Echoes of Darkness Read online

  Now, though, it was the old man’s turn. He either had to explain what he meant by a “fire-hole,” or dig the damn thing himself, and to be honest, the boy was so tired he wished the old man would refuse to answer.

  No such luck.

  “Dig a pit a foot across and two deep. Then another, ’bout a foot and a half away, big around as your arm, angled to catch the first pit near the bottom. Like the back door in a badger hole. The fire goes in the big pit, covered up with the griddle. That little hole feeds air to the fire. We keep the fire small, and we can cook us some supper without no chance of throwing off enough light to hook the zombies’ attention. They can’t see near as well as they can hear, but they sure as hell ain’t blind. Well, most of ’em, anyway. Them’s that still have eyes.”

  The boy dug and the old man prepared some kind of freeze-dried stew, mixing it thick, with the absolute minimum of water—water, the old man said as they ate, weighed more than food, but was more important.

  “Out here, the only thing that’ll kill you faster than thirst are those damn risen folk. It comes down to it, in an emergency or suchlike, and you have a choice between grabbing the water and the food, you grab the water. Every time.”

  He began dry-scrubbing the empty stewpot with fistfuls of grass, then glanced up speculatively.

  “I s’pose, if it did come right down to it, I could always eat you if I had to.”

  He rasped a laugh, but the boy didn’t see the humor. He didn’t like the look in the old man’s eyes: though his lips were twisted into a smile, those sharp, calculating eyes said the old man didn’t really think it was funny either.

  After supper the boy lay on the ground, unmindful of the dirt under his hair or the rock digging into his back. He had walked all day, saddlebags over his shoulder, and he didn’t think he had ever been so tired. His eyes closed, and his mind began to wander, but it wandered into places he’d rather it not go. All day long he’d been concentrating on something or other: the old man’s questions, the old man’s tasks, or even just putting one foot in front of the other as he tried to keep up. Now, though, thoughts crowded into his head as if they’d just been waiting for an opening, and he lay there thinking.

  Remembering.

  Father’s voice . . .

  Mother’s face . . .

  Screams . . . chewing . . .

  A boot thudded into his thigh, and the boy shot upright.

  “Ain’t time to sleep yet, boy. Still things to be done.”

  The boy blinked.

  “What? Fill the hole?”

  “Naw.”

  Something hard and heavy dropped into his lap, and he flinched, nearly crying out. He looked down to see one of the old man’s long revolvers. He picked it up and found it empty.

  “You said you cleaned your daddy’s guns, and I got to find some kind of use for you. Show me.”

  The old man broke out a small kit of brushes, cloths, and oil, and watched as the boy cleaned the revolver. It took a little figuring, for though his father had owned a similar gun, it wasn’t an exact match, and the boy had only handled the guns occasionally. The old man remained silent, merely observing as the boy worked through it.

  When he was done, the old man took the weapon, broke open the cylinder and gave it a spin, flipped it closed, pulled the hammer back, and dry-fired once.

  “Not bad,” he said, breaking the cylinder again and slipping in cartridges. “I used these quite a bit getting you out of there yesterday. You use a gun, you clean it. Use it a lot, you make sure you clean it. Out here, weapon failure is not an option. Comprendé?”

  He holstered the gun, drew the other and shook the bullets out into his palm before dropping it into the boy’s lap.

  “Now this one. Do it in half the time, and use a quarter the oil. What, you think I can just piss gun oil?”

  He cleaned the second revolver, and then the rifle the old man had carried all day—a hunter’s weapon, complete with scope—and then a third revolver that had been in one of the saddlebags. The boy was bleary-eyed with exhaustion by the time he finished the last gun. The old man watched every move, nodding when he was done.

  “You’ll do it faster tomorrow.”

  That was the last thing the boy heard before sleep overtook him, far too quickly for his mind to wander anywhere.

  Feet shuffling. Many. Louder. Moving closer as he tries to muffle his sobs. He clutches at his own traitorous mouth, trying to force the noise back in, but it’s like pushing a handful of water upstream in a river; the sounds rising from his hitching chest simply flow between his fingers, around his hands, until the top of the barrel is torn away—

  The slap shocked the boy awake, sending him scrabbling across the grass.

  “Quit that,” the old man rasped. “You keep making them sounds in your sleep, you’ll get us killed. I’ll kill you first, if I have to.”

  The boy looked about the dark, confused, seeking the moon to try to guess the time.

  “Your turn on watch.”

  “Huh?”

  “Watch,” the old man repeated. “What’samatter, you deaf?”

  “No, I—”

  In his confusion, the boy had spoken loudly—quite loudly—in what his mother had always called his whine. After just two syllables his mouth closed so hard and fast he nearly bit off the tip of his tongue. Iron fingers dug into his jaw as the palm cupping his chin shoved upward. The boy rocked upright, then over, his back crushing the thin grass. The old man, moving with terrifying speed, now knelt beside him, pinning his head to the earth and holding his jaw firmly closed. The boy squealed, a muffled shout escaping his nose, until two of those hard fingers gripping his face shifted slightly and pinched it shut.

  Panic seized the boy as breathing ceased. He struggled, trying to writhe away from the grip, but his head seemed nailed to the ground. He arched his back, thrashed and flopped, but to no avail: the harder he fought, the more the old man leaned in, his weight pressing down painfully. The boy flailed, slapping and punching in his terror. The old man batted most of the wild swings aside, and those that made it through to strike the arm and hand holding the boy’s breath hostage were undirected, ineffective things the old demon ignored.

  The boy was light-headed, sparks flying across his dimming vision when he realized the old man was talking to him, whispering the same words over and over:

  “Settle down, now . . . quiet . . . settle down . . . quiet now . . .”

  The boy did quiet, too exhausted to struggle any more. He thought of his parents, wondered if he’d see them again when the old man had finished killing him. Unnoticed tears had streamed across his cheeks on their way to the ground; now they tickled his earlobes before dropping away. The leathery face faded . . .

  The old man let go.

  Air rushed into the boy in great, whooping gasps. He rolled onto his side, away from the old man, and would have run could he have gotten to his feet, but he was dizzy and sick, the dark night spinning about him. Half-digested stew clawed its way up his throat, but the old man quietly pummeled his back.

  “Just breathe. Breathe and try not to puke—and if you do throw your guts up, you do it quietly, y’hear?”

  The boy forced the stew back down, swallowing hard, terrified of what would happen if the old man decided he needed to be silenced again. He crawled away, but iron fingers wrapped one ankle, hauling him back and flipping him face up on the grass. The old man loomed, a hellish scarecrow, all sharp angles and black button eyes.

  “On the plain we can see ’em coming for miles. That kind of works in our favor—they can’t take us by surprise. We have time, can prepare and outthink ’em, easy. In the dark, that advantage is gone. Sound still carries, though, and them zombies can still hear, and I don’t aim to wake up to one of them sons of bitches gnawing on me just because you was having a bad dream, or got your feelings hurt, while one of them was passing in the night.”

  He helped the boy to his feet.

  “Now, I’m catchin
g some shut-eye before we have to get moving. You’re on watch. I used to count on my horse to hear ’em coming in the dark, but that ain’t an option no more. I got string with little bells on it wound between these three trees, about ankle high. They make it close enough to ring the bells, though, and there’s more’n one or two of ’em, well, that could be trouble. You sit here, quiet and still, and you listen. You hear a shuffle, or a footstep, or a by-God snapping twig, then you wake me up, quiet as you can. Y’unnerstand?”

  “You didn’t have to choke me,” the boy whispered. “You could have just told me.”

  He glared at the old man, rebelliously refusing to answer the question. The old man stared back, black eyes expressionless.

  “You need to mind me, boy.”

  “You’re not my father!”

  “No, I ain’t. Your daddy went and got himself killed. Got his wife killed, too. Got you stuffed in a barrel like some kind of zombie snack being saved for later.”

  He lunged in, suddenly face-to-face, and the boy flinched.

  “So no, I ain’t your daddy. I ain’t putting you in a barrel. I’m putting you on watch.”

  A knife appeared in the old man’s hand with all the speed of prestidigitation.

  “I wake up and find you asleep, I’ll hamstring you and leave you for the zombies to find. Finish the job your daddy started.”

  The knife disappeared. Those shark’s eyes never wavered. “You’re on watch ’til dawn. Y’unnerstand?”

  The old man lay down without waiting for an answer and appeared to fall asleep instantly. The boy settled to the ground with his back to a tree, staring at the sleeping form in the dark, hating him more than a little. Wondering if he could ever manage to get one of those guns away from the old bastard.

  And whenever his eyes drooped he thought of that knife, appearing in the old man’s hand like a magic trick. He thought about those dark, cold eyes and those strong, choking fingers.

  He was still awake when the sun brought dawn to the world.

  Days passed in this manner: hiking in near silence, with muttered instruction at mealtimes, then camping on some high ground, under cover if they could find it.

  “If nothing grabs their attention, if they’s just wandering along,” the old man explained, “they move kind of like water: downhill is easier than uphill. ’Cept for cities and towns. They congregate in towns, head for ’em like they’s zombie-magnets, like they remember that’s where they used to belong or something. Stick to the high ground and avoid them towns, that’s my motto.”

  The boy had thought that first day with the old man was the hardest of his life; he later realized his mistake. Every meal the old man explained some new task, often watching the boy do it at least once, and from then on that task belonged to him. Cooking, cleaning, weapon care, stringing the emergency “alarm bells,” setting snares near the occasional prairie dog town, skinning and cleaning the animals they caught in the snares (something that made the boy vomit the first couple of times, the old man standing over him in case he started making too much damned noise); the list of things the boy had to do grew all week long.

  Each chore the boy took over was another thing the old man no longer did. Pretty soon it seemed that all the old man did was walk, sleep, eat, and shit—which the boy then got to bury.

  The third day after the rescue, the boy noticed the pills. Several times a day the old man would fish in a pocket, pull out a small plastic bottle, and shake out a pill or two to dry-swallow. While the bottle had cotton packed in it to help keep it silent, the old man removed the packing to shake out the pills, and the bottle rattled no matter how he tried to muffle it with his hand.

  Curiosity roused, the boy asked about the bottle. Twice the old man ignored the question, merely shouldering his pack and walking on. The third time, however, they were sitting around the fire-hole, a small pot of fairly fresh ground squirrel simmering on the griddle. The old man had just shaken out a pair of pills with a rattle that would have gotten the boy a hard slap and a short lecture, had the noise been his.

  “Never you mind,” was the harsh reply. “And get to stringing those bells. We ain’t got all night.”

  The old man’s eyes, coupled with the noise it made despite his fanaticism for quiet, told the boy that whatever it was in that bottle, the old man needed it.

  It can’t be a heart condition, not setting the pace he does, the boy thought, and try as he might he could only think of one other answer.

  Terrific. Rescued from zombies to become slave labor for Colorado’s last surviving drug addict.

  It was also the third day after the rescue when the old man rummaged through the saddlebag after breakfast.

  “I believe you said your daddy taught you how to use this?” he said, holding up the spare, third revolver.

  “Yessir.”

  “Show me.”

  The gun arced through the air. The boy dropped the pot he was cleaning to fumble the weapon, bobbled it for a moment, then dropped it as well.

  “Terrific.”

  He scowled at the old man as he scooped up the weapon. “You want me to shoot?”

  “Yep.”

  “What about the noise?”

  Bony shoulders rose in a shrug. “You let me worry ’bout that.”

  “Well . . . what do you want me to shoot?”

  “How’s about me?”

  The boy stared.

  “C’mon, boy. You’ve probably thought of doing it already. Now’s your chance.” He spread his arms wide, making a target of himself. “Go on. Plug me.”

  All those slaps and cuffs from the old man ran through the boy’s head. The indignity of being strip-searched. His near suffocation. The gun came up. Rather than pointing toward the old man, however, the barrel aimed just off to the side.

  “I’m over here, boy.”

  “I know.”

  “Then where the hell you pointing that thing?”

  The boy was silent a moment. “My father taught me to never point a gun at a person.”

  “In case it goes off accidental-like?”

  The boy nodded.

  “I take it you ain’t going to shoot me, then.”

  The gun lowered.

  “Fine. I’m actually pretty good with that. How about that, then?” He waved a hand toward a tree, stepping aside to be far from the line of fire. “Think you can hit that?”

  The boy gazed at the tree, a cottonwood only ten feet away. “Sure.”

  “Show me.”

  The boy adopted the shooting stance his father had taught him, sighted down the barrel, thumbed the hammer back, sighted again, breathed, and pulled the trigger.

  Click.

  The gun wasn’t loaded.

  “Jeeezus! You took that long to pull the trigger at a damn tree? What if that tree was coming at you, looking to chow down on some dumb kid? What if it wasn’t alone? Jeeezus!”

  The old man waved a hand, disgusted, then tossed the spare’s gun belt and holster to the ground at the boy’s feet.

  “Put that on and let’s get going.”

  The belt buckled on easily enough, though the gun felt odd and heavy on the boy’s hip.

  “Do I get any bullets?”

  “Bullets? Pfft.”

  The lipless mouth emitted a dry, sarcastic sound, then twisted into something approaching a smile. “When I think it might not be a waste of time, then, maybe, you’ll load that thing. Now pack up and let’s get to walking.”

  In the days that followed they practiced as they walked. The old man would hiss “Now!” from a few yards away, then move toward the boy with a measured pace. The latter would try to stop whatever woolgathering he’d been doing and get that gun out to dry-fire at the leathery scarecrow. It took half a day, and more than two dozen tries, before the gun even cleared the holster ahead of the old man’s stinging slap.

  “You’re dead,” he’d whisper into the boy’s reddened face, then turn and continue on his way as if nothing had happened.
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  The first time the boy managed to get the revolver up and fire, he felt a second’s elation before the hard palm cracked across his cheek anyway, joy becoming frustration that made him want to scream.

  “I got you,” he said to the old man’s retreating back, “before you got me—you had no call to hit me! That wasn’t fair.”

  The old man turned, tapping his stomach.

  “You shot me here. That won’t stop a zombie—hell, that won’t even slow him down.”

  He walked toward the boy, one finger touching the brim of his hat.

  “The body don’t matter to these things, boy. It’s the brain. Destroy the brain, destroy the—”

  He stopped as the gun snapped up, nearly touching the end of his nose, steady in the boy’s hand. His mouth twitched.

  “That’s good, but—”

  He whipped up a hand to slap the boy’s red, swollen cheek, but checked the swing at the sharp click of the revolver dry-firing in his face. His mouth twitched again.

  “Good. I—”

  Click-click-click—

  The boy stared into his dark eyes, pulling the trigger again and again, making sure the old man heard the hammer fall every time. He stopped when he realized he’d fired eight imaginary shots from a six-shooter, and lowered the gun.

  They stood, silence spinning out between them for what felt like a long time. Then that hard slash of a mouth quirked at the corners.

  “Don’t spray lead like that unless you can pull fresh ammo out of your ass. I know I can’t. We only have what we carry.”

  He spun on his heel.

  “Let’s move.”

  On the fourth morning, the boy realized they were traveling in a curve. Each day they walked in a more or less straight line, following the occasional road crossing their path awhile if it was going in the right direction, but striking out cross-country again as soon as it turned the wrong way. In the morning, though, they set out in a different direction than they’d traveled the previous day: they’d been moving east, then turned northeast, then north, and were now heading almost due west. When he asked about it, all the old man would say was “Got somethin’ to do,” and would speak no more on the subject.