The Afterblight Chronicles: Death Got No Mercy Read online

  Jerry Muldoon closed the bar early - he was coming down with the flu or some such, he said, and besides most of the patrons had staggered out long before - and he died twenty minutes later, while Duke and the hitchhiker were singing in the streets, drunk as lords, not seeing the bodies in the doorways or hunched in parked cars. They were singing Meat Loaf, as far as Cade could remember - I Would Do Anything For Love, with Duke singing the female part in a high, shrill voice. He punctuated every line with a hacking cough until he had to stop, and when the hitchhiker, whose name Cade never learned, leant over and puked his guts in the street, there'd been blood in the vomit. The boy stared at it a second and then slumped face first onto the pavement, the seat of his jeans turning red as he bled out.

  Duke made it home, at least, although he didn't know who the hell the Duchess was when she let him in. He called her by the name of a whore he'd known in Abilene while his guts turned to liquid and pooled on the kitchen floor.

  Cade buried him the next day. Duke had touched a lot of people in his life, but only the Duchess was there to mourn him.

  Everyone else in Muir Beach was dead.

  They'd got a hard dose of what was going round - Cade had heard tell of folks hanging on for maybe a week or so with it, but Cade was kind of glad that wasn't the kind anybody in Muir Beach got.

  Bad times should be over with quick.

  Cade shook his head. He figured there wasn't any point in dwelling on it. He pulled up the truck next to Woody and leaned to open the door.

  Woody nodded slightly and walked around to get in. His eyes shifted uncomfortably to meet Cade's for a moment, and Cade could see the skin beneath them was baggy and black. It was a sign of what kind of nights the man had had recently. Last night he probably hadn't slept at all. Apparently people didn't sleep too well when they were guilty, or at least Cade had been told that once. He had no way of knowing.

  Cade hadn't felt guilty about much of anything in a while.

  Woody muttered a hello as he clambered into the passenger seat. Cade didn't say a word in reply.

  It wasn't a calculated gesture, or one made out of dislike of Woody. Cade found Woody pretty much as bearable as he found anybody else. But Cade wasn't a man who said hellos and goodbyes - it was one of those social conventions he never did see much point in, like giving up your seat or opening a door for someone. Cade didn't see the point in that. Or shaking hands. Shaking hands was the worst.

  If you reached out your hand to someone, you exposed the wrist. It was the easiest damn thing in the world to grab that hand and carve down the wrist with the blade of your knife. Then the other guy's busy trying to stop eight pints of blood hitting the dirt and he's no damn good in a fight, which means you can drive your knife right in the man's eye and kill him stone dead in less than a second. Shaking hands just seemed like a risk that wasn't worth taking.

  That's the way Cade saw it, anyway.

  Woody sat - nervous, fumbling with his hands. Then he reached across to grab hold of the seatbelt and draw it across what remained of his pot belly. He spoke softly, without looking at Cade, fingers fumbling with the seatbelt catch as it rattled in the slot. "I couldn't sleep last night, Cade. I felt terrible. It's my fault, all this."

  Cade shrugged and shook his head.

  "It is, though. I mean it, Cade." He sighed. "She was relying on me. She was relying on me and I let her down. I should have looked in the boxes, or at least... I don't know. It's - it's our most valuable resource. More than canned food. We've got more of that than we know what to do with. I... I should have..." He paused and swallowed, his eyes wet, still fixed on the road ahead, unable to go on. He seemed not to be able to look at Cade.

  Cade didn't say anything.

  "She could die." It was almost choked.

  Cade didn't say anything. Not much to say. Woody wasn't to blame. Some damn fool had marked or packed the crates wrong and there'd been no way of telling. If Woody couldn't see that, there wasn't much point in discussing the subject. He'd have to work through it on his own time.

  They drive through Muir Beach in silence.

  Muir Beach was a small town - small and secluded, with about a hundred and fifty houses in all, and the trailer park just up the mountain. Everybody knew each other for the most part, even if only by sight, and while there was plenty to gossip about, the folks had respected Cade enough not to pry into his business too close, which was the way he liked it. Muir Beach had become his home after the business with Fuel-Air and the Captain and Sergeant A, which was a business Cade didn't like to dwell on too much. He didn't exactly regret anything he'd done, or even anybody he'd killed, but it'd been a hard day to live through and it was better kept in the past.

  Muir Beach had seen better days.

  Woody and Cade had managed to clean the bodies out of the places they went regularly and a couple other places besides, but for all that, the town had a rotting, decomposing stench to it, that got on the clothes and the skin. It was one reason the Duchess had moved out to the trailer park after Duke died. The air up the mountain was a hell of a lot cleaner, at least once they'd burned the few bodies that'd been in the trailers.

  Woody'd stuck around. Cade didn't dwell much on why that might be. Punishing himself, probably. Cade looked over at him as he sat up suddenly, looking confused and pointing out of the passenger side window.

  "The, uh, the gun store's down that way."

  "We don't need them."

  Cade used the 'we' out of courtesy.

  "Um. Are you sure?" Woody finally looked at him, wet eyes wide and uncomprehending. "I mean, you don't know what kind of trouble you're going to run into there. You - you need something to defend yourself."

  Cade shrugged. He never did like guns. They just weren't that much use unless you were on a battlefield, at least in his opinion, and Woody's idea that a gun'd help defend a man was full of holes. If someone saw you had a gun, they'd be more likely to shoot you, not less, and a gun wouldn't stop you getting shot either - not unless you were faster than they were, and that was a gamble, not a guarantee. But Cade's real problem with guns was that guns jammed. Guns broke. Guns misfired. They needed cleaning all the damn time. They could get taken away from you and used on you if you didn't know what the hell you were doing, and most people didn't. Guns were just plain unreliable.

  When it came to killing, Cade liked things to be reliable.

  That's why he carried a bowie knife.

  "Hardware store's got everything we need." he said.

  Woody paused, looking at Cade out of the corner of his eye, but didn't say anything more.

  Instead, he looked out at the empty streets, as if he was wondering what it was going to be like to have to walk them all alone.

  Cade didn't spend too long at the hardware store. He was mostly there for chain.

  He settled on two lengths of it. The first length was of the kind strung between posts to make fences with; every third link was decorated with a diamond-shaped decorating weight. This was chain designed primarily to look pretty and line driveways and lawns, and there wasn't all that much in the way of call for it here, but the hardware store kept it in anyway, for reasons that died with Bart Oakley, who was in charge of ordering and died with his face in his cat's litter tray. The chain was useful, in that it was heavy and strong and the decorative weights on it would crack skulls and gouge out eyes should the need present itself. Cade looped it around his waist like a belt and fixed it in place with a combination padlock, which he closed and locked with one number off 0-0-0-0, in case he needed it quickly.

  The other chain was lighter gauge, a little thicker than you'd find in a door chain. The sign next to the roll said it was the strongest on the market, and Cade took about five feet of it. It was a good length for strangling, and if looped on itself it'd hurt without killing. A good swipe of this would blind a man, which could come in useful. He looped it around his right bicep, putting it in place with another padlock. Then he though, hell with it, and took a
nother length of the same chain for his left. Might as well.

  A man couldn't ever have too much chain, in Cade's opinion.

  Woody looked dubious, and that was good. Cade knew most people would look at it the way Woody did - as a decoration or an affectation. That was very good. That meant that when they took away his knives, they wouldn't take the chains. And they probably would take away his knives, Cade figured, even if he didn't know who 'they' were quite yet.

  He had two knives. The combat knife, the bowie, his favourite and the one he knew best, was strapped to a holster on his belt. He also had a switchblade decorated with a skull, picked out in white ivory, that fit neatly in his pocket, waiting to come out. Both of these were good blades, although the switchblade was kept more for sentimental value, or as close as Cade got to sentimental, anyway. He made sure to keep them both in good working order. Cade figured between them and the chains, he'd have enough to work with.

  The knuckledusters were insurance.

  Woody watched in silence as he loaded up, then moved to get in the passenger seat again. Cade shook his head.

  "I'm going to head out to Frisco from here, Woody."

  Woody swallowed and looked at his feet. Cade figured he could walk from here without any problems, and he waited patiently while Woody searched for the right words.

  "Thanks, Cade. For... for taking this on, I mean. Uh, when do you think you'll be back?"

  Cade shrugged. "No idea. Depends."

  Woody's head lifted. "On what?"

  "Don't know. Might need to kill some people. Depends on how many and if they kill me." He scratched the back of his neck, frowning. He wasn't used to talking as much as this, and it sat wrong.

  Woody nodded and looked at the ground again. Cade didn't feel like prolonging this any longer, and he figured he should cut it off where it lay.

  "See you, Woody. Visit the Duchess regular. She worries."

  With that, Cade figured he'd done about enough big speeches. He stomped on the accelerator and the roar of the engine drowned out Woody's reply.

  Driving out past the far edge of town, towards the woods that lay between home and the big city, Cade felt something. Saying he felt his load lighten wouldn't be true - Cade was a man who didn't really lighten or otherwise - but there was something that lifted, all the same. The routine of two years of sunrises and sunsets.

  Cade had a job to do in San Francisco. He was going to have to do what he did, and it'd been a long time since he'd done it. It might even be fair to say that he missed it, as much as he let himself miss anything or otherwise.

  Cade was going to have to kill people again.

  He might have smiled at that.

  But he wasn't the smiling type.

  Chapter Three

  The Voice in German

  Duke had a story he used to tell. Kind of a story about a story.

  There was a fella once up Russian River way - and Duke always said how dumb they were up Russian River way - but anyway, this fella made his money driving a big rig, an eighteen-wheeler, from a supply depot in Jenner down through the woods to Sausalito. Electrical goods for the most part, there and sometimes back - repairs, Duke figured - and occasionally he'd run a little coke down there from his cousin, or bring a load of reds back to Jenner with him if the Sausalito boys gave him a good deal. Usually his route took him through the Muir Woods area which, by a coincidence, were the same woods Cade was headed through now.

  One time, this fella, the dude from Russian River, saw a body laying in the road in a pool of blood. Just laying right in the road and looking deader than hell. So this fella stopped, got out of his cab and went to check, whereupon the dude laying in the road got himself right up and pulled a Mac-10 out from under his belly, stuck it in the dumb fella's face, jacked his truck and drove off into the sunset with a hundred thousand dollars worth of Japanese cameras and half a kilo of coke under the front seat. They found the truck abandoned in Tiburon with the coke still sitting there, and the fella ended up doing about fifteen in San Quentin. War on drugs and all.

  Turned out the blood on the road was ketchup.

  Now this wasn't the end of Duke's story - it was just the point at which he got in another round of whiskies and maybe took a trip to the head if he had a mind to. The rest of the story went like so: one time Duke was taking the Mustang on a road trip down to Daly and the best way to get there was on the road through the Muir Woods, less you wanted to carry on down the highway and get backed up for your trouble. It's worth mentioning at this point that it'd been ten or eleven years since dumb-fella-whose-name-Duke-forgot got jacked up and busted, and in all that time Duke hadn't ever heard of anyone else having any kind of a similar experience - not in the Muir Woods, anyhow.

  Lo and behold, as Duke would say, he'd driven roughly about a mile into the woods when he saw a body laying in the road. Not looking deader than hell so much this time, but laying on his front with one hand under his belly, like he'd hidden something there. Duke stopped the Mustang and got his shotgun out from under the blanket on the back seat. Then he walked towards the fella in the road, real slow, checking the situation out. There wasn't even any blood on the road this time and Duke figured he'd best shoot first before the guy got his Mac-10 or Uzi out or whatever else he had and sprayed Duke with a few hundred rounds.

  That was when the man vomited up his breakfast all over the road, which was evidently two bottles of bathtub liquor. Damn fool had just passed out in the road.

  "I damn near shot up a drunk 'cause of that dumb Russian River bastard," Duke would say, ordering another round of whiskies. "What the hell was that fella's name anyway?"

  The lesson according to Duke was that if it's a choice between taking the Muir Woods shortcut and going around the highway, you should go around the highway.

  Cade didn't feel like going around the highway.

  So he ran the truck on the road through the woodland, letting the giant redwoods rising up either side pass him by. Cade figured they hadn't much noticed the human folks dying, but they''d take advantage just the same. Gradually, those redwoods were going to spread out, first of all obliterating this little road, then the big highway, then any of the empty towns in their way, until they'd reached a size big enough for them to feel comfortable in. Muir Woods had been hemmed in by the people for too long.

  Cade wasn't what you'd call an environmentalist, on account of how he didn't get too involved in politics on a general principle. He didn't figure he needed any more excuses to kill folks. Life provided enough as it was. Still, he figured it was only right that the great redwoods would take their land back over the generations, for practical reasons if nothing else. People wouldn't be gone forever. Those trees needed to get their numbers back up a little, if only so that men could come and chop them down again when the time came.

  That was about all the thought Cade gave the subject.

  He drove the woodland road in silence.

  There wasn't much point in having the truck's radio on, since there was no stations to pick up anymore. On the few occasions he and Woody had clustered around Bobby Terrill's radio set - Bobby Terril had boasted back before the bad times that he could get any station in the world with his setup, and Woody believed it -- they'd heard nothing but crackle and static, apart from one voice in German, talking about who knew what.

  Woody had been excited at that, and Cade had let him be. It'd lasted about half an hour, and then Woody realised that neither of them knew German and while it was nice to know that some German guy had gotten hold of a radio, they didn't have any way of talking back. Still, Woody took Bobby Terrill's radio set into his home and listened to the German voice sometimes on dark nights, long after Cade had lost interest in who else might be wandering around out there, and after the Duchess had decided it was better not to hope too hard.

  Once, Woody'd turned up at Muldoon's during one of Cade and the Duchess's drinking sessions, all excited. "He was speakin' English today! Kinda, anyhow. See, I couldn'
t figure what he was talking about at first, but it was all thees and thous and it had a kind of rhythm to it and I figured it out pretty quick - it was Shakespeare! The man was reading Shakespeare, can you believe it? Out loud, I mean."

  Cade had shrugged, and the Duchess had smiled maternally. "That's real nice, Woody."

  "Ain't it? I figure he's been reading stuff over the radio to maybe keep himself sane. It's a good idea, y'know? I mean, maybe I could do that. Read books to whoever's listening. If we could broadcast, I mean."

  "That sounds like a real good idea, Woody," slurred the Duchess, lifting up her eighth whisky. "So, you worked out how to do that? I'd like to hear it. You got a good voice. Ain't he got a good voice, Cade?"

  Cade shrugged. Woody shook his head, not losing his smile.

  "Nope. I figure, uh, we need a transmitter or an antennae or something. I dunno, I'd need to look it up, and I don't think we've got the books here. Still, it would be nice, wouldn't it? Sending all that literature out into the world. I got some Ed McBains I could read - you know, like those old detective plays that used to come on the radio. Wouldn't that be nice?"

  The Duchess had laughed, and poured him a tall whisky, and they'd talked into the small hours about the books they liked to read. Turned out the Duchess had a thing for Harlequin Romances and J.P. Donleavy, of all people. Woody liked crime novels, most especially Donald Westlake in his Richard Stark days, the Parker novels.

  Cade didn't read, at least not fiction. Nobody was surprised.

  A few shots of whisky after that, with the Duchess passed out on a couch in back, Cade had asked Woody if he'd ever tried tuning in and finding something from the States. Maybe there was someone reading books in American. Maybe, said Cade, coming to the real point of the matter, the Government had managed to get themselves together again. Maybe they were organising, or broadcasting. Maybe there were some good times coming.