that echoed into nothingness.
The revolting waste of Dragna went to a boiling steam that was hot and suffocating. In the end, I sat there, shocked and mindless as she evaporated around me.
15
It’s been two weeks now since I destroyed her.
Two weeks since the adults of the shelter were exterminated.
Two weeks since I cleaned out the compound and burned the remains in a huge funeral pyre in the parking lot and two weeks since I gathered the children together and told them we are a family and we must look after one another and care for another and only this way can we survive. It sounded like one of Doc’s speeches and I felt an eerie sense of deja vu while I gave them the spiel. But I believed it. And I think they did, too.
I feel no guilt over what I did. But every day I miss Maria and I dream about her every night. I know she would be ashamed of my petty revenge on Doc and the others and that hurts. But, likewise, I know she would respect how I care and teach the children.
Following Dragna’s destruction, I noticed something very peculiar with the Wormboys out there. They had devolved into your average b-movie zombies. Shambling deadheads, wandering around, bumping into one another, picking at scraps. No organization whatsoever. Dragna had been their brain and without her, they were really just mindless walking corpses. Creatures of opportunity.
It gave me hope.
I started planning out how we would escape the shelter. Go somewhere and find other people. Maybe an armory or a military base somewhere. But the more I thought about it the more I began to picture us wondering the wastelands, finding empty city after empty city, nothing but the dead haunting the cemetery sprawl of the brave new world.
Soon enough, I pictured us becoming little better than animals. Maybe living in caves, huddled around fires, drawing crude pictures on the walls of Wormboys sacking civilization until we reached the point in our crowded, primitive brains where we could no longer remember what civilization was.
Hope sometimes dies a cruel death in the face of reason.
I don’t dare go out at night, but during the day-if I’m armed-I can handle the dead as long as they don’t cluster or put on a united front. The scary thing is, lately they’ve been organizing again into small bands. They’ve been watching the shelter like they used to. Just standing out there, staring, infinitely patient and infinitely frightening.
This morning I found out why.
I found a note stuck to the door. Here’s what it said: TOMMY, OCTOBER 13 DELIVER THE SIX IF YOU DO NOT WE WILL COME FOR ALL WE WILL SKIN YOUR CHILDREN AND WEAR THEIR ENTRAILS M.
In the back of my mind I suspected something like this for a long time and I think it was the inspiration behind me wanting to gather up the kids and get out. But we’re not going anywhere. That’s the terrifying reality of it. And the most disturbing thing, of course, is the note itself. You see, I recognize the handwriting: it’s Maria’s. They’ve found their new Dragna as somehow I supposed they would.
So I’m going to gather the kids together in the dining hall tonight and this is what I’m going to say to their innocent, trusting little faces: “Kids, we’re going to play a new game. It’s called a lottery and only six of you can win…”
Or lose.
CORPS CADAVRE
Midnight.
The prison mortuary.
The building was squat and cold, cut from blocks of gray stone stacked in a grim heap like a cairn made of interlocking skulls. The windows were barred and the doors were narrow, clustered with shadows. Sullen and utilitarian, it sat well away from the other prison buildings, connected only by a ribbon of winding dirt road. It flanked the potter’s field cemetery, rising above and lording over the weedy fields of the dead-the wooden crosses riding the hills and hollows, marking the graves of the unknown, the unwanted, and the undesirable.
Inside, Johnny Walsh sat at his little desk, feet up, fingers drumming nervously against his legs. Not yet forty, Johnny had already done ten years in that hardtime joint on a double-homicide. His world before maximum security was a tight working class existence and after the murders, one of rage, anger, and oppression. A world just as dark as the skin on his face, a world where poor shanty blacks and white trash busted heads to break the boredom, where black drug gangs and the white Aryan Brotherhood shanked each other over donuts.
But that was doing life.
Johnny would taste freedom roughly about the time of the Second Coming. Breathe in, you smell the despair; breathe out, you smell your life winding out in crowded, steel silence.
Johnny was humping the night shift with the stiffs because of the riot.
Four days before, the small, seething Hispanic population decided to kill every black in the joint. They squirreled away shivs and pipes and razors. At a prearranged moment, they rose up, set on the blacks like rabid dogs. When it was over, the National Guard had been called in and seventy inmates were dead, the infirmary packed with twice that many.
And now the mortuary was full.
The freezers held more cold meat than a butcher’s display case. Full drawers, gurneys and slabs packed with rigid, white-sheeted figures. You could barely walk in there now, dead heaped like firewood.
The warden decided that someone had to keep watch over all those bodies. There being so many and all, it made the old man nervous. Word had it more than one body had turned-up missing there in the past and what with the state and their impending investigation, warden didn’t want no fuck-ups this time around.
So Johnny, who had a good record and was a trustee, pulled the duty. Pulled it mainly because he was in good with LaReau, the sergeant hack. LaReau was a big, mean intolerant prick the cons called “Ironhead” because he enjoyed head-butting anyone that gave him shit and when he did, he piledrived convict-ass big and small right to the mat.
But Johnny was okay with him-yes boss, no boss, how was your day, boss, and can I wash your car come Wednesday, boss? Make the peckerwood feel like he was something special and he would be easy on you.
So the mortuary wasn’t a bad gig, all things considered.
Johnny kept the doors locked-warden’s orders-and did a lot of reading, but mostly a lot of shivering. Because it was cold in there. Johnny had a little woodstove in the corner, but it didn’t help much. The mortuary had held so many corpses in its belly through the years that the stone had sucked in all that tomb cold, let it out at night, exhaling the breath of graves.
The clock on the wall was ticking and Johnny kept hearing little sounds-poppings and crackings-but it was just the old building settling and he would not let himself think it was anything else.
Lighting a cigarette, Johnny went to the window over the little sink, started a bit at his reflection in the glass, smiled, and stared out through those rusting black bars.
A moonless, black night.
The world was caught in-between chill autumn and the promise of bitter winter, pelted by blowing leaves and a freezing, relentless rain. It turned the roads to slop and the fields to mud, sluicing and oozing and pooling in black puddles that were frosted with a scum of ice. December or not, it was miserable by the standards of northeastern Louisiana, just a stone’s throw from the borders of Arkansas and Mississippi.
Johnny turned away, didn’t like the night and certainly didn’t like that face and those eyes and what they were saying to him. Because, yes sir, he’d made mistakes and now it was all done and he was all used-up. No more fresh air and freedom, no more t-bones and certainly no more pussy. You could get both if you had the money,
