Echoes of Darkness Read online

  The hand began to pull.

  The boy screamed again, pain ringing his torso, his knee burning like fire. More hands reached for him as he was stretched, his tortured limb pulled down toward their hungry grasp, and his scream turned into a howl of hatred and rage.

  “Old maaaaaaaannnnnnn!”

  A head exploded beneath him as a shot rang out across the lot. The gripping hand fell away with a jerk that sent him swinging, spinning once more above the crowd of dead faces and hands. The sudden fast spin coupled with the blast of stench from the burst head were finally too much for him: he vomited, raining effluvia down upon the hungry mob. They took no notice, eyes remaining open, teeth still chattering in anticipation of feasting on his flesh as the crowd surged back and forth, following his swinging form with mindless determination.

  They also took no notice of the gunshots, round after round slamming home in the mob. Head after head disintegrated in gouts of meat and liquid rot, bone and brain spattering the surrounding blank faces. Several of the zombies fell, tripping on the remains of their brethren or slipping in the chunky gore now covering the tarmac. The fallen were trampled, unnoticed by those still standing, some of the older ones reduced to dragging themselves through the mess when arms and legs, brittle with their slowed decomposition, snapped beneath the horde’s marching feet.

  None dragged themselves far before the bullets found them, reducing them to inanimate bags of meat and muck.

  The boy was sick again as this went on, the stink of the carnage burrowing its way into his sinuses, his stomach clenching like a painful fist long after it was emptied. The two- or three-dozen zombies below became a dozen, then little more than a half-dozen, shuffling tirelessly after him as his writhing maintained his back-and-forth swing. Each time his spinning brought them into view he watched them come, hating them in their mindless, unstoppable determination to have him, almost as much as he hated the old man for putting him here.

  “Your turn!”

  The voice startled him, so focused was he on his silent, stumbling pursuers. He craned his neck, trying to find the old man, but what with all the swinging and spinning it was impossible to make him out.

  “Watch your landing, boy—you’ll have to be quick on your feet.”

  He was swinging away from the following crowd when the rope went suddenly slack. He hit the ground boots first, dropping and rolling not so much by plan as that his legs simply gave out. Had he not already purged himself empty, rolling on the filth-covered blacktop would have made him sick; as it was he rolled clumsily to his feet, fighting to strip off the rope as he staggered away from the footsteps so close behind.

  “Here you go!”

  Motion caught his eye as he flipped the loops up and over his head with arms half-numb from their tight bondage. One object, then another, arced through the air to land in a clear spot by the edge of the gas station’s cement pump-pad.

  A revolver.

  A machete.

  Dead fingers brushed his collar as he momentarily lost track of his pursuers. He spun away from the grasping, reaching horror, trying not to focus overmuch on the wood-on-wood sound of the thing’s teeth clacking in a grotesque parody of chewing. He ran, circling around the pad, leading the pack, the bandleader in a parade from Hell. They had him in sight, were fixed on him now; they would not stop, he knew, but would keep on coming until destroyed. He looped back, an all-out sprint putting a little distance between himself and the pack before he stooped to snatch a little bit of death from the tarmac.

  He picked up the revolver.

  He could tell it was loaded this time, could feel the weight of the thing, heavy in his hand. He thumbed the hammer back as he turned, backpedaling between the old fuel pumps.

  On they came, slowing to force their way between the pumps, not fighting each other, simply unaware, tripping one another up as they squeezed through the bottleneck. He leveled the gun at the one in the lead; a woman, according to the dress. The weapon bellowed, bucked, and the zombie behind her fell, head a spattered ruin. The body dropped into the gap between the pumps, slowing the zombies behind it, their legs entangling in its suddenly inanimate limbs.

  He avoided the female, ducking left, using the pumps to impede them again. He shot one when the range was close enough, then another, nameless stuff spraying the pumps as corpses dropped between them, further slowing the following dead. He fired three more times before the gun clicked empty, and he cast it aside as he ran to scoop up the machete.

  Chest heaving, he faced his remaining hunters, two relatively fresh zombies: a male wearing a disgusting sweater who lacked more than half his face, and the female he’d missed at the pumps, torn dress still almost pretty, despite the blood from her missing right arm.

  “No.” The word was a sob, tears streaming down his face.

  Was that why his first shot had gone wide? Had he recognized that dress even in the touch-and-go of a running gunfight, the revolver twitching aside at the last second? Had he instinctively not fired at that ugly sweater, a family joke his father had taken good-naturedly for as long as the boy could remember?

  “No!”

  The cry was ragged, torn from him as he backed from the staggering figures. His father tracked him awkwardly, his one remaining eye staring. His mother stumbled, ragged dress fluttering in the breeze, exposing a section of leg where there was no leg, thigh stripped to the bone, exposed muscle gnawed and raw, the leg stiff and wooden.

  “That ain’t your ma!”

  He heard the words but didn’t spare a glance toward the old man. He stumbled back, staring at that hand reaching for him, fingers stiffening and curling with anticipation, wondering which hand this was: the one that caressed his hair as it pushed him down into the barrel, or the one that had held the lid for him?

  That one touched my hair, he decided, watching it draw closer as she staggered faster than he retreated.

  “That ain’t her! Your ma is dead, been dead for a week. This is just something using her leftovers like a tool, a tool that looks like her!”

  Some quiet, clinical part of the boy suspected the peak of her screaming had come when they’d done that to her leg, but that sudden stop, her awful silence . . . that had come when they took her arm.

  “Take back her leftovers! Put it down, boy, take it back so we can bury her proper!”

  He held the machete in a loose, two-handed grip, its tip pointed in her general direction, but this was less threat than reflex action. The blade tip bounced about as he moved, wove a looping figure eight more than a foot wide in the air, but her dead, filmed eyes didn’t follow it. She was focused entirely on him, on him alone, with no evidence she even considered the weapon.

  For his part, it never even occurred to him to swing. He still held the blade only because he never thought to put it down. Or perhaps there was some small thing of self-preservation in this; maybe that calm, clinical part of him, somewhere deep inside, was aware of her rotting flesh and champing teeth, and was afraid.

  But afraid or not, he couldn’t take a swing at her, shouldn’t take a swing at her. He couldn’t hurt her any more than she could hurt him. And she wouldn’t hurt him. Couldn’t hurt him. Because she was his—

  “Mom?” he whispered, his feet grinding to a halt on the tarmac, left hand leaving the handle of the machete to reach out toward those straining fingers, fingers that had twined in his hair as she pushed him into the barrel. Into safety.

  Right before she told him she loved him.

  “Mom.” He smiled, and began to take a step forward.

  “Look out!”

  Iron fingers clamped about his left bicep. A powerful yank spun him left, his right hand flying high for balance, the weight of what he’d forgotten he even carried pulling it wide, swinging it in an arc—

  —that stopped when the machete’s blade lodged in the side of his father’s head with a wooden chunk.

  “No!”

  The line of the blade crossed the edge of his father’s
jaw, had caught it in mid-chatter, breaking it, shooting it six inches to the side like the platen on an old-fashioned typewriter. The boy reeled in horror, but his father never slowed, shambling forward, misaligned jaw waggling like a scolding finger as it tried to bite. Seeing his own hand still gripping the handle of the blade buried in what was left of his father’s face shocked him, caused a change within him as, deep down, something buried even further inside than that quiet, analytical part . . . broke.

  “No!”

  He had been falling back; now he pulled back, twisting the handle to free the blade. He spun right as he pulled, keeping himself away from the grabbing left hand as the right hand, still tightly clamped to his upper arm, pulled the zombie off-balance. The two zombies collided, further disrupting both their pursuits. The female fell to the ground with a hollow crack, gnawed left leg not up to the task, but the male maintained his grip on the boy’s arm. The machete rose, then fell, the blade nearly severing the zombie’s arm at the elbow.

  The shock knocked the clutching hand loose, but the zombie simply staggered on, closing on him with sudden speed. The boy stumbled back, feet twisting upon themselves as he tried to raise the machete for another blow, but he was too slow, too slow—

  —and the zombie missed, the nearly severed arm dangling from the outthrust stump, hand still clutching and grabbing though only a thin strip of tissue held the remains of the elbow together. The boy sidestepped, eyes fastened to the spot just below that waggling flag of a broken jaw. The machete rose. The boy screamed.

  The machete fell.

  Blood flowed, thick with pus, chunks of blackened meat bumping in the weak current like the last bits of cereal floating in the bowl of milk as fluids moved lazily, without any kind of systolic pressure. The hideous sweater his dad had worn so proudly, proof of the love of a father for his young son, sopped up the gore like a woolen towel. The boy avoided looking at the round object rolling in a tight circle, bumping as the offset jaw, still waggling, tapped time in the center.

  He stiffened at the clack-clack-clack of teeth close behind, and spun.

  She lay full length upon the ground, left leg missing below the thigh. Now the boy clearly saw the gnaw marks on the stub of bone protruding from the meat, where the dead had chewed through his mother’s living limb like someone starting in the middle of an ear of corn, teeth closing hard on the cob in the center, trying to suck up every last bit of sweet kernel. The chewing had weakened the bone, splintered it, so the impact of his father’s body had snapped it like a rotted stick, leaving her to drag herself toward him one-armed and single-legged, in a ghastly parody of an army crawl.

  Her eyes were still focused on him and only him, though now he recognized what he saw in them. It wasn’t love, or caring, or even some maternal instinct mysteriously surviving death to cause a faint glimmer of recognition.

  It was hunger.

  Hunger drove her . . . drove it, to drag itself across a field of rot and gore, over the fallen body of one who had once been her husband—the love of her life—without a second glance, implacably moving toward the only food in sight: one who had been her only son, whom she had once given her life to protect.

  She gave her life . . .

  Long seconds passed as it clawed closer, nails splintering bloodlessly against the tarmac. The leg-stump flailed, scraping against the ground as the remaining leg kicked, leaving bits of itself behind in its unstoppable effort to reach him. Teeth clacked in mindless anticipation. Milky eyes stared.

  Tears flowed, and then dried upon his cheeks.

  “Goodbye, Mom.”

  He lifted the machete as he stepped forward.

  With slow steps, the boy approached the Kwik-Mart, the last place he’d seen the old man. His eyes felt swollen and hot, though they were dry. The sound in his head wouldn’t go away, a high buzz like a heat bug in the summertime. Maybe there was some water in the Kwik-Mart, something that had been missed by looters.

  One could always hope.

  “Nice work.”

  The old man stepped in front of him, blocking his search for water. He didn’t carry the rifle—he’d probably run out of shells—but his revolvers sat on his hips, and his hat upon his head.

  “Go away,” the boy said, voice deep and raspy from crying, and thirst.

  “No, I mean it. Using the terrain to slow ’em down like that. Well done! I guess you were listening to all my jawin’.”

  “Get out of my way.”

  The boy sidestepped. The old man slid back into his path.

  “Just a minute now, just a minute. After all that, I have a question for you. That all right?”

  The boy said nothing, merely raised his gaze to meet the old man’s stare.

  “How’d it feel?”

  The old man smiled.

  The boy stepped into the swing and hit the old man hard. They stood too close to use the blade, but the machete’s hilt made a damn fine addition to his fist and he smashed it into that grinning face. His left hand snapped out as his right made contact, snatching a revolver from its holster as the old man staggered back. His right foot came up high then stomped into the old man’s gut, pushing him away, creating room for him to swing the machete backhanded, an awkward follow-up to that roundhouse punch.

  The old man flew back, blood flying from lips smashed against breaking teeth, the wind exploding out of him. He was lighter than the boy had expected, less substantial, and much easier to move: the machete barely reached its target, slashing across ribs instead of burying itself deep in the old man’s guts. The worn hat fluttered away as the rawboned old devil sprawled on his back, clutching his bloody side. The boy stepped in, stomping on one flailing arm to stop it from drawing a weapon, and aimed his captured revolver straight down at the old man’s eye.

  The eye was crinkled about the outer edge. Not a wince of pain, but in a smile.

  “Do it.”

  The words were mushy, forced out between ruined lips and teeth.

  “Just . . . do it. You’re . . . ready now.”

  The words brought the boy up short, and he snorted.

  What was that?

  A breeze had sprung up, blowing off the plain, pushing away the stink of the parking lot carrion. He inhaled again, sniffing deep, picking up the scents of the old man: ancient body odor; coffee-powered halitosis; burnt gun oil. And under it . . . something horribly familiar.

  Studying the rent in the old man’s side, he used the tip of the machete to raise the tattered shirt from the skin. Beneath, just above the red gaping slice in the old flesh, a bandage wound about the lean torso, yellowed with sweat stains and stippled with the grime of long, hard travel.

  Except across the ribs, where it was patinaed green and black with pus. The boy leaned down, the old man breathing hard, and sniffed. He rocked back in surprise.

  Gangrene.

  Rot.

  Decay.

  “What the hell is this?”

  “T’other week. When we . . . lost the horse.”

  “When we . . . you mean, when you rescued me.”

  The old man nodded, too winded to continue. The boy shook his head, trying to make connections he knew were right in front of him, but the pieces wouldn’t fit together in his mind.

  “You got, what? Scratched?”

  A head shake. “Bit.”

  “But then you’re infected with . . .”

  He trailed off, gazing at the parking lot covered with corpses that had arrived under their own power before the old man and his rifle had convinced them to finally lie down and stay there. A shaking finger pointed toward the field of meat that lay rotting in the sun.

  “That was more than a week ago. You should be like—”

  “Antibiotics slow the spread . . . you take enough of ’em. Won’t cure it. Won’t stop it. Slows it some.”

  The boy thought of the pills, the rattle of the old man shaking out dose after dose as the week wore on.

  “But I thought those were . . . what the
hell was this all about, then? You’re just gonna—”

  “Couldn’t do it myself. Put a bullet in my brain. Not when it happened.”

  “But wh—”

  “You’d never have made it.”

  The boy stared into the old man’s eyes, still fierce though the leathery face was creased with pain.

  “Not the way you were. Not lasted a day . . . way you were.”

  He lay back on the tarmac, eyes closed, breathing labored. The boy watched the ooze seeping through the filthy bandage, lost in thought.

  “I’m tired.”

  The words, wheezed from between dry lips, brought the boy’s attention up to the old man’s face. His eyes were open again, bright with what looked like fever.

  “I’m so tired. It’s been a long damn week. I just want to rest. I just want to rest . . . and not get up.”

  Those shining eyes found the boy’s face. Focused on his eyes.

  “Think you’re ready . . . to help an old man out?”

  The boy held his gaze a moment, then nodded.

  He thumbed the hammer back.

  He tamped down the loose soil, then cast the shovel aside. It was a snow shovel he’d found in the Kwik-Mart, but it had been a far sight better than nothing. He’d dug the graves deep, deep enough to discourage any scavengers from digging them up, especially with so much meat just lying in the parking lot out in front of the little building.

  “’Bout time for me to go,” he said, standing at the foot of the three long humps of fresh earth. He turned and walked to where his saddlebags waited, and settled them on his shoulders, making certain not to tangle the straps on the rifle scope. Slipping the worn cowboy hat on in place of his long-lost Rockies cap, he turned back to the three graves.

  “Guess this is goodbye.”

  Leaving the four of them behind—the mother, the father, the old man, and the boy—the man set off toward the middle of town, searching for that gun shop the old man had spoken of. He needed ammunition.