chestnut Street had comprised a few wormfeeder graveyards. Many of them had uprooted themselves to pursue the kids. The others remained planted in place, their eyes noting us, watching, but ignoring both. Their deteriorated bodies swayed, from the breeze, or maybe excited by the action at the car. I figured a good number of the dead had wandered over from Finlay Street too. Dormant for so long, until Klug rang their alarm clock.
“There’s too many to dodge or kill,” Christopher said. “What do we do?”
Merit and Tayna spotted us. They slapped their palms against the windshield and screamed for us to help us, save us, get us out of here. Just kids, dumb enough to throw a knife at me in one moment then beg me for help in another.
The smart play would’ve been to walk away, rendezvous with the others, and head home. Leave behind what amounted to two more mouths to feed, that’s all. No one had asked Klug to bring a bunch of kids here, to trust me to take them in. But he had. Down to his last breath, my enemy came to me for help. Once, we’d tried our best to kill each other. You couldn’t say either of us had defeated the other, but we’d persevered. Beyond that, though, the look on Christopher’s face made the smart thing to do an impossibility. His expression removed “walking away” from my lexicon of moves. He intended to solve this problem. He needed to save those kids as he’d once been saved. I refused to let him down.
“We shoot them, we’ll be ringing the supper bell for the others out behind Mona and Joan’s, over on the next street, hell, anywhere around here. That only gets us cut off from the SUV.” I pointed to an Acura with four flat tires in a nearby driveway. “Hide yourself behind that car. I’ll draw them off the Caddy. They’ll scatter a bit when they come after me. I’ll lead them the other way. Once it’s clear, get the kids out and head back the way we came for the SUV.”
“No way, you can’t dodge that many,” Christopher said.
“Don’t worry about me. They’re slow, old, and unmotivated. I won’t have to dodge them all, just a few of the overachievers, I said. “Besides, I got a plan.”
Christopher met my gaze. I didn’t turn away. I needed to sell the lie, couldn’t let him see it in my eyes that I had no plan except to play rodeo clown for the wormfeeders long enough for him to retrieve Merit and Tayna. That’s what parents do: They make sacrifices for their children. Put themselves at risk for their survival. Give of themselves. I wasn’t Christopher’s father and never really would be, but there was a time when I would’ve been a father. A time before prison, death, the dead plague, and mad saints ruled a world sinking into decomposition. A time when long-dead Evelyn, who blessedly passed before all this insanity, would’ve made parents of us both—and I let her and our baby die, taking all the hope I’d ever had of living a normal kind of life with them.
This time, I promised myself, it would go differently.
Once Christopher hunkered down behind the Acura, I rampaged at the Caddy.
I skidded to a stop and poked one of the wormfeeders with the tip of my shotgun barrel. Then another one. I prodded a third, a fourth, then onward, one after another until half of them noticed me and scraped their attention away from the kids. I howled and whooped and jumped around, mocking them, keeping myself out of arm’s reach and glancing over my shoulder to check the ones still rooted in the yards. Most of the wormfeeders, about a dozen, left the Caddy and trailed me as I led them like the Pied Piper leading rats. I guided them beyond the Caddy, toward the far end of the block. When they slowed, I darted in and poled the frontrunners. A few lingered at the car, dead faces pressed to the windows. I grabbed a rock from the ground and threw it at them. Another. One more. I hit them in their faces, aimed for their multitude of eyes, made them see me. The curb tripped me, and I almost fell, but the tactic paid off. The last three joined the free-lunch crowd hoping to eat me.
“Go, Christopher, go, now!” I shouted.
On the other side of the Caddy, Christopher appeared, running so hard he stopped himself by slamming into the driver’s side door. He slapped at the glass, urged Merit and Tayna to unlock the door, get out, run with him. After several horrifying seconds of fumbling, they did. They scrambled free of the Caddy, too frightened to argue now, and bolted with Christopher. I watched them turn the corner and dash back to town along Main Street, out of my sight.
Left alone with fifteen wormfeeders, I evaded their clumsy assaults.
When I reached the next corner, I stepped from the proverbial frying pan into the fire.
A mob of new admirers more than twice the size of the Caddy crew approached from the direction of town, likely formed by uprooted wormfeeders from Mona and Joan’s parking lot. They had missed out on their prey at the diner, but they’d caught the signal.
Come down to Chestnut Street. We got fresh meat.
It’s a block party for the dead.
Chowtime, soup’s on, get it while it’s hot.
Or at least warm-blooded.
The two groups melded together, a handful of wormfeeders falling as they tripped over each other. None rose again. The others simply stamped them to a gory mush on the street. I backpedaled, stringing them along toward the road out of town. They came faster than I expected, but not fast enough to catch me. With Della and the kids off on their way to safety, I hoped and prayed, I raised my shotgun and let loose into them. If the report drew more of them my way, so much the better. Each blast did much more damage than I’d expected. The rooted ones weren’t sturdy. They were the difference between uprooting a healthy tree and a dead one. The former makes you work for it; the latter rips right out of the soil. Several wormfeeders collapsed in the road, bodies so disrupted by shot, they no longer functioned. Enough kept coming to worry me. I crept backward, firing a shell every couple of seconds. More dropped and lay in the street like earthworms dying in the sun after a rainstorm. The stragglers slowed. An end to my pursuit appeared. I reloaded the shotgun, fired four rounds in rapid succession, knocking down a seven-ten split of wormfeeders. The last two didn’t worry me. Their knee bones showed through their broken dead flesh, clicking, sliding like gears out of sync, on the verge of failing.
“Enjoy the rest of your walk, folks,” I said.
I heeled around and ran, intending to dash up the next side road back to Main Street and hook up with the others. Instead, I bolted into a solid mass of dead flesh and muscle, hard enough to stagger me back two steps.
Klug.
He stared me down with a hundred eyes, but his own milky set sent the worst chill through me.
His right hand swung, almost slow-motion, and easy enough for me to dodge, but I felt the wind from it and knew it would punish me if it landed. He stumbled closer, took another swing. I ducked, lost my balance, fell to the ground, and rolled with the motion, coming up on my ass at the curb. The two wormfeeder stragglers hooked up with Klug. The trio moved on me, the way Klug had so often moved on his enemies in the prison yard, with backup, a gang, the implication of overwhelming numbers, a show of force to remind you of your weakness. Except Klug’s intimidation, dead or alive, no longer sent a chill through me. Back when I met him, I’d wanted to stay clear of the web that people like him use to draw you in and manipulate you, but I’d learned how impossible this world made that. No one stayed clean, no one walked away free—not unless you fought for it.
“Shit, Klug, look how far you came, saving kids, and making peace with me, and now, you’re right back where you started, you fucking evil, deadhead bully,” I said.
I didn’t try to rise to my feet. I braced the shotgun to my shoulder and fired.
The recoil slammed me flat on my back.
Scrambling onto the sidewalk, I watched Klug’s decapitated body wobble. The blast had vaporized his head, neck, all of what remained of his left shoulder, and most of his right. His one arm bobbed from a thread of tendon and ligament.
The stragglers moved past him. I stood, steadied myself, and blew their faces away too.
“Son of a bitch, Lohatchie just ain’t what it used to be,” I said.
Groans and the rasp of air whispering through dead flesh caught my attention. More of the dead came shuffle-stepping in my direction. Another sound reached me too. A car engine.
The SUV came bouncing and jolting across a nearby front yard as it swerved out of a side street, rounded a cluster of wormfeeders, and skidded to a hard stop. The passenger door swung open. Tayna leaned out from the passenger seat. A chorus of voices yelled at me to get in. Jumping into the SUV, I shoved Tayna onto the console between me and Della, behind the wheel. I yanked the door shut behind me then pulled Tayna onto my lap.
Della floored the gas. I counted heads in the back seat. Everyone there.
Christopher crouched in the trunk, covering our six out the back window. Merit and Chloe sat on Birch’s and Nina’s laps. I never saw so welcome a sight. Our little group, or unit, or family, or whatever the hell you called it, had just doubled in size, and something about that fact that I couldn’t put into words made all the chaos and death around us fall away like scenery.
“Took you all long enough, kid,” I said.
“You shut up before I throw another knife at you,” Tayna said. “We saved you didn’t we?”
“That you did. You saved Klug, too. No matter how he died, you did that for him in life. I hope you know that.” I let out a long breath. “And I hope you like gardening.”
Tayna flashed a questioning eye at me. I didn’t bother to explain. Plenty of time for her to learn, for all of us to learn.