Revenence (Novella 2): Dead Tired Read online

  It was a quarter to eight when Adrian entered the abandoned shop. He returned the wrecking bar to its usual place hooked onto his belt loop, having pried his way through the front door.

  He peered through charcoal-colored eyes at the disordered interior of the hunting supply shop. It was clear that he wasn't the first to loot the store since the end of the world had begun in April. Many shelves were bare, and others were close. Pornographic magazines littered the small space behind the counter, some having been stepped upon and thereby losing pages. On one such page, a brunette, on all fours and caked in full makeup, gazed back over an impossibly smooth, airbrushed rump.

  Adrian continued past the counter, his right hand darting out to grab a small plastic tool from a bin. He stepped further into the store, then paused, stepping back toward the bin once again. A small label on the shelf below identified the implement. DEER-ANUSING TOOL. He took several more, depositing them in an outer pocket of his pack, and probed deeper into the shop.

  The building was reminiscent of an Old West saloon, with a tall, imposing window taking up most of the southern facade. Brilliant, white morning sunshine poured through the glass and into the building. It illuminated a thick layer of dust covering the wide, wooden floor planks. Relatively recent boot prints interrupted the dust layer here and there. Adrian turned to make his way down an aisle to the left, noticing canisters lining a shelf. He read the front of one of the cans.

  Bear mace, he thought, stashing two in his bag before continuing through the shop, silent but for the slow tread of his boots on the wood floor. As he neared the rear of the building, he detected the faint odor of decay. His gaze scanned the back wall, where a wooden sign hung, the words LIVE BAIT carved into its front. He ignored the increasing stench as he neared the small refrigerators, still stocked with white styrofoam coolers full of lifeless crickets and worms left to fester after the power had gone out. Tanks of putrid minnows sat behind a counter.

  "Celia," he mumbled reflexively, his consciousness far away, as he pocketed a few compasses before turning to head back toward the front door. "Papa bear's coming."

  Heading west on a stretch of historic Old Route 66, not far from Springfield, Missouri, Adrian chased down a lead he had gotten over the radio. He rode with his AR-15 slung over his back, his shotgun holstered at his right hip, and a vague sneer spread over his features.

  "They're headed west, taking 66 by storm," he had heard a woman warn over the radio. "A real blitzkrieg. Consider yourselves warned."

  Adrian let his mind wander. The deep, rumbling vibration of the vintage Indian motorcycle beneath him lulled him into a meditative state of mind, much as it had well before the world had fallen apart. He recalled the two women he had met back in Kentucky a few days prior. He wondered, not for the first time, what it was about the dark-haired one that had reminded him of his ex-wife. Unable to place it in his memory, he allowed his conscious mind to go inert as he sped down the highway through sections of woods and past once-tidy farm houses set off of the road. He had realized early on in his pursuit of the sadists that they must have taken the route before, as it seemed to be clear--clear enough for them to stay well ahead of him, which would be unlikely if they had to consistently stop to push cars out of the way.

  He had traveled about eight miles, approaching a tiny town, when he recalled the detail upon which his mind had been unable to seize earlier.

  It was her cheekbones, he thought, nodding slightly to himself as he passed a sign to his right. The top of the sign, bearing the name of the town, had been obliterated from gunfire, leaving it splintered and ragged. The intact bottom half, however, informed him that the former village had boasted a population of 262.

  He ruminated over the thought as he entered the village via the historic highway. Her cheekbones were like Rachel's. And Celia.... He cut the thought off, the muscles in his jaw tightening, before allowing it to finish. Celia looks like her mom. Celia, his little girl who, at twelve, still reminded him of baby blankets, chubby hands reaching up for help, and everything pure and guiltless. Celia, taken away from him by what Shari, the dark-haired woman, had termed "sadists." Sadists, who reminded him of cold steel, gunpowder and terror. Explosives and shrapnel. Poisonous gasses and heartless, cruel desert landscapes.

  He reached the western border of the village, finding himself out in the country once again. His thoughts raced along with him, his visage a mask of defeat.

  Last thing I ever wanted, he thought, was for her to go through the same shit Rachel went through.

  For all the grief Adrian had suffered at the hands of his ex-wife, he couldn't help but attribute most, if not all, of her behavior to the severe abuse she had suffered as a child and teenager. In the end, he had left, having to accept the fact that allowing himself to be abused by Rachel wouldn't benefit anyone. He had never ceased to pity her, however, no matter how self-inflicted her troubles may have seemed to others.

  "You can't hate someone for being broken," he had often explained to friends and family in her defense. "But I'll be damned if I ain't learned to keep my distance."

  Up ahead, a knot of about a dozen undead clogged the two-lane stretch of highway. They ambled awkwardly down the asphalt in Adrian's direction, drawn in by the growl of his engine about a quarter mile up the road.

  "Just rotters," he mumbled to himself, reaching toward his thigh holster for his sawed-off, double-barrel shotgun. He rode in closer, palming the well-grooved grip with his right hand, until he was about 100 feet away. He paused, leaning the idling motorcycle's weight slightly into his right leg, and loaded two buck and ball shells into the shotgun.

  He waited while the shuffling herd of ruined, decomposed meat continued to close the gap between themselves and the living. When around ten feet remained, Adrian raised the shotgun and aimed the twin barrels at the lower head of an undead female at the front of the procession, and the center-most out of the group. He squeezed the trigger, and the second chambered shell waited to follow the first round while Adrian briefly observed its effects.

  The main payload--a .65-caliber lead ball--went effortlessly through the lower face of the female zombie in the center, exiting the lower back of her skull. From there, it drove into the cranium of a slightly shorter undead woman behind her, entering via the eye socket and splattering the lifeless, rotted orb in the process.

  The round had emitted six #1-grade buck pellets along with the lead ball, which incapacitated another five zombies, three off to one side and two to the other. A few more sustained torso and limb damage, but not enough to mortally wound them. A total of six continued toward Adrian, moving slightly more quickly and gnashing their teeth more aggressively as they circumvented the corpses of their kind in the road. Adrian heard the low, whistling growl of deteriorating vocal cords vibrating as the undead pushed through the moderate wind.

  Adrian leaned the weight of his motorcycle onto its kickstand and backed away from the group of undead, which was now close enough to gag him with their fumes of spoiling matter. When he had put about eight feet between himself and the horde, he aimed the barrel once again at the one closest to the center.

  This one, a male as best as he could tell, was particularly tall compared to the others around and behind him. Adrian lowered the barrel slightly, going for the throat, then pulled the trigger, sending the lead ball and its six smaller allies hurtling toward the group. The ball obliterated the throat and neck of the middle zombie. Most of the spine also splintered to pieces, allowing the weight of the head--no longer supported by muscle or tendon--to loll down, causing the thin shard of remaining vertebrae to snap under the weight.

  From there, the leaden sphere blasted into the front of an androg
ynous zombie behind, blowing most of the face and a good amount of the brain away. Coupled with the damage done by the pellets, Adrian found himself facing only one more of the rotting adversaries. He turned the unloaded shotgun as the undead male meandered into reaching distance, attempting to lunge at him as it gnashed its filthy teeth. Adrian jammed the butt of his shotgun into the zombie's open mouth, knocking out most of the teeth and causing him to crumple to the ground.

  "Stunned," Adrian said to himself, "but not done for."

  He came down to one knee, bringing the extremity of his shotgun down down into the undead man's face again. The brass-capped butt sunk into the skull cavity with ease, and Adrian heard the rough, grating sound of metal scraping asphalt, indicating that his gun had made an exit wound in the back of the zombie's head.

  He stood, withdrawing the weapon, and sauntered over to the side of the road. Crouching, he rubbed the shotgun on the grass to remove some of the excess gore smeared on the stock. Having cleared away all of the visible chunks, he stood and made his way to his bike, producing a tube of antiseptic wipes from the storage compartment.

  He stood wiping his gun, the chorus of cicadas rising to a crescendo around him as his eyes became unfocused and his vision blurred. His thoughts wandered once again, this time about ten years prior, to when his daughter was a toddler.

  Adrian's parents had encouraged him to make plans with Rachel for their third anniversary, offering to keep Celia for a few days. Although reluctant, being unsure about the idea of spending three days alone with his wife, he had decided in the end to take his parents up on the offer.

  Rachel had been surprisingly receptive to the idea, booking them a three-night stay at a bed and breakfast on the shore of Kentucky Lake. Even the trip to the resort, a two-hour drive, was fairly relaxed, even pleasant.

  "It's our anniversary," Rachel had told the woman at the reception desk as she checked them in. "Three years."

  Adrian glanced to his left, taking note of his wife's glowing smile, an expression he hadn't seen from her in more than two years. She smiled at him as she palmed his crotch briefly, confident that the receptionist wouldn't see from where she was seated behind the chest-high counter.

  "Oh, congratulations!" the forty-ish red-haired woman behind the counter squealed, regarding the couple with a smile that seemed roughly as genuine as her straight, dazzling white teeth. Adrian smiled, attempting to dismiss his arousal until he and Rachel were alone in their room. "To help you two celebrate," the redhead continued, "I'll go ahead and upgrade you to our luxury suite. It's got the nicest lake view in Kentucky."

  Rachel clung affectionately to Adrian's left arm as they made their way to the large suite occupying the third floor. He kissed the top of her head, his lips meeting her soft, fragrant hair. It's going to be a good weekend, he thought.

  It had, indeed, turned out to be a good weekend. He and Rachel spent a fair amount of time in their room, but they also managed to squeeze in some outdoor activities, taking advantage of the Indian summer and changing autumn colors.

  On their last afternoon at the lake, they had decided to rent a rowboat. Adrian rowed them to a small, lagoon-like section connected to the lake. Foliage in every color surrounded and enclosed them, issuing a gentle, continual confetti of colorful leaves into the transparent, still aqua water. Adrian glanced upward, where he could see the brilliant blue autumn sky peeking from between the treetops. He breathed in deeply, enjoying the fresh, slightly sweet scent of the forest. He thought to move in closer to Rachel, feeling more fulfilled and serene than he had in years, when she uttered a question that threw him at once out of his center.

  "Have you thought about enlisting again? I mean, the promotion they offered was a pretty good deal. You shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth."

  At that moment, Adrian came upon two distinct realizations. The first was that his wife's agreeable nature during the trip had been a well-played, manipulative ruse. His second realization was that he should have seen it coming. He shook his head, avoiding looking her in the eye. He didn't want her to see how wounded he felt.

  "We've been through this, Rachel," he said. "I was lucky to make it back in one piece the last time." He gritted his teeth. "I'm not going back. If you knew what it was like, you wouldn't--" He shook his head again. "If you knew what it was like over there, you wouldn't ask me to go back."

  "Okay," Rachel said with a falsely casual tone. It was one of the tones she used that made Adrian particularly uneasy, letting him know that her state of mind was shifting into a familiar, unsettling direction. He preferred her when she was screaming, over the tone she was presently using. "I'll just go back to stripping."

  "Why, Rachel?" Adrian implored, turning to look her squarely in the face. "Why are you doing this? We had such a good weekend together, and it was all so you could butter me up to re-enlist? For what, ten grand more than I make now?" He paused. "Or you just want me gone, overseas? That it?"

  Rachel glared at him for a moment, formulating a response.

  "We're just barely scraping by!" she blurted, throwing her arms out to her sides with the palms up. Adrian watched as her expression changed from exasperation to belittlement. "You're barely clearing fifty-grand a year. How do you expect to send your daughter to college at this rate?"

  "Sister," Adrian scoffed, "you have a twisted view of what 'scraping by' means. Take a trip to a ghetto or a trailer park, see what it's like for some of those folks who live there."

  "Ha," Rachel chirped. "That's where Celia and me'll wind up, if I stay with you."

  Adrian shrugged, rowing back toward the rental shop. "I guess you can go back to stripping, if you're worried, 'cause I'm not going back overseas. There's nothing you can say'll change that."

  Rachel had been a seething, ticking time bomb by the time he rowed them to the dock beside the shop. As Adrian finished wiping his shotgun, he remembered what had happened next.

  Rachel had stepped from the boat into the ankle-deep water, and as she did, something washed up beside her, brushing against her left foot.

  "What the fuck is this?" she snapped, bending to examine the object more closely as it bobbed against her. Adrian's eyes opened wide in horror, realizing that it was half of a large catfish, torn asunder and badly decomposed. Rachel made the realization at precisely the same moment, uttering a series of high-pitched shrieks and running up and down the small strip of beach until she collapsed in a heap, her shrieks dying down to whimpers. Her distress was severe enough to prompt the shop workers to call for an ambulance, and Rachel had spent more than a week in a psychiatric ward as a result of the incident.

  Adrian shook his head, returning his shotgun to its holster and straddling his motorcycle. He surveyed the carnage and decomposition in the road before him. God help me, he thought as he started the bike, I still love that woman, but she would never make it in this world.

  He continued his westward voyage down route 66, stopping for the evening near the point where the Missouri border met Kansas and Oklahoma. He pulled his bike up next to a small metal building within a deserted industrial park. Turning the key in the ignition, he quieted the engine and listened to the silence for a minute before walking away from his motorcycle.

  When he was reasonably sure that he was alone, he made his way to the blue and white sheet metal building, inspecting the single entrance. Finding it locked, he returned to his motorcycle, rummaging through the storage compartment for his wrecking bar and a bright LED flashlight. As he walked back to the steel door of the building, he whistled an old country song he had heard often as a child, the melody drifting into the house from his father's workshop. He pried the door open, still whistling, and entered the structure.

  Switching on the flashlight, he probed the interior of the building thoroughly with the brilliant, slightly bluish beam. The building had only one window, on the far end, though it was small and set high up off the floor. The structure appeared to have been used for storage of maintenance equip
ment and supplies, with cabinets lining the walls of the single, large room. He spotted a hulking steel cabinet with rollers to his left, reaching down to unlock the wheels. He slid the cabinet in front of the broken door, locking the wheels in place. He located another cabinet of the same size, placing it in front of the first for good measure.

  Feeling sufficiently barricaded, he settled onto the floor, reaching into the pocket of his denim jacket for a packet of wasabi-flavored almonds. HIs hand delving into his backpack, he took out his portable, walkie-talkie-sized ham radio. He searched the bands as he leaned against the wall, snacking on the crunchy, spicy nuts.

  He had scanned through more than half of the FM band and found only static when he heard the soft, purring vocals of Billie Holliday. She was another of his father's favorites, one he remembered having heard often as a child. After a few moments, the song ended, and Adrian heard the voice of an older male come on the air.

  "Evening, folks," he said. "You're listening to 100.9, bringing you all the finest oldies but goodies, right here out of Ottawa County. Now, you may ask yourselves, is it a fair contest, seein' as we're the only station left?" He chuckled, and Adrian heard a brief, guzzling sound. "Well, dear listener, I'll let you be the judge of that. And now," he said before pausing for another guzzle of fluid. It resulted in a noticeable slur of his words as he continued, "It's time for a l'il bit of news. And by news, a course, I mean the terrible shit I heard over the radio the past couple days. First order of business--there have been reports of the shitheads as close as Tulsa. Yes, shitheads. Yes,Tulsa. You all know the ones I'm talking about. The same types we've heard about in Sikeston, St. Louis, Little Rock, and elsewhere. If you want to know my take on it, for what it's worth--" He paused to gulp down a mouthful of the unknown liquid, his slurring intensifying as he continued. "I don't take those pompous, shit-slingin' sons of pansies to be part of any organized effort, as some have speculated. No, I think their type is likely to pop up wherever someone with LSS--that's Latent Shithead Syndrome--has managed to survive." He laughed, taking several more mouthfuls. "An' it seems LSS'll continue to touch the lives...of many. But that's just the 'pinion of this old fugger right here. And now--here's Peggy Lee."