“Over here,” Texas Slim said.
There was a Greyhound bus parked at the curb. I saw curtains in the windows. I moved around towards the bifold door. It was open. The safety bars you pulled yourself up the steps with were dark with sticky blood. There was a bloody handprint on one of the windows.
Even outside, I could smell the death cooking in there.
“Carl,” I said. “You and me.”
I went in, Carl at my back. The bus had been converted into a dormitory of sorts with the seats removed and cots lined up in orderly rows…at least they had been. Now they were flipped over, tossed aside, everything painted a shocking red. Blood was sprayed in wild loops and whorls. The floor was sticky with it. Bits of flesh and clumps of hair were stuck in it.
And bodies, of course.
I figured at least a dozen or more, all cut and slit and hacked. And scalped. Limbs and entrails were scattered around, dangling from the shelves on the walls and tangled in old army blankets. It was hot in there, hot and closed-up and revolting with the smell of blood and meat and bowels. Several spear shafts were still sunk in torsos. They had been painted up with symbols that were unreadable because of the dirty handprints and bloodstains.
I got outside before I threw up. And then, to my surprise, I did anyway.
“Don’t go in there,” I told the white, drawn faces of my friends. “Don’t go in there.”
When I felt better, I drank some water from my bottle, had a cigarette with Carl. I felt hopeless and helpless, outnumbered and just beside myself. The carnage. Dear God, the carnage. There must have been a somewhat thriving community of people here before last night. Before the Clans marched in and slaughtered them. I thought they had been normal, too. In the bus, I had seen baskets of clothes, books, tools. These people had not been crazies, they had not been animals.
Texas Slim had been sweeping the area, finding nothing but more bodies. But he had found something else, too. “Got one,” he said. “Over here.”
We followed him. He stopped and there, lying in a twisted heap just inside the display window of a store, was one of them.
A dead Clansman.
He was perforated with bullet holes and must have taken quite a volume of fire before he went down. He wore a filthy green army overcoat and heavy scuffed boots. His hands were curled up like dying spiders. They were yellow, bony, mottled with open sores. His head was shaved bald, but he wore a greasy scalplock like an old time Pawnee warrior. And he had a gas mask on. They all wore them like some kind of fetish mask. Strictly war surplus, as Sean had said, it was made of leather with an oval breathing filter and two glaring buglike eyepieces. It was strapped on.
Finding a dead Clansman was rare because they always carted off their dead with them.
“Let’s see what this fuck looks like,” Carl said. He shouldered his AK and pulled out a K-Bar fighting knife. Being careful not to touch the corpse, he slit the straps and peeled the mask back with the tip of his knife. And then recoiled in horror.
“Shit,” he said.
The face was an atrocity. The flesh was yellow and spongy, grotesquely distorted like the skull beneath was swollen. There was only one eye which was glazed white and staring. The other was gone, a bubbly white mass of fungus growing from the socket and engulfing the entire left hemisphere of the face and head. It seemed to be dissolving the tissue. Tiny rootlets had grown from it in a wiry mass, feeding right into the flesh and up the nostrils. The growth had contorted the muscles, pulling up one side of the face in a hideous toothy grin. The blind eye that had once been powered by a diseased brain watched impassively.
“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” I said.
We turned away, turning a blind eye to the slaughterhouse around us. Even Janie, who was helplessly sympathetic, just turned away because there was simply too much of it to take inside and hold there. She was drained. We were all drained. The first normal people we’d seen in months and they had been butchered.
I pushed on farther down the street, getting us away from the carnage and the smell, wondering if we should have searched the buildings for survivors and knowing that it was pointless. I rounded the corner ahead and that’s when the first shot rang out.
16
I hit the ground with the others, crawling towards the safety of an overturned car. Bullets zipped around me, thudding into storefronts and street signs. Whoever was doing the shooting was not real precise. Another shot rang out and punched through a plate glass window, knocking a dusty cobwebbed mannequin over.
“Hole in one,” Texas Slim said.
“Coming from that building over there, Nash,” Carl said, pointing to a brick walk-up across the street. “See the glint of the barrel? Second story window?”
I did. The window was gone and pink curtains were blowing out.
“Sounds like a medium caliber. Maybe a thirty-thirty or a thirty-ought.”
“You, sir, are a violent man,” Texas said. “Such a knowledge of firearms. Shame on you.”
We were effectively pinned down. Other than a few wrecked cars the street was wide open. A perfect kill zone. The only thing we had going for us, way I saw it, was that the sniper out there wasn’t much of a shot. The bullets came intermittently and always pretty wide of our position as if the shooter was just trying to scare us off or keep us contained.
“Well, what do you think?” Carl asked, sighting on the building with his AK.
“I’m not sure,” I said.
“Maybe they’ll just go away,” Janie said.
“And maybe Carl’s mother should have kept her legs closed, child,” Texas Slim said.
“You better shut your fucking hole,” Carl warned him.
I put a hand on him. “Easy.”
“I’m all for waiting until they run out of bullets,” Gremlin said.
Carl laughed. “You would be.” He turned to me. “Let me see your Savage.”
I wasn’t sure if it was a good idea or not. Carl had a way of stirring up the hornet’s nest and particularly when he had a gun. And then another shot rang out and punched into the hood of the car and I handed Carl the rifle.
Carl jumped up, sighting as he did so. He fired, ejected a shell, and repeated the process twice in quick succession. I couldn’t have done it in a matter of seconds like that and even if I did, I wouldn’t have had any accuracy. But Carl did. His first two rounds punched into the face of the building mere feet from the window and the third went right through it.
And then a figure-a woman, I thought-leaped in front of the window and fired twice, the slugs hitting the street in front of the car. She kept trying to fire, but she was out of rounds and that was obvious by the temper tantrum she threw at that moment before crying out and jumping away from the window.
Carl handed the. 30.06 back to me and took up his AK. “I’m going to get the bitch.”
“Leave it,” I told him.
“Leave it? Full moon’s not far off, man. We need something before then if you know what I mean.”
I just nodded and Carl raced off. I felt the guilt cut into me as it always did and I could feel Janie next to me, disapproving. She just didn’t get it.
Texas Slim said, “Well, I’d better go accompany him. Boys do get into trouble when unsupervised.”
I sighed and leaned up against the car. Sometimes I felt like I was leading and sometimes I knew I was being led. Janie was looking at me. Her face was unreadable.
“If nothing else, they get her she might know where a car is.”
“Oh, is that what you want her for?”
I lit a cigarette to keep my nerves in check and probably so I didn’t slap her right across the face. “Listen to me, Janie. Do me a favor and pack away your fucking morals and ethics, okay? In case you haven’t noticed we’re at
