Well Fed - 05 (43 page)

No answer.

“Wallace, you answer, or by fuck, I’ll shoot you!”

Again, no answer. Gus stepped to his right and stuck his neck out, widening his field of vision. Wallace sat in the driver’s seat, helmeted head resting against the upper curve of the steering wheel.

“Wallace!”

The soldier slowly plopped back against his seat as if recovering from a head-on collision. Black stains covered his mouth.

“You finished lunch in there?” Gus bawled.

Wallace’s head and chest heaved, chuckling.

That response made Gus feel a little better. If Wallace had crossed over, the guy would be fighting to get out of the truck.

Gus walked closer and pulled open the passenger door, keeping its bulk before him as a shield. “You okay?”

Wallace didn’t answer.

“C’mon man. Say something.”

“Shoot me.”

That put a frown on Gus’s sickened face.

“You heard me.” With an executioner’s grace, Wallace reached up and pulled his helmet off, revealing black veins webbing his temple. Black worms pulsed underneath the surface of his pallid skin. He flopped back and indicated his head. “Blow it off. Right here.”

He tapped his brainpan.

“Do it.”

Gus took a calming breath and held it. “You’re fine now.”

Wallace rolled his head on his shoulders. “Now.”

“What happened to you?”

“Came over me all at once. I… wanted to chew your face off. While you slept. An urge worse than a jacked-up nicotine craving—if you ever smoked, that is.”

“No,” Gus admitted. “Never.”

“Doesn’t matter. I can’t do that again. Shoot me, and get it over with.”

The command jolted Gus, leaving him hesitant to pull the trigger. He had killed in the past, in self-defense—or so he’d convinced himself—but never as an executioner. The gun wavered, heavy as lead.

Shoot me and get it over with
, Wallace had said. He had
pleaded
.

“Do it,” the stricken man grunted, opaque eyes narrowed to slits.

Gus shook his head and lifted the weapon, pointing it at the soldier’s head and lining up the sights. “I––I can’t. You saved my life.”

“You’d be saving mine.”

That didn’t make it any easier.

“Remember what you said you’d do.” Wallace made an effort to draw his lips over his teeth. “You remember.”

“I can’t. I can’t.”

A sad smile spread over Wallace’s face. The sound of an approaching engine broke the tension. Gus and Wallace looked to see a Winnebago coming back up the road in slow, careful reverse. The white ass of the vehicle bobbed this way and that but stayed on the deserted stretch of highway. As jarring as it was to see the RV, it wasn’t near the shocker of seeing Collie crouched on the roof and focused on the pair.

The scowl on her face was as mean as Gus had ever seen—and as lovely.

“Shit,” Wallace muttered. “Can’t catch a break.”

Gus lowered the outstretched gun.

When it reached the truck, the Winnebago stopped with a squeal of brakes and exhaust. Collie stood up, her hand on her sidearm.

“What’s going on?”

“Going on?” Gus repeated, at a loss before that furious countenance.
What’s going on is your man just tried to bite my face off, and now I’m deciding if I should honor his request to put him down.
But he didn’t say that. He just stood there like a deadhead with a red dot on its forehead.

“Nothing, Collie.” Wallace came to the rescue. “No problem.”

“I don’t remember asking you a goddamn thing.”

The ice in those words flash-froze Gus’s balls and guts in one breathtaking instant, and he eyed Wallace nervously.

“Collie––”

“Shut the fuck up, Ollie,” she barked. “Gus, answer my fucking question before I forget who you are and who I am.”

Gus didn’t want her to forget. “Uh, well. Ah, it’s like…”

“Gus?”

“Yeah?”

“Before you continue, you just remember that was my husband you were pointing a weapon at.”

With that, Collie drew her own.

“I told him to shoot me,” Wallace said in his Zen tone. “Crazy bitch.”

Collie returned her sidearm to its holster and stared off at the trees for a stabilizing moment.

Gus wasn’t about to say shit until he was in the clear.

“Gus.”

“Yeah?”

“You’re good.”

Thank Christ
. “Thanks, Collie.”

“Get aboard the RV.”

Wallace and Gus exchanged looks.

“Don’t look at that bastard,” Collie warned. “Chances are I’ll fucking murder him myself in the next few minutes. Get aboard the vehicle. And sorry for the tone of voice.”

“’Sokay.”

Gus glanced at Wallace again before doing as told. The glum look on Wallace’s decomposing face said it all. He was in shit. He
knew
he was in shit, and Gus wondered what Collie would do with her husband. Maybe the special forces had training for situations like this.

“Gus, tell Jim to take you and drive on back to Phil. Then you wait. Wallace and I will be along shortly in the pickup. We’ll take the lead from there. Got all that?”

“Yeah.”

Collie’s boots
pinged
on the rear ladder as she descended. Gus didn’t dare look back at the pickup for fear of earning more of her wrath. He climbed aboard the motor home filled with wondering people. They regarded him, faces demanding updates, so he provided one.

“Collie says we drive on back to Phil. She and Wallace have a few things to work out.”

“Wallace?” one of the middle-aged women asked. Gus had forgotten her name but noted her missing teeth. “That the one who’s sick?”

“Yeah.”

“He turn yet?”

“No,” Gus said, the need to defend him flaring up. “He didn’t turn.”

“He will,” the woman warned, her eyes looking at the road.

The little convoy stopped for the night in a gas-station parking lot, allowing the survivors to stretch their legs for a bit before returning to the relative safety of the motor homes. Collie appeared and gave curt instructions for the following day, and that was the only time Gus saw her. Wallace did not show at all. The operators had maintained a safe distance from them all since the roadside incident when Wallace had almost turned. Gus understood the reason for the separation. With Wallace being a question mark, keeping him away from everyone was wise.

The next morning, the RVs rolled onward.

Gus took a shift at the wheel, following the lead pickup and wondering what waited at Pine Cove. Conversation was low to nonexistent, and Gus didn’t engage the survivors traveling with him. He knew as little as they did.

Signs heralded approaching towns like spoilers for a horror movie. If the folks riding with Gus had been quiet before, they were subdued by the sights of gutted homes and buildings, crashed vehicles, and the occasional sprinkling of yellowed bones on the wayside. Terrible battles had scraped these smaller towns off the map, leaving only piles of charred debris and wrecked property, evoking memories of Annapolis’s fire-washed streets.

Gus hoped Maggie and the kids were alive.

The sky reddened into evening as the little convoy drove along Highway 17, eventually linking up with the 132, steadily bearing down on the coastal bastion known as Pine Cove. Collie drove along a battered strip of road that might have received extensive shelling at one time. Potholes and pits blotted the pavement while vehicles littered the shoulders. Some cars lay on their roofs, crunched to a third of their size. Others seemed to have been blown apart in spectacular fashion. Gus drove through the mess, spotting a naked and twisted chassis halfway up a tree that might have been napalmed at one time. The forest around that morbid badge had been ravaged by an unchecked blaze, leaving only blackened frames in a thick dew of ash. The entire strip might have been firebombed at one point, intentionally or perhaps accidentally. The chassis suggested someone had a twitchy missile finger.

The rescued folks hunkered down in the RVs, studying the morbid landscape with narrow-eyed sadness, all while the sun blazed a frigid red.

They all wondered where the soldiers were leading them.

Ahead, a single taillight flared to life as the pickup braked, forcing Gus to do the same.

Collie got out of the cab and walked back. He opened the window and stuck his head halfway out. “Yeah?”

“We’re almost to Pine Cove,” Collie said, all business, which made Gus go cold inside. “We’ll lead you to the gate and let Spencer know you’re okay.”

“Who’s Spencer?”

“The gate watch. You’ll see. Some real forest up ahead. Not the horror show we went through today. Then it’s through a big rock cut, through a hill. At the end will be a wall of piled car wrecks and a bus that serves as a gate. I’ll do the talking, and after that, you’re on your best behavior.”

“Where are you guys going to be?”

“Good question,” Collie shrugged, her scarred features showing emotional fatigue. “Wallace is going through a rough time right now. We’re going to see it to the end, whichever end that might be. We’ll return to Pine Cove when this is finished, one way or the other. Clear?”

“Clear. Yeah.”

“All right. You’re good, then.” She turned to walk away.

“Collie.”

That stopped her, and she glanced over her shoulder.

“I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, for what?”

“Whatever it is I’ve done.”

“You’re fine, Gus. Wallace told me everything. I’m not mad at you. I’m just pissed at him. Just might seem otherwise. We’re good. Just gotta get through the next couple of days. If that. Rough times on the horizon, y’know?”

“Okay.” Gus felt shitty anyway and didn’t understand why clearly, but he figured that when the time came for Wallace to die, Collie had decided if anyone was going to send him off, it would be her.

“And I just wish…” Collie started and paused, “we had a little more time together.”

“Yeah.”

“Later, Gussy.”

“Yeah. Later.”

Collie continued back to her pickup, and Gus watched her go.

“Tough lady,” Phil muttered nearby.

“Toughest I know,” Gus admitted.

Twenty minutes later, roller-coaster hills with sharp inclines loomed over both sides of the road. A thick forest covered those undulating peaks, darkened by the oncoming night. Gus hunkered over the steering wheel, minding the highway while sneaking looks at how high those little mountains rose. The road curved to the left and stabbed through the center of one of those tall mounds, through an impressive rock cut illuminated by headlights. Layers of dark stone passed by Gus’s window, making him wonder how much explosive was used to split that particular hill and how many working hours it had taken to clear it. The end result, however, was a nearly perfect natural defense for Pine Cove. The undead would struggle with climbing those peaks.

“Been up here once,” Phil disclosed. The older man had taken the passenger seat and was staring out at the towering landscape, his posture and profile reminiscent of a weathered sea captain. “Pine Cove’s a small fishing town, kept going by a seasonal crab-processing plant. Mostly old folks like myself lived there. Young ones all went off to the cities or whatever. Nice place on the water. Or so I remember it that way.”

“They sure as hell blew the shit outta this hill,” Gus remarked. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say we were in an open pit mine.”

The taillights of Collie’s pickup flashed red as it slowed and pulled over. Ahead of the truck, a wall of cars piled four deep blocked the road. A walkway bridged the roofs of the cars, shielded with slabs of scrap metal on either side of a main gate barring any further progress. The gate itself, higher than the cars, consisted of a quilt of sheet metal. The dull pattern reminded Gus of a poorly conceived chessboard with uneven squares.

Collie got out of her truck and about-faced, holding up her arms.

Gus lowered himself over the steering wheel once again and tried seeing the tops of the rock cut, wondering who she was trying to hail. He couldn’t see anything but sheer cliff walls.

“Can’t see shit,” he said. “Walls are too close and high.”

“It’s a bottleneck,” Phil said.

Gus cocked a curious eyebrow and regarded the older man.

“We’re bringing home some goodies and good people,” Collie shouted. “All aboard the motor homes. Wallace and I are heading out again, so be nice to the new folks.”

With that, she lowered her arms, saluted at Gus, and climbed back aboard her vehicle. The road was just wide enough to perform a three-point turn, and as she drove by, she held up her hand once more. Wallace was a gloomy cadaver on the passenger side.

Then they were gone, vanishing around the bulk of the second motor home.

“Hey,” Phil grunted, pulling Gus back from his side mirror.

Figures pulled themselves into view from atop the wall, revealing themselves from the chest up. Some carried rifles, and others had shotguns. Gus counted eight faces and felt his stomach knotting.

“Hey, you!” A man shouted from the wall, to the right of the gate. “Behind the wheel.”

Phil gave Gus a “that’s you” nod.

Gus rolled his eyes and lowered his window. He stuck his head out and yelled, “Yeah?”

“Where’d Collie go?”

“Ah,” Gus hesitated. “Personal shit that couldn’t wait.”

“Personal shit?”

“Yeah, personal shit.”

“Well, what was it?”

This perplexed Gus. “
Personal
shit, man. That’s why it’s
personal
. I can’t tell you any more than that. ”

A few of the men and women on top of the wall exchanged worried glances. Gus figured this group was a tight one and no doubt knew about Wallace.

“Hold on, then,” the man called back in a disappointed voice. He turned and waved, and a few seconds later, the sheet-metal center of the wall moved to one side. Gus had seen the same deal in
The Road Warrior
, but there wasn’t room behind that barrier for a bus.

The people pushing the section came into view.

“Ah.”
Mystery revealed.
Gus started up the RV.

“That’s a tight fit,” Phil observed.

“Looks like one,” Gus agreed and put pressure on the accelerator. He drove through the opened slot, guiding the rig through as carefully as possible. The side mirror barely cleared the edge of the cars, but the rest slipped through the opening without problem.