Flash felt like shit. His lungs burned, but worse than that, the area around his throat was on fire. He was getting sick, infected, and he knew it. He could have made a big stink about it, demanded everyone leave him, but that wasn't his way. He would walk until he dropped. Only problem was, he was about to drop.

  His boots were heavy now, the infection seemed to be using up all his energy, burning through his fuel like a space shuttle launching into space. Cammy walked with him. They didn't hold hands anymore, but he could still feel the press of her palm against his. She stuck close though, and he wished he could smell her, smell anything, but all he got was the scent of smoke. His clothes reeked of it, his hair, rebellious and long, held back by a bandanna, positively stank of smoke.

  The only thing they had going for them was that the world was mostly flat out here, and they weren't too far from Monktree. A few miles, at most. Nothing that couldn't be covered in a few hours, maybe even less if they hit the highway. They angled west and south, hoping to intersect the road, maybe find some help (or some victims). Either way, Flash would be fine. He wasn't afraid to kill people. Never had been. It was him or them now, and he voted for himself. Wasn't no reason to keep people alive anymore.

  Death was coming for all of them, had been hounding him ever since that big, dead motherfucker had crushed his throat and Cammy had cut it open to save his life. Most people thought of death as a cold thing, but it wasn't. Death was fire, would burn you up, take everything you were and leave the cold husk behind. Flash felt the fire now.

  His body sweated as he stumbled among the grasses, pushing himself as far as he had ever gone. Never in his life had he been this exhausted. His mind began to wander, and he understood a fever was setting in. Death was like that, a funny little fucker, liked to blur your mind up, so you couldn't fight back.

  He stumbled a bit, and Cammy caught hold of him, tried to keep him from falling flat on his face, but she wasn't strong enough.

  "Flash!"

  The others turned as Flash tried to push himself up.

  Cammy put her hand to his forehead, the side of his face, announced he had an infection.

  "Well, we oughta kill him right here," Jaiyama said, and he heard the cock of a shotgun followed by a "Yeah," from Tarot.

  "No. Not that type of infection. If he gets antibiotics, he'll be fine."

  "Anyone got any antibiotics?" Jaiyama asked.

  No one said anything.

  "Well, there are none, so I guess he's going to have to go."

  "That doesn't make any sense," Cammy countered.

  "Most things don't," Clean muttered. He'd been quiet ever since they stumbled from the corn. He stared off into space.

  "Hey, Jaiyama," Ernie said. "I'm not feeling so hot either."

  Cammy stood then, went to Ernie, and placed her hand to his cheek. Flash saw the concern on her face, felt his ego bruise a bit. He'd thought the concern might be because she liked him, maybe just a little. But the look on her face for Ernie was similar to what she'd shown Flash. He was nothing special, shouldn't feel surprised by it. What's a girl like Cammy want with a grease monkey like me? Not a goddamn thing.

  "Anyone else feeling sick?" Jaiyama asked.

  "I suspect we'll all feel sick sooner or later," Carl said. "They've probably made it airborne. If they can't shoot us down or burn us up, they'll probably just make us sick."

  "Are you high?" Jaiyama asked.

  Carl shook his head. "No. I just see it all."

  Jaiyama shrugged. She didn't really have time to be talking to Carl about his bonkers theories. She had two sick people in her crew, and once you got below seven or eight members, well, that wasn't much of a crew at all. She couldn't let them die. Maybe Flash, but not Ernie.

  "Well, fuck," Jaiyama asked. "Where can we get the medicine we need?"

  Cammy shrugged. "I don't know Monktree that well," she said.

  "I fucking know it," Ernie said.

  "And?" Jaiyama asked.

  "There's no place, not with what we need. Could maybe do a sweep of the houses and find someone's antibiotics if we're lucky. If we're unlucky, we get killed by all the dead in town."

  "What about Casper?" Jaiyama asked.

  "There's a couple of pharmacies around."

  "Fuck that," Tim said. "I ain't going into that town on foot."

  Flash didn't care for Monktree, but it was better than Casper. There was nothing left living there, and so far, all their problems had been because of the living. "I vote Monktree," Flash said.

  "Stop that shit. Ain't no fucking vote," Jaiyama said. "This ain't fucking Congress. This is the crew, the club, and I say what goes."

  Jaiyama's hand scrubbed her face; she took a deep breath, and finally said, "Monktree it is. We can find what we need there, then we're getting out of this fucking state. I've about had it with all these backwoods motherfuckers trying to take what's mine."

  With that, she turned and strode across the field, continuing in a southwesterly direction.

  "Can you walk?" Cammy asked.

  "Yeah," Flash said, though each of his limbs seemed to weigh as much as the motorcycle he'd left abandoned at the farmhouse. He'd come back for it one day. That was a fucking promise.

  ****

  The night wore on, heavy and dark, and the survivors trembled in their jackets, hoodies, and long-sleeved shirts. The smell of smoke still wafted over to them as the sky began to turn turquoise to the east. When they looked back that way, the specter of smoke rose into the air, and they wondered if it was just the corn maze burning or if the house had caught on fire as well.

  It was a shame. It would have been a good place to stay.

  As the first sliver of sun rose over the plains to the east, they took a break, counted up bullets and shells, figured out how many people and dead things they could kill before they were turned into cavemen again. They had the capacity to kill a hundred people, living or dead, not much in the grand scheme of things.

  They strode in the morning sunshine, checking their six occasionally to find the small dots of stumbling dead still trailing after them, barely visible, but on an inexorable march toward food.

  As long as they were on foot, they would always be back there, questing for the living, tracking them down with the uncanny senses they used to find those who hearts still pumped blood.

  When their boots finally touched pavement, Flash could barely walk anymore, and the stronger men in the group, stood under his shoulders, propelled him along. Three more miles to go. They knew where they were headed now, could see the smoky smudge of the still smoldering Monktree in the distance. No one had bothered to go there and put out the fire. As they marked the smoke, they recalled the horrors of the previous evening, the revolting stench of charred flesh, the nightmare image of flesh cracking and bursting as it dried out, exposing the tender pink meat inside.

  By the time they passed an abandoned truck on the side of the road, the dead owners were swarming with flies and ants in the road. A quick search of the truck turned up nothing, no keys, no weapons, no food, just a registration card with the name Hank Douglas printed upon it.

  Onward they stumbled, needing sleep, needing food, needing to not be hunted and attacked. Their hearts hardened inside their chests, the walls of their atriums and ventricles thickening, becoming tougher. Not a single member took a step without constantly replaying the events that had led them to this lowly position, each reliving the mistakes they'd made. That's the thing about a good walk, the mind wanders as do the feet.

  Tim had told of seeing the old man who'd killed Russ in the cornstalks; he'd come back for his revenge. Ernie regretted plowing into the militiamen and killing the old man's granddaughter. He had a feeling things would have been different if she'd still been around. Jaiyama and Tarot wondered how things would have been different if they had ignored everyone's complaints and killed off the families when they had the chance. What-ifs roared through the minds of everyone, carving valleys of experience they would call upon in the future.

  It was clear two groups had come after them, one upon the other. The first had been using guns and on foot, which would have been suicide if they had known the second group was in play. Ernie had counted six targets from the second floor of the farmhouse in the initial rush, six men. He'd killed a few of them, didn't know what happened to the other ones. Hell, they could be in Casper right now setting up another of their stupid roadblocks.

  Cammy plodded along, wondering if she had been too soft, if she should have just let the bikers kill the family. In the end, she decided that yes, she should have. This was a different world, a broken thing, rotting to the core. There was no time for the old laws, the old sentimentalities. It was a harsh truth, but one she was coming around to.

  At the edge of Monktree, they took the highway exit, curved around to the north, walking along the road that would transform into Main Street.

  They stumbled now, exhausted, hungry, and thirsty.

  "We'll head to my house," Ernie said. "I can get us in, and I got some surprises upstairs."

  Everyone was too exhausted to ask him about his surprises, and as the highway turned into Main Street, the dead came onward. There were less of them now, way less. Most of the dead seemed to have departed for greener pastures. The smell of smoke hung on the air, charred wood, burnt chemicals, and singed flesh. Even the strong breeze could do nothing about clearing the air.

  Jaiyama said, "We can't see 'em all, but we know the dead are out there. Knock 'em down and stomp 'em," she said. "No guns. We don't wanna draw a crowd."

  It was solid advice, but no one in the group was looking forward to doing it. Their eyes felt like sandpaper, their muscles and legs aching with fatigue. When the dead came on, the survivors felt nothing, not even the brief flare of life adrenaline would give them, not even the chemical dump of fear in their bloodstream. They'd used it all up, drained their glands dry. Now, they fought weakly, pushing and shoving and stomping with their boots.

  A man wearing a Los Chistadores jacket appeared, stumbling toward Tarot. She stepped out of the way, dodged his clumsy hands. She extended her leg in front of the dead man's shins and shoved him down from behind. Tim joined her as they stomped on the man's head, one, two, three times. His head cracked off the pavement, and the skull fractured, blood dripping from the biker's head. When they were done, two more had replaced the one they'd taken out, and they began the process again, more of the dead continuing to shamble in their direction.

  If they had limitless energy, they could have taken them on one by one, cleared the zombie menace from the streets. But unlike the movies, it was hard work to crack a skull. As they executed random strangers, Cammy pondered the existence of the dead and the method by which they were dispatching them. Developed over millions of years of human evolution, the brain was the most important organ next to the heart. The human skull had started out as bird-thin and had grown thicker and thicker over millions of years. It took close to twelve-hundred pounds of force to fracture the damn thing. Although, you could fracture the temporal lobe much easier, but that wouldn't put down a zombie. The temporal lobe was already non-functional in the dead as far as Cammy could tell. If the temporal lobe was still functional, the dead would still have access to speech, memory, and emotions. So far, they had yet to see one of the dead crying on the sidewalk at their plight in life, or death, if you wanted to get technical about it.

  No, as Flash tripped another gangly biker to the ground and stomped on the back of his head with his heel, the man didn't speak or cry out for Flash to stop, or show any awareness his undead life might be ending. There was nothing there. Kick one of the dead in the face, and the only thing that would happen was a cool sound. You had to go deeper, to the primordial regions of the brain, the brain stem or the cerebral cortex. You could fuck up the temporal lobe all you wanted. Hell, living humans had been known to survive damage to their temporal lobes. Oh, they were weird as fuck afterward, but they could still function. Their bodies still ran, but they weren't human anymore. That's why they made lobotomies illegal. A lobotomy would get rid of all sorts of troublesome problems, but in the end, you were left with something like the creature who walked down the street in Clean's direction, an elderly lady with no real sense of self or existence.

  Clean wound up, smacked the dead woman across the side of the head with the butt of his rifle. A crack echoed across the street. The temporal lobe, Cammy thought, but onward the woman came. Clean knocked her down, stomped on her skull where the spine met the neck, and that put her down for good.

  Cammy tried to stay out of the way, to keep herself from getting bitten. The dead shuffled down the sidewalk as they inched closer and closer to Ernie's house. It was a nice house, a two-story number. She could tell he'd taken good care of it, but it was now coated in a layer of ash and soot. Wherever they stepped, they left footprints on the road. To their right, the ruins of Main Street smoldered, left to burn to nothing. She worried about the pollution in the air, the noxious poisons released by burning plastics and flaming chemicals, but that was a for-after problem. All that mattered now was the dead and getting off the street.

  ****

  Clean shoved another person down. He didn't recognize the face, didn't care. The dude might have been someone who had sat next to him at the bar, drinking a beer. Might have been someone who had passed him on the road. But none of it mattered now. All that mattered now was they were dead and he wasn't, and he aimed to keep it that way.

  The sigils on his head tingled. He wondered if any of his cousin's energy had seeped into the tattoos. That's how they worked according to the shaman. They weren't magical, they just collected energy, especially negative energy. When something negative was coming your way, or some traumatic event happened, they would go off. The dead attacking him counted as one of those events.

  A doughy man, shaped like an eggplant, came at Clean. He wasn't wearing any pants, which grossed Clean out. He swung his rifle, not like a baseball bat, because he didn't want to fuck it up, but like a pugil stick, hopefully maintaining the integrity of the weapon. It had served him well, though he'd run out of bullets for the damn thing. He kicked himself for not stuffing more into his saddlebags. But he supposed that wouldn't have mattered either. He'd lost everything out here. His ammo, his bike, his cousin, his way home.

  The eggplant-shaped man dropped to the ground on his side, and Clean, his legs sore from walking for miles and now stomping on skulls, kicked the man in the face. His head rocked back, blood dripping from the side of his nose where the skin had split. Another kick, and then two more for good measure, and the man stopped moving.

  His foot ached from the impact. Shoulda worn my steel-toed boots. But he didn't like wearing them on long rides. They made his feet ache. Instead, he'd worn his normal boots, and with each kick, he prayed he didn't break his toes.

  The survivors slid down the block dispatching the dead, and then finally, covered in sweat and their boots covered in blood, they came to Ernie's house.

  The old man ran around the side of the house, came back with a key, and slid it into the door. Relieved, they stepped inside. The smell of smoke was strong in Ernie's house, had leaked in and made itself at home.

  For a second, Clean looked down at his boots, thought about taking them off. He didn't want to leave bloody footprints all over Ernie's house, but then again, he didn't want to be forced to run into the streets barefoot either.

  Ernie solved the conundrum for him, walked across the floor leaving footprints of his own, and Clean figured if the old man was going to ruin his own floor, then it ought to be fine if he kept his boots on.

  Flash was the last person inside, breathing raggedly. He slammed the door behind him as the first of the dead reached the porch. He threw the deadbolt and secured the chain lock as the first bang rattled the door. Then he stumbled over to the couch in the living room and collapsed on it. Cammy, the girl from the hospital, walked over there to check on him, and Clean stood in the middle of the living room, not knowing what to do.

  A piss would be good right now. Though he didn't really have to use the restroom, figured he'd spent all his liquids fighting and running and sweating while the cornfield burned around him, he figured he'd give it a shot. It'd get him out of sight of people at least. He just needed to be alone for a second.

  Upstairs, he heard Ernie clomping through the house. On his own, he set out to find the pisser, tried to ignore the pictures on the walls, the ones with Ernie smiling with some older lady by his side. He knew there was sadness in those photos if he dwelled on them too much. He hadn't been hanging out with Ernie for long, hadn't really said two words to the man, but the old man had never mentioned anything about a wife. That meant she was dead—and a sore subject.

  He knew the feeling. Right now, the last thing he wanted to talk about was his cousin Luke. Not that anyone was asking.

  When he found the bathroom, he put the lid down and sat on the toilet. He was about to lean forward and place his head in his hands, close his eyes, and process everything that had happened the night before, but then he saw his hands were stained with blood. Not a lot of it, but little dried flecks from the dead. Maybe they'd caught on the wind in the cornfield, blown over to his body.

  When he looked in the mirror, he found his face much the same, along with his clothes. Everywhere he looked, there were those little spots of blood. Suddenly, he wanted to take his clothes off, peel off his leather vest, and throw his T-shirt in the garbage. Is some of the blood Luke's? Clean had nothing else to wear, so he stayed in his clothes, turned on the sink, and began trying to wash the blood off his skin.

  As he performed his ministrations, his boots squeaked on the floor. When he looked down, he saw he'd tracked bloody footprints into the bathroom. Something about the sight of those boot prints on the bathroom floor drove him crazy, and he wadded up a bunch of toilet paper, soaked it in the sink, and then set about scrubbing the floor clean.

  He didn't know how long he cleaned for, but soon there came a knock at the door.

 

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