Cattle (The Fearlanders) Read online

  Cattle

  By

  Joseph Duncan

  Table of Contents

  1. Illinois

  2. Night

  3. Morning

  4. Road

  5. House

  6. Snow

  7. Day

  8. Chompers

  9. Cleanup

  10. Caught

  11. Muriel

  12. Manfried

  13. Longworths

  14. Roosters

  15. Dinner

  16. Roo

  17. Bedtime

  18. Routine

  19. Yard

  20. Discord

  21. Punishment

  22. Humanity

  23. Fever

  24. Kid

  25. Advice

  26. Ghost

  27. Plan

  28. Cooley

  29. Keys

  30. Dark

  31. Herd

  32. Aftermath

  33. Ford

  34. America

  35. Home

  Copyright Page

  Copyright © 2014 by Joseph Duncan

  Cover image by Zdzislaw Beksinski (1929-2005)

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  First E-book Edition, 2014

  Published by Cobra E-books

  Metropolis, IL 62960

  E-mail: [email protected]

  Also By Joseph Duncan

  The Oldest Living Vampire Tells All

  The Oldest Living Vampire on the Prowl

  The Oldest Living Vampire In Love

  The Oldest Living Vampire Betrayed

  Menace of Club Mephistopheles

  House of Dead Trees

  Hole: A Ghost Story

  Indian Summer

  Frankenstonia

  Apollonius

  Mort

  For the real Harold…

  It is ten years after the global apocalypse. The Phage, the zombie virus that brought the world to its knees, has mutated, restoring the minds of its undead victims. Their personalities. Their memories. Even their dreams. The hungry dead are no longer the mindless monsters that drove mankind to the brink of extinction. They possess once again the human cunning that once made man the masters of the world.

  But they still have their relentless hunger for human flesh…

  1. Illinois

  “Come on, Harold! Try to keep up!” Brent Scarborough gasped, racing through the forest as fast as he could go. His lungs were burning, his heart banging like a bongo in his chest, but he didn’t dare slow his pace, not even for his friend.

  They’d been running together for two years now, Harold and Brent. Harold Killian was like a brother to him—closer than a brother, to be honest—but the Reapers were hot on their tail, and Brent was determined to get away, to survive and make it Home, where they could live among their own kind and have some kind of normal life again, without worrying about deadheads eating them alive their every waking moment.

  “Just go!” Harold cried, limping several yards behind him. “Don’t you wait… on me, Brent Scarborough!”

  Harold had twisted his ankle pretty badly when they fled into the wilderness. They were foraging for food in an old service station when a meat patrol came upon them unexpectedly—caught them dead to rights as they were coming out of the crumbling Pack ’N’ Tuck—and they had rabbited into the woods. It was autumn, probably late October or November. The forest floor was thickly carpeted with leaves, and Harold had stepped into a chuckhole, nearly breaking his ankle.

  They would have been fine if their pursuers were chompers. Chompers were zombies that hadn’t recovered their minds. Brent and Harold were good at eluding the dumb ones. But it was a meat patrol, a group of the smart ones, and the zombies had squealed to a stop and given chase. It was the Reapers’ job to find and catch Homerunners. The deadheads were well trained, and they were armed, and they never gave up.

  Brent could hear the Reapers calling out to one another behind them, organizing their pursuit. Their bone chilling grunts and snarls echoed in the distance like the cries of jungle beasts. They were closing in, and Brent felt almost faint with terror.

  Terror for himself.

  Terror for his friend.

  This is it, he thought. We’re going to die!

  And we were almost Home!

  Home was a city populated and controlled by living men and women. Once it had been a place called Peoria, a city of some 120,000 souls in Central Illinois, but it was Home now. The people of Home had ensured their survival by rigging their fortress city with nukes. Any aggressive move by the Zombie Nations, and they would blow themselves up, vaporizing every man, woman and child in the city. There were so few living human beings now the Resurrects didn’t dare move against them, and sometimes they even protected the city of the living from herds of mindless chompers. In exchange, the people of Home gave the zombies their deceased. Zombies couldn’t starve to death—they were already dead—but they were always hungry. It was a suicide standoff, but it worked, and the zombies were content to pick off any Homerunners who tried to make it to the Shangri-La of the Living.

  A shot rang out, its report rolling through the forest, and Brent cried out. He couldn’t help himself. The yelp had jumped, like a startled frog, out of his mouth before he could snatch it back. He tried to increase his speed, but his strength was rapidly flagging. He had once played running back for his high school football team, even played some college ball before the Phage ended everything, but those days were like the fairy tales now-- once upon a time, and in a land far, far away. He was much older now, and he couldn’t run all day without stopping.

  But his pursuers could.

  Harold grunted loudly and fell, the dry forest duff crunching under his body as he hit the ground and rolled. For a second, Brent thought his friend had been shot, and he turned back to help him, zombies or no zombies.

  “Go, go!” Harold panted, struggling to get back to his feet. The barrel-chested older man was sweaty and flushed, his bright orange hair a frizzy mane around his face. There was a long, bloody scratch on his cheek where a broken branch had gouged him. As Brent wavered between obeying and helping his companion, Harold yanked off his backpack and threw it to the younger man. The bag held all of his worldly possessions: supplies, a few keepsakes, and the little bit of food they’d found in the abandoned service station. Some old canned vegetables. A few packs of Ramen noodles.

  “Harold, no,” Brent wheezed, looking down at the backpack like it was rigged to explode.

  “If you don’t go they’re gonna catch us both today,” Harold said. He tested his ankle and groaned at the pain. “Go on. I’ll catch up if I can get away from them. Run! Run Home, Brent! Don’t throw your life away on me!”

  Another shot rang out, and Harold Killian’s eyes bulged. His body stiffened, and then he dropped to his knees.

  “Harold!” Brent howled.

  Harold tried to talk, but his last few words came out a froth of blood and spit. He toppled forward onto his face and didn’t move. A moist red stain expanded around a nickel-sized hole in the back of his denim jacket.

  Brent squeezed his hands into fists, screaming through his clenched teeth. He spotted one of the Reapers then, trudging up over the rise, a rifle in its decayed hands. It was dressed in a camo top and olive pants. Brent ducked out of sight, snatched up his friend’s backpack, and started running.

  They wouldn’t follow him any further, he knew. They were like sharks. They wouldn’t be able to resist the smell of his friend’s blood. They would tear the dea
d man apart, eat until their bellies couldn’t hold anymore, then take the remains to the nearest town and put it on the meat market.

  Harold was a big man. He’d probably fetch a handsome price, even if they ate half of him here in the forest.

  Brent ran.

  He ran for his life.

  2. Night

  There was one thing more frightening than death, more horrible than the zombies who had inherited the earth, and that was being alone.

  Brent was 23 years old when the zombie apocalypse went down, a junior studying at Western Tennessee University, still living at home with his parents to save money on tuition and engaged to a bright, funny, sexy little bookworm named Naomi Richardson. Naomi was a sardonic feminist, wore crazy horn rim glasses to damper her rather stunning beauty, and only read novels written by dead authors. Her only nod to conventionality was dating Brent. That, and a lifelong addiction to The Days of Our Lives, of which she was both proud and ashamed. The soap because it was so ordinary, and him because there was really nothing special about him apart from his looks. Your typical college jock, that was Brent Scarborough, studying business and partying on a football scholarship. His mother loved Naomi and couldn’t wait for them to marry and start having beautiful babies for her to spoil. His dad thought Naomi was strange and that Brent should sew his wild oats some more before settling down, though he would never say something like that to his wife or future daughter-in-law. He only said it to Brent, and only after he’d had a few too many drinks.

  But that was before the Phage. That was before people started getting sick and eating each other. That was before his mother, father, and fiancé died, and he was cast adrift on the churning stormseas of a global catastrophe.

  Brent had survived because he was strong and fast and lucky. He might not have been the sharpest knife in the silverware drawer, but he found that he possessed a keen instinct for self-preservation. It had kept him alive when so many others were dying, kept him going when other, smarter people gave up.

  He wanted to live, and that determination to survive drove him on when any other rational being would curl up into a fetal position and surrender.

  But he hated being alone.

  He was crouched in the corner of some sort of derelict pumping station now. It was a squat little shed with a tin roof and cinderblock walls. In the center of the bare concrete floor was a confusion of pipes and gauges. The way the pipes folded around the big central column reminded him of Kali, the Hindu goddess of death. He hadn’t the foggiest idea what the station was for, but he was glad that he had stumbled across it. He had almost wept with joy when the door gave way under his first kick. It would be safer, and a whole lot warmer, sheltering inside the shed than it would have been sleeping out in the open.

  “What do you say, Harold old buddy old pal?” Brent murmured, huddled under his jacket and threadbare blanket.

  “It’s a lot better than sleeping outside,” Ghost-Harold replied.

  Teeth chattering, Brent nodded. “Yes, indeed!”

  He knew there weren’t any ghosts in the shed with him. He wasn’t that crazy, but he was still too juiced up on adrenaline to sleep, and it was a way to keep his brain occupied until exhaustion finally claimed his weary soul. It was that or replay the day’s events in his mind, and he certainly didn’t want to do that.

  “Remember how we met, Harold?” Brent said, grinning a little in the dark.

  “Oh, yeah,” Ghost-Harold said with a chuckle. “Sorry about that.”

  “It was about two years ago,” Brent said. “I was on my own at the time. The girl I was traveling with just before you, gal named Angie Wright, had just died. She scratched her hand trying to climb over a barbed wire fence and got some kind of infection. It was… pretty bad.”

  “You guys do it?” Ghost-Harold said.

  “I told you already!” Brent said. “No, she was a lesbian.”

  “Oh, yeah, right. I forget.”

  “Anyway, I was on my own at the time, walking down some back road in Rutherford County. Came across a little creek. Climbed down the bank for a drink. It was a hot summer afternoon. Broiling hot. So I decided to cool off, do a little skinny-dipping, wash off the road dust, you know? I was splashing around buck-naked when you came out of the woods with your rifle. ‘Put your hands where I can see ‘em!’ you yelled, just like a bandit in some old TV western. Oh, man! I about messed myself! And then you told me to turn around, and I thought for sure you were going to shoot me in the back. Or cornhole me. Or both!”

  “Naw, man, I don’t swing that way!” Ghost-Harold guffawed. “I just wanted to rob ya!”

  “You did, too. Took everything I had. Even my clothes.”

  “Yeah, but you followed me. You followed me the rest of the day, naked as a baby, until I felt sorry for you and gave your stuff back.”

  “Yeah,” Brent said, smiling at the remembrance. The smile faded and he sniffed. “We got off to a rough start, but we ended up making a pretty good team.”

  “We sure did, kiddo,” Ghost-Harold said.

  “Always stayed two steps ahead of the meat patrols. Always… Ah, hell, man, why’d you have to go and die today? I hate being by myself!”

  “Sorry, kiddo,” Ghost-Harold said. “I couldn’t help it.”

  “I know.”

  “You just keep running, little buddy. You’ll make it Home, and then you can find a nice live girl to marry and have a whole passel of fat little live babies.”

  Brent snorted. “Is that all you think about?”

  “What? Making babies?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You know something better to do? We gotta repopulate the world, kiddo.”

  Brent sighed. “I think our time has came and went.”

  “You mean me and you?”

  “No… I mean humanity.”

  “Oh… Well, that’s fucking grim, kid. Why you gotta say stuff like that? It’s depressing.”

  Brent laughed. He pulled his backpack around and laid his head on it. He wished he had some light to see by. He hated being in the dark almost as much as he hated being alone. But he couldn’t make a fire, and it was too cold outside to leave the door of the pumping station open, even just a crack.

  “I don’t think I’ll ever have kids,” Brent said. “I used to want kids, when Naomi and I were engaged, but not now. Not anymore.”

  He imagined he heard a scraping sound as Ghost-Harold lay down on the other side of the pumping station.

  “They’ll just get eaten,” Brent said.

  Ghost-Harold didn’t speak, but only because he wasn’t really there, and Brent was finally falling asleep.

  3. Morning

  It was the dim gleam of sunshine around the edges of the door that woke him. That, and a throbbing bladder.

  Brent swam up from terrible dreams, dreams of blood and wormy monsters, and sat up. He looked around the dingy interior of the pump station, disoriented and a little bit afraid, before remembering where he was, how he had gotten there, and that his best friend Harold had gotten himself dead.

  Poor Harold was probably just bones by now, Brent thought. Just a little pile of gnawed on bones.

  “Stop it,” he said very firmly to himself, and he clambered to his feet. His body was stiff and achy from sleeping on the cold concrete floor all night, but it was better than being dead.

  Maybe.

  He put his jacket on, rolled up his blanket and stuffed it into his backpack, then shuffled to the door.

  He put his ear to the crack, listening to the cold autumn wind snuffle around the narrow gap like a hound. After a moment or two of listening, he opened the door a crack and peeked out with one eye. It was still early, the sun barely clear of the horizon. The area immediately visible to him was free of any deadheads, dumb or otherwise. It was just him, a field of waist high wildgrass gone to seed and the gently stirring forest beyond that. Birds were twittering, the sky was deep and blue, and he had to piss like a ruptured racehorse.

 
His grandfather used to say that.

  Gramps Scarborough had died a year before the zombie apocalypse. He had lived a long full life, loved many women, had a passel of young’uns, and passed in his sleep of a myocardial infarction at the hoary old age of 82. He didn’t have to see his family and friends get sick, turn into monsters and start killing and eating everyone in sight. He never sat in front of the TV and watched in stunned disbelief as the pope got dragged from his popemobile and torn apart by a mob of mindless cannibals. He would never have to stab his own parents in the brains with an icepick to make sure their dead bodies didn’t reanimate, or sit with a comatose fiancé after her insulin ran out and her non-functioning pancreas slowly poisoned her with her own blood sugar.

  Lucky guy, Gramps Scarborough.

  Gritting his teeth at the cold, Brent unzipped, opened the door just a little wider and eased his shrunken pecker through the gap. Puffs of steam curled up from the arc of piss that pattered on the frosty ground outside. Brent emptied his bladder, then tucked El Toro away and retreated into the pump station.

  “We’ll never make it Home before the weather turns,” Brent said as he returned to the far corner of the shed. “We need to find some place to hole up for the winter. Someplace warm and safe, with plenty of fresh water and food.”

  “While you’re at it, why don’tcha wish for a tropical island with lots of bare breasted young native girls?” Harold said. “We can lay on the beach all day and drink from coconut shells while they fan us with great big palm leaves.”

  Brent laughed. “I wouldn’t turn my nose up at that!”

  “I imagine not!”

  He eased down and pulled Harold’s backpack closer. There was just enough light coming through the seams of the door to see by. He unzipped the backpack, fingers clumsy with the cold, and started dragging out Harold’s things. The food he set carefully to one side. Lighters, eating utensils, can opener, bowie knife… he put those aside, too. He decided to keep Harold’s pistol, even though bullets were as rare as four leaf clovers now. He pulled out a ragged issue of Hustler and set it aside. It was bloated with moisture and some of the pages were stuck together, but the paper could be used to start fires, or for T.P.. There was a yellowed copy of Fifty Shades of Gray and another book called The Road. He kept those for the same reason he kept the Hustler. He had never been much of a reader.