war here. We’re fighting for our lives. Do you think I care about some crazy bitch who’s trying to kill us? Well, I don’t. I care about Texas and Carl. You, me. Gremlin. If she dies so that we live, fuck it. That’s how it has to be. You think she cares about us?”
Janie was ready to answer that, of course, but in the building across the way there was the distinctive staccato of Carl’s AK-47 doing some talking over there. He wasn’t cowboying it…just two rapid three-shot bursts and that was it.
“Well, he either got her or she got him,” Gremlin said.
Then we waited. The silence was heavy, almost crushing as we watched the building, listened to the wind make things creak and groan in the deserted street. Dust devils whipped around. Birds cawed in the sky.
I crushed my butt. “Hell are they?”
And then they appeared, pushing a woman before them. Carl shoved her out the doorway and Texas took her by the arm and guided her down the stairs and out into the street. I figured she was probably in her twenties, tall and long-limbed, very attractive. She was tanned and fit, swearing and bitching and fighting the whole way. Texas Slim and Carl, being quite resourceful, had torn up some bedsheets and tied her arms behind her back.
And she didn’t care for it much.
They brought her over and Carl shoved her to the ground. She twisted and squirmed, struggling up to her knees. “You fucking asshole! I said I’d go with you! Quit fucking pushing me, you prick!”
“Quite a mouth on her,” Texas Slim said.
“We caught her in the corridor. She was making a run for it. I convinced her otherwise.”
She was wearing a pair of cut-off jeans and a yellow shirt with a picture of Sesame Street’s Cookie Monster on it extending his middle finger. EAT SHIT, was printed above this. And that pretty much summed up her feelings concerning her captors.
Carl put a hand on her shoulder and she jerked away and spit on him. He laughed.
“Settle down,” I told her. “We’re not fucking crazies. We’re not going to hurt you.”
“Oh no, I can see that.”
“You shot at us first, honey. Not the other way around,” Texas reminded her.
She sat there looking at us with big dark eyes, lips pulled away from white teeth that wanted to snarl. Slowly, by degrees, she mellowed. She was still breathing hard, but she wasn’t as predatory.
Her T-shirt was ripped and I could see a fine expanse of flat belly and a pierced navel. I cleared my throat, dug a water bottle from my pack and gave her a drink. “They didn’t…ah…hurt you, did they?”
She shook her head.
“I’m Nash,” I said and made a quick round of introductions.
She licked her lips, still looking ready to claw out eyeballs. “Mickey. Mickey Cox.”
Texas Slim giggled. “Cox, did you say? I like women named Cox.”
Carl started laughing.
Gremlin was just staring, his mouth hanging open. He wasn’t drooling at our captive, but he wasn’t too far from it.
Janie went to her, pulled a jackknife from her pocket and cut the knotted sheets from her wrists. “Are you all right?”
“Yes.”
Janie smiled at her and Mickey relaxed almost instantly. No one could refuse Janie’s eyes, I knew, when she put them on you. There was such honesty and sincerity in them she could have melted a rock. “Are you sure these idiots didn’t hurt you?”
“They were rough. But I’ve been handled rougher.”
“I’m certain you have, child,” Texas said. “And often.”
I thumped him on the arm to shut him up.
Janie looked her up and down. “You sure they didn’t…touch you or anything?”
Mickey shook her head. “They’re still walking aren’t they?”
“C’mon,” Carl said. “Nash, you know I wouldn’t do something like that. I might kill her ass, but I wouldn’t fuck it.”
“True, very true, that’s our Carl,” Texas Slim said. “He’s a noble sort. And you all know I wouldn’t hear of such a thing. I would never assail a woman’s virtue unless she asked me to.”
“Comedians,” I said by way of explanation.
Mickey drank her water, kept an eye on us. Particularly me. The others she didn’t much care about, but she kept her eyes on me. I was very aware of it, but pretended I didn’t notice. She was eye candy. Or maybe, and more bluntly, hand candy. Unlike Janie who was petite and fair and porcelain doll-pretty, Mickey was tall and dark and long-limbed. She was pretty, too, but in a blatantly sexual sort of way. She had the curves and the legs, the high tits, the big dark eyes and full lips. The sort of girl who could talk about eating a salad and make it sound positively sensuous and carnal, make you want to dash out and fuck your hand. Here was a girl who’d gotten along on her looks her whole life. She knew what men liked and she knew she had it, knew how to use it.
I figured she might be trouble if she started trying to manipulate my people.
I told her what we were doing and how we needed some wheels.
“Where you going?” she asked.
“West. Just west. Out beyond the Mississippi, I think.”
“That’s kind of funny,” she said. “You see…I was moving west, too. I was in Philadelphia when New York was hit. Everything went to shit there.” She dismissed that with a wave of her hand. “A bunch of us got out, started heading west. I’m the only one left now. You know how it goes. There were six of us. Rats. Hatchet Clans. Fallout. My boyfriend…Mike…we lost him in Canton one night. Something attacked our car. They yanked him and another guy out, left us for some reason.”
“Something?” I said.
“Yeah…it was dark I couldn’t see. But they had claws. Big claws. Smelled like piss…like rotten meat.”
“Trogs,” I said.
“Were you with those people…back there?” Janie asked her.
Mickey nodded. “Yeah. For the last two or three weeks. They were nice, you know? Real nice. Real normal. They had a little community set up. All of it was run by a guy named Fisher. He’d been some kind of minister once. He was cool. They had some doctors and nurses, carpenters, teachers, all kinds of things. They were all working together. Lots of families were living with him. A few kids even, ones that hadn’t changed over yet…you know how that is.”
She told us Fisher was planning on getting out of the city. He had a bunch of buses stashed away on the south side over in Hammond. Trailers of supplies, military surplus, medical, everything. He had his sights on a fortified monastery down in Hebron County. They could have lived there in safety.
“What happened?” Carl asked her.
“Clans came, man. They must have been watching us awhile because they just came out of nowhere…we never had a chance.” But that was something she didn’t want to talk about and everyone saw it in her eyes. “So you guys are going west? Yeah…I can’t explain it, but ever since this started I’ve had the strongest urge to go west, too. Funny, huh?”
“It’s a funny world, dear,” Texas said.
I thought of my dream of The Medusa exterminating the human race city by city. Moving westward. I wondered if maybe Mickey was just one of many that would be trying to escape west, part of some exodus.
“Can I come?” she asked. “Can I come with you?”
“Sure.”
Carl was looking at me and I could feel those eyes. More so, I knew what he was thinking which was very much along the lines of, course you can come, sweet thing. Wouldn’t be a party without you. Next night of the full moon, we gonna get down, we gonna bust a move you’ll never forget. I guess I was thinking it, too, more or less. But maybe not as bluntly as Carl.
Mickey kept watching me. “I know where there’s a nice Jeep Cherokee just north of here across the river. It’s in a garage. Fisher had vehicles stashed everywhere. It might work out.”
I smiled. “Welcome aboard,” I said.
And then there were six.
