“Us or them,” the man at the gate had said. “Us or them.”
Keegan turned the ignition off. Mechanically he unloaded the truck, putting the cream and eggs in the refrigerator, sorting through the ammunition, putting the other odds and ends in boxes. When he finished, he looked at the clock. 2:30.
The safe thing to do would be to go to bed. He would need to move his business north. No matter how thorough the men were, they were few and the mutants were many. They wouldn’t all be wiped out. He could build a new route in the downtown area, maybe, where the broken skyscrapers crawled with life.
Or maybe he could stop the men.
Keegan opened one of the storage rooms off the garage, turned on the light, scanned the walls filled with equipment: rifles, shotguns, pistols, M-16s, bandoliers, sniper scopes, night vision goggles, gas masks, trip mines, hand grenades, Kevlar jackets, bazookas and mortars. All trade goods that had come in the last year. Boxes of ammo reached to the ceiling. Some shells had spilled. Their brass casings caught the ceiling light. He couldn’t walk without kicking them.
He picked up an M-16, turned the heavy and unwieldy thing over in his hands, and realized he’d never fired it. Wasn’t even sure if he had clips to load it.
And what good would it do? He wasn’t a soldier. He couldn’t kill. “Us or them,” the voice said. “Us or them.” Keegan could hear it in the room quiet as a whisper.
“Who am I?” he said out loud. He smoothed his hands over his apron, sticky with the day’s work. They still smelled of chocolate.
An hour’s labor refilled the truck. All the ice cream he could fit. Boxes of sugar cones. Keegan checked the clock again. Almost 4:00. They’d be at the gate by now.
Steering by moonlight, he pulled onto the street, heading north. “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” pumped out of the loudspeakers, turned loud. The first mutoid stepped from the door of a house in front of him. Keegan nodded his head, but kept rolling. Soon, another joined him, then a third. The music switched to “Song of Joy.” Keegan turned left onto 19th Street, cruising at walking speed. Doors opened. Mutoids crawled from under cars, out of manholes, from behind walls, big ones, little ones, ones that were so misshapen they were hard to look at, and still Keegan drove on, cutting back and forth through the blocks. He beat time on the steering wheel. How far could the music reach?
Old man Granger had said, “Don’t ever drive too fast. You don’t want to leave the kids behind.” Keegan watched through the mirror. Would they keep following? By now the street was crowded. When he reached University again, he turned north. Behind the music, did he hear a gunshot? How far back were the men?
Twelve blocks to go. Fourteen or fifteen if he wanted a cushion. At this speed he could feel broken glass crunching under the wheels. Slowly he passed moonlit cars’ rusted-out shells, drooping road signs. A three foot tall mutoid with a body and head like a frog supported on a pair of slender legs, trotted alongside the truck, waving a box of rifle shells.
“Keep coming,” Keegan called. They rolled through the 24th Street intersection. “Song of Joy,” finished. In the pause between tunes, the patter of feet sounded like rain. “It’s a Small World” covered the noise. Another sharp crack from behind, then, two more over the music. Definitely gunshots.
Ahead of him, a bus that had been turned on its side years ago nearly blocked the road. He steered the truck to the left to go around, over the sidewalk. A shadow stirred on top. Keegan leaned forward to look through the window.
The black creature he’d seen the day before arched its head high, its stubby front claws clasped across its chest, like a giant otter. Slowly, the truck passed the bus, within a few feet of the creature. It cocked its head to one side, as if listening to the music, and Keegan was struck again by its graceful posture, an almost regal pose with the moon-filled clouds behind it. The mutoid parade moved to the side of the houses, as far away from the beast as they could, but they kept following.
A dim reminder of gunshots rang out again. The creature looked south, then dropped to all fours before flowing off the bus, onto the street, toward Colfax Avenue, toward the men. “Don’t go,” Keegan whispered, but the long, black mutoid vanished into shadows.
Keegan didn’t pull over until he was past 33rd Street. By the time he’d opened the counter, the crowd had gathered around. Their bodies bumped against the truck. Over their heads, Keegan saw more coming.
He wiped the counter clean. A dog-like face peered up at him, the creature’s tiny, pink hands holding a screwdriver for trade. Keegan slung the rag over his shoulder. He grabbed a scoop. “What’ll it be?” he said.
When the ice cream ran out, the sun was two hours into the sky and Keegan’s wrists burned. He blinked against the daylight. The last mutoids wandered off, cones in hand or paw or claw or tentacle. But he hadn’t heard a gunshot for some time. He closed the counter. As he drove home, he turned on the music to the inside. “The More We Get Together.”
Five days straight labor replaced most of the ice cream, but Keegan was low on ingredients. It was time to head south again. He’d hadn’t unloaded the truck since his all-nighter, and it took an hour to sort the ammunition and knick-knacks. He opened an unused storage closet to stow the overflow, mostly .22 short and longs, but also an assortment of larger calibers, several boxes of shotgun shells, and four clips of what he guessed were M-16 rounds. The mutoids were good at scavenging, digging deep into basements and warehouses and abandoned homes.
A dozen men including Laird stood at the Colfax fence as he pulled up. They slid the barrier aside to let him in.
“What’s going on?” Keegan asked.
Laird rested his hand on the door. “The boys were eager to see you.” He frowned. “Seems they were pretty successful on their trip last week, and they’re raring to try it again. Acquired a bit of a blood lust, I figure. Rich there is leading the posse.”
Keegan stiffened as he recognized the man with the short mustache from the week before. “How successful?”
Rich joined Laird at the truck. “Not bad, hairlip. Didn’t get as many of the bastards as we might have liked, but we got a trophy out of it.” He gestured to a tarp on the sidewalk ten feet away. A man next to the shape pulled the tarp back, revealing a broad black head and sleek neck. A chaos of flies descended on the corpse.
“Getting ripe too,” Rich added.
Keegan opened the door, stepped onto the street. The sun leaked around his sunglasses, and his eyes teared instantly. He wiped his cheeks with the side of his hand. Up close the fur really was more purple than black. Even a week dead, the creature’s muscles stood out, as if with a flex of will, it could rise, throw off death’s shroud and rip them apart.
Rich said, “We need to trade for more bullets, though. Our supply is low.”
Keegan touched the creature’s head. Its eye was gone. Just a raw socket remained. He remembered it standing on the bus. Why had it gone toward the men? What drove it south? He smiled. There had been young mutoids then, or at least small ones. Ones he’d never seen before, like children. The truck played “Love is Blue,” and “Music Box Dancer,” and “Fly Me to the Moon” while he handed them ice cream. All of them gave him something. He flicked the trade goods behind him, not even looking to see what he was getting. There were so many. He’d scooped and scooped and scooped.
Rich said, “I’ll bet there’s a lot more of them out there, maybe more big sons of bitches like this one. Took all of us to drag him back this far.”