throat to crotch feeding on the dead cat or the bloated woman breastfeeding her swollen, blackened infant while grave maggots wriggled in her dirt-clogged hair…well, panic ensued. The authorities denied it all, but still the stories spread and nobody believed what they were told because by then, they had all seen the walking dead. Biocom overflowed the graveyards and deceased loved ones came washing out, knocking at doors and windows in the dead of night with grim appetites.
Six months later…the world was gone.
Biocom was the great eraser that washed the blackboard clean. A world that had been a struggling, unruly child lost its innocence almost over night and became a deranged adult that shit and pissed itself hourly, its mind lost in a sucking black whirlpool vortex of dementia, madness, and resurrection.
The plague filled the cemeteries and emptied them again and that’s the way it was. Many contracted the plague, but survived it. But even survival left a little parting gift: sterility. No man or woman over the age of thirty came away able to reproduce. The young and virile became something to protect and covet. Without them, there was no children and with no children, no future.
And that had been five years ago. Five long, hard, cruel years.
This was the reality that Cabot and the others in Hullville lived with day in and day out. It was a bitter pill to swallow. Some people just couldn’t keep it down. They lost their minds, they raged, they pulled into themselves, they became sightless breathing shells. And more than a few slit their wrists or ate the gun.
But for all those, many more did not roll up like frightened pillbugs. They survived. They accepted. They adapted and overcame. Not just in Hullville, but in towns like Moxton and Pick’s Valley, Slow Creek and Nipiwana Falls. They accepted the reality that the new world was not the world they or their parents had known. The new world offered the survivors nothing; everything from food to shelter to a bucket to piss in had to be fought for, had to be wrenched free from the hard earth or taken from those that held it.
Survival.
A simple concept and one the human race was very adept at.
Graveyards and ghost towns.
A few struggling pockets of humanity trapped in-between. In Hullville, things were run by the Council. They made all the decisions. Guys like Cabot didn’t like the idea of driving the sick, the weak, the old and diseased out to the Deadlands and ghost towns, but there was no other choice. If the Wormboys weren’t given meat, they’d come for it.
So Cabot, like so many others, did what he was told.
For in the end, it was always better to be in the front of the truck than in the back.
*
The ghost town came up out of the fog like a clustering of tombs blown with fingers of white vapor. The headlights speared through the mist, but neither man looked too closely at what they might reveal in the deserted lots and leaf-blown streets. A pall of age and shivering malevolence hung over the town, just as thick and palpable as the fog itself.
“This is it, kid,” Cabot said, his voice dry and rasping. “This is where we dump our load.”
Blaine said nothing.
He hadn’t said a word in some time now. He was just as still and silent as the mist-shrouded streets spreading out around them. Cabot had been keeping an eye on him and, mile by mile, he had gotten more tense, every muscle drawn taut, his jaws clamped tight, sweat beading his face.
Cabot pushed the truck further into the ghost town.
Out of the corner of his eye he caught shapes pulling back into the fog, thought he saw eyes once that reflected red in the headlights. He’d done this so many times but it never got any easier. He fumbled another cigarette into his mouth with a shaking hand, his fingers trembling so badly he could barely fire it.
The Freightliner’s lights revealed the town inch by diseased inch: the dusty windows of empty shops, the spiderwebbed windshields of abandoned cars rusting at curbs, rotting houses leaning precariously on lawns gone wild with weeds. Everywhere, desertion and desolation, the American dream gone to rot and ruin.
In the back of the truck, the cargo was thumping and bumping around in the darkness, trying to shake off a drugged stupor.
Cabot pulled off his cigarette, pretending he could not hear them back there. Pretending he could not feel the flat, evil atmosphere of the town invading him and turning him cold and white inside.
“Another block,” he said. “We’ll be in the village center. That’s where we’ll get rid of our load.”
Blaine muttered something under his breath.
“What’s that, kid?”
He swallowed, then sighed. “I said it hasn’t changed much. Just older. Decaying.”
Cabot looked over at him. “You been here before?”
Blaine nodded. “This is Mattawan. This is where I came from. This is where we were running from that night our van puked out.”
“Why didn’t you ever say so?”
“Nobody ever asked me.” He shook his head. “Whenever I started talking about it, people shut me up. In Hullville, they all shut me up. You’re here now, they’d say. Where you came from don’t matter. We all came from somewhere.”
Cabot didn’t like this. He was getting a real bad feeling stirring in his guts.
“We hid out in a basement for three years,” Blaine said. “We foraged by day. The dead were in the streets then, too, but not as bad as at night. Ever notice how they’re so sluggish and stupid during the day? But then at night-”
“Kid, you should’ve told someone.”
“Nobody’d listen. Now I’m back. I’m home.”
Cabot was wiping sweat from his own face now. “Sure, kid. But this ain’t home. Not anymore. It’s a graveyard.”
And then Blaine reached over and quickly popped the lock on his door, threw it open and leaped out. Cabot cried out, caught the kid’s elbow, but he pulled free and was gone.
“Shit!”
Cabot hit the brakes and brought the truck to a stop. It rocked back and forth on its leaf springs. He shut the kid’s door, smelling the vile and polluted stink of the mist out there.
Then he jumped out himself, looking around in every direction.
“KID!” he called out. “GET THE HELL BACK HERE! DO YOU HEAR ME? GET THE HELL BACK HERE!”
His voice echoed off into the misty darkness, but there was no reply. Fog filled the headlight beams and brakelights, swirling and steaming. Shadows clustered in warped doorways, the air damp, heavy, and moldering.
Cabot wiped a dew of sweat from his face, his breath coming fast.
Maybe Blaine was naive and just plain stupid, but he was not. He knew this was not just some empty dead town. They were out there and they were out there in numbers. Even now he could feel their malefic eyes crawling over him, sizing him up.
They wanted what was in the back of the truck.
But they would take whatever meat they could get.
Cabot started first this way, then that, stopping each time, daring to go further. There was a park across the way. He could make out the shapes of slides, swingsets, an upended teeter-totter rising up in the fog like a derrick. This more than anything said all that needed saying about the wasteland the town now was, the extinction of the people who’d once lived there.
A little house bordered the park and Cabot wondered if maybe the kid had gone in there, wondered if it could be that simple.
He stepped over the curb into the long yellow grass that climbed up above his calves. His breath would barely come. He could hear the truck idling, a stray breeze in the trees overhead. Shadows were crawling everywhere and death waited in each one. The house was sagging, weathered and gray. A lone monolith wreathed in darkness.
He moved further into the yard, the crackling of dry leaves under his step making something pull up tight inside him. He saw a birdbath in the yard. It was sprouting withered creepers. The front door of the house was
