talk. You give him an opportunity and he’ll make up a story.”
“You should mind your mouth so you keep your friends,” Hardy told her. “Besides, you got a better explanation? Dead people walking around and what not? You telling me that ain’t a haunting?”
“They’s not ghosts,” Hubb said. “I don’t know what they are, but they’s not ghosts.”
Hardy thought it over for a time. “Okay, then zombies. Just like on TV. The walking dead. I seen a show about that. They got zombies down in Haiti. It’s not shit, either. They got ‘em working in the cane fields. Some lady on that show, some colored lady, she said she was driving up the road down there in Haiti and she’s sees her brother chopping cane. Only thing was, they buried her brother a month before. But there he was, eyes all glazed and funny, and him chopping that cane.”
Hubb pulled off his oxygen mask. “Them shows ain’t shitting real, Hardy.”
“This one was. One of the documentaries. Zombies work the cane down there. Witch doctors rise ‘em up and steal their souls or something. The rich guys that own them plantations, they hire them witch doctors to bring ‘em back. Cheap labor or something.”
Hubb said, “Zombies? Jesus, of all the cockwongling nonsense I ever did hear.”
No, Hubb was not believing that zombie shit. Witch doctors and all that sort of crazyass late show nonsense. Besides, where the hell would you find a goddamn witch doctor in Witcham or in all of Wisconsin for that matter?
“Witch doctor, my fat hairy ass,” he said.
After what they’d seen that afternoon when that crazy kid put his Intrepid right through the front door and what came afterwards, no one?not even old hardassed Hubb himself?doubted the enormity of what was happening in Witcham. The city was flooding and, yes, the dead were walking. But zombies and witch doctors. Jesus, now that was like them Saturday afternoon horror shows he used to see when he was a kid over at the Rialto. Always had Bela Lugosi in ‘em. Crazy, cheap shit with titles like Voodoo Man and Zombies on Broadway.
Well, it had been some kind of day…but Hubb just wasn’t up to any of that Bela Lugosi shit.
But something was happening and those people out in the streets…well, by Christ, they were dead and they were walking.
After Mitch and Tommy and most of the others left, Hubb got the Intrepid pulled out of the front of his store and then spent the next few hours answering questions from cops who wanted to know what had made their officers out front literally melt. But what could Hubb or Hardy or Knucker tell them?
Nothing.
So that’s what they did tell them.
With Knucker and Hardy’s help, he had shored up the great rent in the front of the building with sheet metal and plywood fixed into place with drywall screws. That was a start. They were safe.
But what came next? That was the question.
Same question they’d been chewing on all night. The lot of them?Hubb and his crew, Hot Tamale and her husband, Herb?just too damn wired-up on caffeine to do much sleeping.
“Ahhhhhh…zombies,” Knucker said. “That’s a laugh. Comic book shit.”
“Well, that’s what they gotta be.”
“Why?”
“Why? Because they’re the walking dead, woman. And that’s what you call the walking dead. Zombies. Jesus H. Christ, your mother didn’t raise ‘em for smarts, now did she?”
“Ahhhhhh…shut up.”
“Or looks,” he said. “Show said them zombies do what their masters tell ‘em, unless you give ‘em salt. That sends ‘em back to their graves.”
“Salt?” Hubb said.
“Sure, salt. Makes ‘em remember they’re dead.”
“I believe it,” Hot Tamale said.
She had been silent for some time which was just not like her and now she was speaking. They all gave her the floor. She stood herself up, a real sight in her skin-tight cherry red outfit.
“See, this afternoon, I talked with my cousin Liz,” she told them. “Those dead ones don’t like salt. She said one of ‘em came out of the basement of a store over in Elmwood and some lady threw salt at it and it shriveled right up. Just like a fucking slug, she said. Salt. They don’t like it much.”
Hardy nodded. “Makes all the sense in the world, don’t it? You get slugs coming up out of the ground and you salt ‘em. Kills ‘em or drives ‘em off. Same with these zombies.”
“Well, now we got something,” Hubb said, as happy as Hubb could be. “This makes some shitting sense.”
“Ahhhhhh…but that don’t answer why or how.” Knucker looked at them all, each in turn. “Well, does it? Does it answer why they’re coming back?”
Hot Tamale fielded this one. “Well, it’s the same as I said today. It’s that Army base. It’s Fort Providence. This all started after that explosion. Those eggheads out there have been messing with things they should have left alone. Has to be.”
“I been hearing things for years,” Hardy said.
Hubb pulled off his mask. “We all have. Crazy shit. But what in the royal fuck could they be doing out there to bring dead people back?”
“Experiments,” Hardy said. “You know, like Frankenstein.”
At any other time there might have been some laughter, but not now. Well, if you could wrap your brain around zombies, Frankenstein and things like that weren’t so far down the road, were they?
“I’m thinking about that salt,” Hubb said. “Well, you can’t just go around throwing suckcocking salt at them pissers. Not practical.”
“How about rocksalt?” Hardy said. “Load it in shotgun shells instead of the pellets. How’s about that?”
And for the first time in a long time, Hubb Sadler grinned.
10
Sometime after Harry Teal, Jacky Kripp, and Roland Smythe escaped from Slayhoke Penitentiary, the National Guard rolled in. Rolled in, scoped it out, and retreated, setting up a half-ass perimeter and immediately calling for reinforcements. What they saw there was beyond anything they could hope to deal with. The men were about coming out of their skins. There were things happening behind that high razor-wire that just could not be.
So the Guard called for back-up.
What they got was not a ragtag collection of State police and county boys, but a first class fighting unit that knew exactly what they were getting into. What they got was the 4^th battalion, 1^st Air Cavalry Division out of Fort Hood, Texas. A legendary group of ballbusters and lifetakers that had been shitting on the enemies of the United States since the hot and heady days of the Vietnam War. The 4/1 was commanded by Colonel Raymond Hargesy Pearle, a scarred-up intolerant vet who’d cut his teeth in Vietnam’s Central Highlands with the 4^th Infantry and had been involved in just about every conflict since. If there was a war and there was a body count, you were sure to find Pearle nearby, circling like a buzzard, just grinning his kill-happy smile at the stink of death, which through the years had become to him what Brut or Old Spice were to other men: a personal fragrance.
The 4/1 was originally given the task of securing Fort Providence Military Reservation, which, as Pearle told his adjutant, Lieutenant Waterman, had become “one ugly stripe of hell.” They were to go in and kick ass and take names, surround and secure the installation so that another unit out of Fort Bragg, North Carolina?a nameless entity whose troopers wore no insignia and dressed in black fatigues?might go in unimpeded and set about “pacifying” things. In other words, they were cleaners and the base was to be scrubbed top to bottom so that the particularly ugly stain that had soiled the base would not smudge the Army in general…and particularly those that authorized what was going on there in the first place.
But, given the situation at Slayhoke and the possibility of what was going on there spreading too far and gathering the interest of the media at large, the 4/1 was diverted to Slayhoke.
“Well, ain’t it just the way in this man’s Army?” Pearle told Waterman as they helicoptered to the location in
