It was humping her to show its dominance.
It screeched.
The baboons yelped and barked.
The females were busy picking maggots from each other’s hides and eating them.
Emma knew she could not panic.
A lot depended on what she did now.
She cast an eye around. There was the woodstove, the carefully stacked kindling. The axe. Double-bladed, kept very sharp by Gus. You could slit paper with it.
The Mandrill leaped off her.
The baboons growled at him and he snarled and shrieked, driving them off and up the stairs. He sat back on his haunches. There were insects crawling in his fur. He studied the females.
His harem.
And Emma was now one of them.
She gathered her strength. It was now or never. She had to reach that axe and if she couldn’t, that would be it.
The Mandrill was turned away from her.
Now!
Emma dove to her knees, ignoring the pain it brought. She scrambled over to the woodpile. The females made baying sounds. The Mandrill roared and came after her.
Emma grabbed the axe in both hands and swung it with everything she had.
The Mandrill came at her with jaws wide.
The axe came down.
It cleaved the beast’s exposed brain, slicing deep into the cerebral fissure separating the right and left hemispheres. The Mandrill hopped this way and that, clutching at the axe buried in its head. It shook. It convulsed. It vomited out a bubbling black jelly and then it pitched forward, dead once again.
Two of the females ran.
A third turned to fight.
It dove at Emma.
She never had time to get the axe free from the Mandrill. The female knocked her down and then they were fighting and scratching. The female was powerful, but Emma fought with a manic frenzy. She clambered onto the female’s back and did the only thing she could do to win.
She bit into its throat.
Bit deep until blood that was black and tarry filled her mouth.
The female squealed and shook, but finally went down under Emma’s weight.
Covered in baboon blood and drainage, she pulled the axe free and chopped off the female’s head.
Then she sank to her knees and vomited.
*
When she came upstairs, she braced for battle.
Her shirt and pants were blackened with baboon discharges, blood encrusted over her face and neck. Tissue caught in her nails.
The other baboons did not attack.
They kept well away from her.
They grunted and yelped and whined when she passed them.
Emma stank of decay and corpse slime and baboon piss. Maybe they smelled the Mandrill on her and the blood of their own kind.
Outside, there was a rumbling.
Gunfire.
The Army had returned.
Thank God.
Emma moved past the cowering zombie baboons and to the door, still clutching the gore-streaked axe in one hand. She was limping, beaten, scratched, bitten and bruised, but still standing.
You’re not a survivor type and you know it.
You just don’t have what it takes, Emma.
The hell I don’t, she thought as she stepped out onto the porch and saw the dead baboons laying everywhere, several dangling from tree limbs.
She waved the axe to the soldiers in the APC.
One of them put the minigun on her.
“ Wait…” Emma started to say.
The minigun could lay down something like six thousand rounds per minute and in the scant few seconds between when Emma was first hit to when she pitched over dead, some two hundreds chewed through her, pulverizing her.
What hit the ground were fragments.
Emma was gone.
“ Never seen a zombie with an axe before,” the soldier on the minigun said.
Captain McFree laughed. “You see it all in this business, son.”
The APC rolled up the streets as the mop-up continued.
THE MATTAWAN MEAT WAGON
The kid’s name was Blaine. He had heart, but his head was no good. Naive as all hell and Cabot took every opportunity he could find to remind him about that. About how things worked and his place in the larger scheme of things and how he better not fuck up because too much was riding on it.
“I don’t get it, though,” the kid said. “Why me? Why do I pull something like this? Did I piss somebody off? I mean, shit.”
Leaning up outside the warehouse door while the meat was loaded in the back of the truck, Cabot lit a cigarette and sighed. “Everybody gets a shot, kid. It’s nothing personal. But in Hullville we all pull our share. You, me, everyone. I make this trip once a month.”
“Yeah, but in the back of the truck-”
“You don’t worry about what’s in the back of the truck.”
Cabot knew the kid wasn’t liking it, knew he thought maybe it was a little barbaric and maybe more than a little uncivilized. But those words had lost their meaning here in the brave new world. Ever since Biocom started sweeping people into the grave and waking ‘em back up again, things had changed. Morality, ethics, humanity…abstract concepts. The country was a cemetery now.
No, he wasn’t going to beat that drum.
The kid wasn’t real bright, but he wasn’t that stupid. Cabot wasn’t going to remind him what his life had been like before a patrol found him out there in the Deadlands and brought his sorry ass into Hullville. How the town had patched him, smoothed out his rough edges, put food in his belly, a pillow under his head and a roof over him. They did it because they needed him and he needed them and he seemed like an all right kid.
The Council did right by him.
And now, favor for favor, it was time to earn his keep.
Chum came out of the warehouse, his overalls grimy, his eyes looking like open wounds that wanted to bleed. “Okay, Cab. You’re loaded. Take it easy.”
“That’s my way,” Cabot sad, grinding out his cigarette and watching the fog coming in off the lake.
Chum hooked his elbow, said, “I mean it, Cab. Watch the kid. Watch him.”
“Sure.”
Then Chum was gone and Cabot was standing there feeling a little weak in the knee. He cleared his throat of fuzz. “Okay, kid. Let’s get this show on the road.”
Blaine kept trying to swallow but it just wasn’t happening. He froze up and Cabot took him by the arm and led him over to the steel-reinforced cab of the big Freightliner.
“Relax, kid,” he said. “Just pretend you’re delivering beef to the butcher’s. Because that’s exactly what you’re doing.”
*
It was funny, Cabot got to thinking as he drove. Just five years ago the world was full of cities with people in them and now there were just a lot of graveyards and ghost towns out there swarming with the walking dead. A few far-flung burgs like Hullville and Moxton, walled-up medieval towns protecting themselves against a coming siege. Once humanity ruled the Earth, now they hid in ratholes and crossed their fingers, made offerings to the Wormboys to keep them happy.
After the gates were closed behind them, Hullville faded into the fog and there was desolation. Ruined little towns and collapsing farmhouses, overgrown fields and wrecked cars, overturned trucks. Day-glo skull-and-crossbone signs set out, warning the unwary away from the Deadlands. Not much else. Just the fog and the night and whatever waited in it.
“How far?” Blaine wanted to know.
“To the drop-off?” Cabot shrugged. “Twenty miles. We gotta go slow in this soup. Be a real pisser if we crashed into an old wreck and had to hoof it. That would be a real hoot.”
“It got a name? This place?”
“Not anymore. Just a ghost town now.”
Cabot drove on, feeling the Freightliner purring beneath him. She was solid and steady with a 220 Cummins under her hood. Medium-duty, she was small compared to some of the rigs he’d handled, but she’d do in a pinch. The cab had been reinforced with riveted steel plating and the side windows weren’t much more than gunport slits now, the windshield only slightly larger, all of it shatter-resistant and impact-resistant plexiglass. The cab was armored like a tank and with where they were going that was a good thing.