Chapter Text
Ezra Standish hurt. Everywhere. Unable to breathe as deeply as he wished, he settled for breathing at all, and counted himself lucky. He’d had worse than being stoned, certainly, and at the hands of more evil individuals, but this latest attack served only to convince him that he had better find a safe—and preferably sane—place to hole up for the end of the world, and soon.
Chaucer’s gait was becoming a bit more labored, but she shared her man’s fear of the things that hunted the night, and she moved ever forward, slacking off only as the pre-dawn gloom revealed them to be on a blissfully barren plain where they would be able to see the zombies coming. Ezra’s body begged for sleep as well, but the only truly safe place in the world now was a place of habitation. Over the next ridge, maybe.
Or the next.
Or the next.
His injuries were enough to threaten to send him into that terrifying sleep of the damned he’d experienced more than once since Santa Fe—a healing unconsciousness that he went into unwillingly and emerged from whole and recovered. Sometimes he panicked that perhaps he just died, like the zombies, only to be reborn into himself instead of one of them. Whatever it was, he fought it with every fiber of himself now, knowing it was possible that neither he nor Chaucer would live the night if he gave in. Good Lord, he was tired of running, even if, this time, he was running to safety instead of from pursuit.
He hadn’t been surprised that the cowards at Eagle Bend hadn’t chased after him. They hid behind their pathetically inadequate gates and dictated the terms of every man’s entry and didn’t leave. Ever. In that they were no different than most of the towns he’d been through since leaving Santa Fe. They were a little different, however, in their treatment of anyone they thought might carry the disease that Ezra worried was slowly ruining the human race.
Oh, it wouldn’t wipe it out, of course—the war had shown him too well that man could kill man endlessly and there’d always be another soldier to take a dead one’s place. Humans had a knack of recreating themselves so as to perpetuate the madness. But he’d passed through towns where the mere thought that a person might be ill had been enough to doom them to a swift death; where scavengers didn’t always wait until the sickness took a town before they started stealing all the survivors had. People were becoming… well, some of them seemed damn near more inhuman than he was. He coughed again in the growing dawn and sighed.
Death Sickness, they called it around here. In New Orleans, he heard they were now calling it Le sommeil mal —The Evil Sleep—though thank God they hadn’t seen the horror reach that far. Few people were allowed past the border of Texas anymore without serious scrutiny, and Ezra knew he’d never stand up to that. It hardly mattered. There was nothing to go home to anyway, and God knew he didn’t want to see his mother as he was now.
Everyone had a different name for the disease, it seemed, and no one could do anything about it. The people here called the undead a lot of different things too, but they all amounted to zombie in Ezra’s mind.
He was damn lucky not to be one. He supposed he was even luckier that quick reflexes and a quicker horse had saved him from being dispatched by the “law” of Eagle Bend as a zombie, untried and unsubstantiated.
Well, mostly unsubstantiated.
He hacked hard, damning the infernal cough that the sickness had left him with months ago. It had never progressed beyond that in the more than half-year since he’d been bitten—not that it mattered. He still sounded infected and people were getting more and more paranoid by the day out here. He tried to tell himself that the cough wasn’t getting worse, that he was just acclimating to the drugs he used to mask it, but he wasn’t sure he believed that any more than other people believed he wasn’t something one step from feral, waiting to strike.
Quite simply, he was doomed. Either the sickness would kill him or those who were uninfected would. And it never seemed to take long to wear out his welcome and fear for his life.
He’d traveled from city to town after leaving that unpleasantness in Santa Fe, making sure, at first, that he had a healthy supply of stramonium, or at least straight tobacco, to quiet the cough. But both, like everything else, eventually became harder to come by, and by the time he was halfway through the poker game he’d been winning under the watchful eye of Sheriff Staines in the saloon at Eagle Bend, he’d known he was in trouble again, his coughs coming not frequently, but brutal when they did.
“Saunders, you said your name was?”
Staines had a vicious cast to almost everything he said, and Ezra had had a bad feeling about him from the first. Not that he’d had much choice in stopping there, with night nearly upon him and the nearest town four or five hours of hard riding away. He’d been run out of more than one town for the sin of surviving, but he’d always been lucky to have it happen in daylight hours.
He took a sparing draw on one of his few remaining cigars and smiled up at the man as he stood over the table. His poker opponents had wisely pushed their chairs back.
“Indeed it is, Sheriff,” he offered amiably. “How may I be of service to you?” He silently flexed his wrist against his Derringer rig, praying he wouldn’t have to shoot a live person. He hadn’t fired on a human being since killing those men bent on murdering him in Santa Fe and the thought of it made him sick in a way it hadn’t ever before. Like he was helping the zombies cull the herd.
“I have to say, I’m becoming a might concerned,” Staines said. “Right harsh cough you have there.”
“And have had since my childhood,” Ezra pointed out. Which was, surprisingly, the truth. He’d been afflicted with asthmatic fits for much of his life, though they were rare. And of course, this was not one.
“Still,” Staines said quietly, his hand on the butt of his gun. “Reckon maybe you should be moving on.”
Ezra looked out into the darkness. Five hours at least until dawn. And only ten hours since he’d entered the town—that was something of a record, even for him. “I shall, of course, vacate at first light, Sheriff.”
He heard no fewer than four guns cock their hammers back.
“I’m thinking now might be better.”
Ezra didn’t have to affect the fear in his voice. “You wouldn’t honestly turn a man out into the night with those fiends, Sheriff, would you?” Not that this was the first time it had happened, but it was never pleasant, and Ezra had been on the move enough in the last few days to be well and truly exhausted just sitting here.
“Like as you’ll be one of them fiends by sun-up anyway,” said another man, his gun in his hand, pointed at Ezra’s skull. “Or dead before you can turn.”
Ezra rose fluidly, gathering his winnings into the overlarge pack he never let go of. “I suppose I will have to take my chances then.” He turned toward the door, all too aware of the guns at his back.
“Not with my ante, you don’t,” one of the men behind him said boldly.
Ezra resisted letting his chin drop to his chest. Of course. Why waste your rations on a dead man, after all?
In other days, before the world fell into this endless chaos and horror, Ezra would have offered up his winnings for his freedom. But now, in this world, what he carried in his sack was all he had. It wasn’t freedom, it was survival.
He wouldn’t give it up for anything.
“I’m afraid I’ve won these items fair and square, sir,” he said, walking on. “I shall certainly need them if I’m to be cast out like a leper.” He didn’t flinch when a bullet plowed into the wall beside him. Truthfully, he’d been expecting it to plow into his skull. He was pretty sure even he couldn’t survive a shot like that.
“Reckon we’ll have to do a bit more convincing, eh, boys?” Staines said coldly.
Before they could advance on him, Ezra leapt for the door, whistling shrilly for Chaucer, who untied herself from the hitching post in response, racing toward him and slowing down just long enough for her man to jump on her back before making for the town gate.
They had men waiting for him there, of course, and the fall of rocks toward him nearly unseated him, though he supposed he should be glad that they were apparently running low on bullets. He weathered it as best he could, cursing as one hit the side of his head and another his eye, in quick succession. He urged Chaucer to a hard run, silently promising her that, should they survive the night, she would get a proper reward in the next town.
If there was a next town…
And here, as the sun rose and banished the undead for at least a little while, as his exhausted mare stumbled to the top of another ridge and stopped to rest, here was the next town. He looked down into it, his one eye swollen shut from that well-placed stone, sharply painful as he surveyed the place.
It was called Four Corners, and Ezra knew nothing about it, except that it was the next town east from Eagle Bend and that it was, reportedly, fortified.
Which was a delightful understatement.
“Finally,” he murmured, patting Chaucer on the neck and feeling her relax at the sensation. “People who might have an inkling of what they’re doing.”
Four Corners consisted of at least twenty buildings that he could see, plus a large paddock and field, all ringed by a tall, solid plank fence. Most towns had much more ramshackle fortifications, which was probably why most towns were dying at an alarming rate. This organized wall would actually pose an impediment to the zombies getting in.
A covered watchtower had been added to the top of the fence, and Ezra assumed there was one on the other side of town, though he couldn’t see it from here. He could see two men in the tower, though, both with rifles trained on him. A two-story, white clapboard house stood alone outside the gates, within safe sprinting distance of them. Ezra wondered what on earth someone had been thinking, building outside such lovely strong defenses.
He nudged Chaucer gently on her way and reviewed his options, trying to cough carefully so that the sentry wouldn’t take him for a zombie-to-be and shoot him down before he could even approach the town, though the fact that he had a little too much in common with the monsters they’d built that wall against made him feel a bit like he was riding to his death. Not that death was as easy or as clear a process anymore, he thought, his stomach twitching with tension. At least for him.
He shook the notion away and calmed his heart with an effort. He had a surprising amount to trade in his saddlebags, which should get him in the door and to a room where he could sleep the sleep of the damned and recover. From there, he’d have to determine the lay of the land . The town seemed to have people in charge who knew what they were doing, but that didn’t mean they’d be reasonable people in charge. He’d have to go carefully.
The nervousness remained, the gnawing in his gut growing until he finally recognized it for what it was—that hatred he just couldn’t stop. He searched the area around the town and sighed.
“Aw… Hell.”
His view of the valley as he descended revealed something that the sentries would have seen, had they not been focused on him. Zombie horde—perhaps two dozen of them, coming out of the north and headed for the town.
Ezra motioned to the sentries, trying to get them to look to their right. He was too far away to be heard but he shouted a warning anyway. “TO THE NORTH!” One of the men looked up, but the other kept his rifle on Ezra.
“Chaucer, my dear,” he murmured, knowing she couldn’t take a run right now without risking injury, “I’m afraid you’ll have to wait a bit longer for that extra care I promised you.” He nudged her into a slightly faster limp.
The itch to destroy bloomed as he watched the zombies come, and it was all he could do not to draw his rifle and start firing. He’d be dead for sure if he did it, with a gun already trained at his head.
He didn’t know exactly why he’d never run from a fight with the zombies, why they kindled such a fury in him; such a need to protect the world from them. In his life before this, he’d been a singularly selfish man, by his own admission. Money had been his only goal, or so he liked to tell himself. But since the zombies came, he truly had never failed to meet them head on—even when he probably should have.
Now was likely one of those times. His right arm and leg both hurt horribly and his head was still ringing from the stones that had hit too near their mark.
Hell. It wasn’t as if he had a choice.
“Hey the town!” He shouted as he approached the white house. “Hey the town! Undead to the north!” The two men were already turning with their rifles ready, and Ezra finally pulled out his own, sliding off Chaucer’s back and shoving her toward the house. Not that it would be any kind of shelter, but it gave him room to maneuver and put him between them and her.
More rifles appeared at the top of the wall, arrayed along it and firing at the zombies. Standing unsteadily on the one leg that would hold him, Ezra took down two himself before the rest were decimated by the surprisingly coordinated attack. It was something of a shock to feel the urge to kill receding as quickly as it had come and it left him shaky.
“Whoooeee! Damn that was fun!” yelled a jovial voice as the firefight ended. Ezra looked up, his energy flagging now the danger had passed, and saw a bright-faced man of about forty with a broad mustache, smiling at him from the guard tower. “No one’s at home there! Why don’t you and your horse come on in? We want to thank you for your help.”
Ezra waved his left arm, his right screaming at the very thought of the motion, and gathered Chaucer’s reins, using her as a crutch and leading her slowly to the gate as it opened, spilling out a handful of men. He stopped and surveyed them nervously.
They were led by a young man no more than twenty, wearing a three-piece suit and a bowler hat, strangely enough. A tall man of his own age with spiky blond hair, a portly dark-haired man in his fifties, and two young black boys rounded out the group.
“Thanks for the help, mister,” the bowler-hatted youth said. “We’ll take care of it from here.”
Ezra wasn’t sure what his response should be. Take care of what?
“Don’t mind them,” the mustached man said, now standing at the gate with that friendly smile still on his face, though beneath it seemed to run a wariness akin to Ezra’s own. “Can’t let the damn bodies stink up the place, can we?”
“Of course not,” Ezra agreed. A large poster, nailed to the gate, captured his attention.
BY TOWN DECREE
ALL VISITORS AND THEIR HORSES
WILL SUBMIT TO INSPECTION
BEFORE BEING ALLOWED TO
ENTER THE TOWN PROPER.
FAILURE TO SUBMIT WILL
RESULT IN IMMEDIATE EXPULSION.
WOMEN WILL NOT BE ASKED TO SUBMIT TO INSPECTION BY MEN.
CHILDREN LIKEWISE
WELCOME TO
FOUR CORNERS
“Quite a welcome letter you have there,” Ezra murmured, stumbling badly as he stepped forward, his head spinning. Lord, this was it, wasn’t it? They’d see him for what he was and kill him right here. “My horse,” he said, clearing his throat to speak a little louder. “She needs care.”
“Tiny!” the tall man bellowed. “We got a—”
“I am not blind or deaf, Buck,” came the irritated, heavily accented response. A huge blond man stepped forward and gently took Chaucer’s reins. “I will look her over,” he promised, noting her labored step and breathing. “Is she…? She was not—”
“I am not a monster, to subject a horse to such pain, sir,” Ezra cut him off, struggling to remain upright now that Chaucer’s support had been removed. Exhaustion threatened to overcome the fear of being found out. “Chaucer is as safe as I can keep her. But we have been travelling since just past midnight, and we met with misfortune before that.”
“Yeah, I can see,” the mustached man—Buck, Tiny had called him—said, gently taking Ezra’s left arm and holding him up. “Once we're done here, we'll get you on up to Nathan’s clinic.”
Ezra very much doubted that, but he let Buck lead him inside, unable to do much of anything else, now his body was insisting on leaning on the taller man. “Buck Wilmington,” he introduced himself. “Thanks for helping out.”
“There hardly seemed to be a choice,” Ezra responded. He suppressed a cough and tried not to limp too badly. “Ezra P. Standish, at your service.” At least they'd get his real name on the tombstone.
A striking blond man in black stood just inside the gate, and Buck walked toward him, his step low to match Ezra’s pronounced limp. Clearly some sort of town leader, the man pegged Ezra with a penetrating glare from stormy green eyes. Lord, he is lovely, Ezra thought, his mind dizzy from pain and exhaustion. Probably shoot me by the end of the day, but lovely.
“Thanks for the help.” The man stuck out a hand. “Chris Larabee.”
Ezra almost laughed. Of course he was. “Ezra Standish,” he replied, gripping the hand awkwardly with his left. His right failed to open and close, and Ezra wondered how long that had been going on. “I suppose it shouldn’t surprise me that one of the fastest guns in the territory should be holed up in one of the best-secured towns.”
“You think so?” There was a wicked humor in that deadly smile, and Ezra calmed himself with an effort. Beautiful or not, the man probably would be shooting him soon. They’d throw him on the heap of zombies, likely. Burn him, too. His head had taken to throbbing again, along with the rest of him, and he wondered how much sense his thoughts were actually making.
“I hazard you don’t get many zombies who actually make it into town,” he commented, delaying the inevitable. “Good Lord, if Eagle Bend had half as secure a perimeter as you have, they’d still be the largest town in the area.”
Buck snorted. “Staines is an idiot and the Mayor is probably still crying in his room like a baby.” He looked Ezra up and down again as he limped along. “Speaking of, you came from the west—Staines being his usual welcoming self?” He sounded a little like he wouldn’t mind delivering a beating to the good sheriff, and Ezra wondered idly where the animosity came from.
He shook his head ruefully, then cursed at the dizziness. “The good sheriff has a way of convincing people it’s time to move on.”
Buck clapped him on the shoulder and Ezra forced himself to remain upright and not to cough.
“Like I said, we’ll get you to Nathan as soon as you’re checked over,” he promised gently. “He’ll fix you right up.”
Ezra stumbled again, and it wasn’t because of his unstable leg. “‘Checked over?’” he asked. “Inspected, you mean? Your poster isn’t very explanatory.”
“Head to toe,” a great bear of a man said, smiling a welcome. Ezra smiled back, but tightly. “Anyone who comes in from the outside—even one of our own—gets checked for bites they either didn’t notice in the thick of a fight, or choose not to share knowledge of.” There was a significance to the man’s stare suddenly, that Ezra did not like.
“That’s… quite ingenious,” he remarked with a grin. Yes, indeed. He was doomed.
“Sure is,” Buck agreed. “Ezra Standish, meet Josiah Sanchez.” Buck threw an arm over the man’s shoulder and topped him by a good three inches. Ezra had thought Sanchez was taller. His presence certainly seemed to be. “Preacher, doomsayer, and damn good with a rifle from a height.”
“Pleasure to meet a man so willing to pitch in,” Sanchez said.
“It’s a sordid pasttime, but necessary,” Ezra replied. He really was going to collapse soon, he feared. Though he supposed he didn’t have to worry about a place to hole up here. They’d kill him in his sleep if they were kind. “My horse?”
An eager blond boy, all of nine years old, came forward from where he’d been watching the new arrival. “She’ll be okay. Mr. Tiny said she’s got a calf strain and some bad bruises, but JD’ll take care of her.”
“Thank you, Billy,” Sanchez interrupted, gesturing Ezra to a set of converted horse stalls right inside the gate. “We’d best commence with the pleasantries before you pass out on us.”
Ezra’s palms began to sweat.
“Mr. Standish?” Sanchez stood waiting, suspicious of the delay. Larabee and his friend Buck looked on without expression.
Ezra sighed, trying to think of a way out of this. Not the stripping—there was clearly no way out of that—but a way to explain himself. It had always been a stroke of luck that even wary towns had never asked to see what lay beneath his shirt and vest. It was just too much to hope for that these people would have run into someone like him before—after all, he hadn’t.
“Certainly, Mr. Sanchez,” he said, limping even more badly now, as if his body itself wanted to delay the inevitable. Sanchez helped him to the barrel beside the door and gestured to his firearms. Ezra reluctantly shed all three of them, figuring he wouldn’t need them anymore, once Sanchez got a good look. “I must say, this is one of the more elaborate rituals to have sprung up since the dead began rising.”
“Not exactly a genteel welcome, but it keeps the town safe.” Sanchez led him into the stall and closed the door. “Gonna have to ask you to take everything off.”
Ezra thought he might be sick right there. There was of course, a chance—however slim—that this man wouldn’t recognize the mark for what it was. Ezra took his time with jacket and vest and boots and trousers, hissing and at one point stifling a scream as he bent down. His right leg was swollen and black with bruising at mid-shin and his right arm didn’t look much better. The change in elevation as he stood straight again nearly dropped him right there.
“Take it easy now,” Sanchez said, compassion thick in his tone. “Don’t want you hurting yourself any more than you already are.”
Oh no, wouldn’t want that, Ezra thought sarcastically. I should leave a good-looking corpse. “Have you ever found a person who’d been bitten?” he asked, trying to sound morbidly curious.
Sanchez shook his head and Ezra started to relax—for half a second. “More than one, sadly.”
Doomed.
The big man shook his head again, and Ezra couldn’t interpret the sigh he gave. “I’ve come upon whole wagons full of people who knew they’d been bitten and couldn’t live with what they might become.”
Ezra gritted his teeth at that. He’d heard it before and God, he hated being made to feel like a coward, even unknowingly. “Surely some survive?” he ground out, taking a deep breath as he stripped out of his drawers and was left with only his rather sweaty and over-worn silk shirt. He began to unbutton, facing Sanchez.
He wouldn’t be shot in the back.
“You would think,” Sanchez said slowly, clearly suspicious now. He straightened up, hand on the butt of his pistol, waiting for something.
Ezra wished he had a gun. Even naked, he could shoot his way out. He finished unbuttoning his shirt, pulled it open, and waited for the horror to wash over Sanchez’s face.
He didn’t bother to look down at himself. The scar was as livid and rough as it always was, he was sure. When everything else healed more quickly and without blemish, this damn thing stayed, like a scarlet letter proclaiming his inhumanity, his inability to do “the right thing.” Though how committing suicide could ever be seen as right, he wasn’t sure.
And now, he didn’t think it would change anything, either.
“My God.”
The whisper wasn’t as horrified as Ezra expected, and he focused on Sanchez’s curious eyes.
“How long ago were you bitten?”
That was not at all the question Ezra expected to be asked, and he answered reflexively. “Seven months.”
“Get your clothes on,” Sanchez said, a bit of urgency in his voice. “Leave the shirt unbuttoned, but cover it up.” There was secrecy there too, which Ezra could probably have sussed out the reason for if he wasn’t two steps from unconsciousness.
“Buck?” Josiah called casually out the window. “How’s Nathan coming along? This boy could use him.”
“I swear to you,” Ezra said quietly, trying to struggle back into his trousers, his right leg all but useless for the moment. “I swear, it isn’t what you think.” His head was swimming and he could feel himself shake as last night’s flight and this morning’s fight began to catch up to him in earnest.
Buck Wilmington appeared just outside the stall. “Nathan’s on his way. He finally pass out on—damn.” The last word was whispered, as he stared at Ezra’s chest, the bite fully visible where he hadn’t covered himself quite yet. Standish felt obscenely like a curiosity in a traveling exhibit.
“May I sit?” he asked, trying for a meek tone. In reality, it was hardly a stretch. He cursed himself for ever stopping here, cursed the coughing fit that he couldn’t hold off any longer. Damn it, he thought as the hacking took him and doubled him over, he was going to pass out and be left defenseless before men who had no reason whatsoever to trust him.
“Get him sat down before he passes out.”
Chris Larabee’s sharp tone had Ezra looking up. Larabee, too, peered over the stall’s door. But he seemed less to be gawking and more… assessing. Though a threat or something else, Ezra couldn’t say.
Sweet Jesus, all he wanted was to sleep! He nodded gratefully as Sanchez pushed him back to sit on the bench built into the wall. The cough eased off finally, and Ezra closed his eyes, trying desperately to stay awake.
“What happened?”
A voice out of Louisiana came to him and Ezra almost smiled. Perhaps this man understood the zombies better. Maybe there was a chance he wouldn’t be killed outright.
He felt someone slide his open shirt to the side—to show off the bite, no doubt. “He’s got a bite, Nathan,” Sanchez said, riding over the doctor’s curse at the news. “Says he was bit seven months ago.”
The way he said it made Ezra want to open his eyes, but the lethargy he so despised was catching hold of him now. He fought it with all he had, but he was just too worn down.
And the doctor didn’t seem surprised or even troubled by the information. “What about all this bruising? And that eye—what the hell happened to him?” Gentle, callused, huge hands pushed at him around the scar and then ghosted over his aching ribs before pushing on his right leg. That opened his eye. His vision still blurry, he shoved the man away, hissing as his arm protested. “Get away from me!” He wouldn’t be manhandled like this, especially when it only made his leg hurt worse.
His one good eye peered more closely at the man who now held up his hands in surrender. “Good lord,” he blurted, too exhausted for tact. “Your doctor is a negro?”
“Better let that negro see to you, son,” Wilmington told him, an edge of menace and anger to his tone. “Pretty much the only one who can fix you up around here.”
Ezra’s eyes fell closed again. His body had simply had enough. “I don’t need his help,” he refuted, slipping sideways in his mind. If he woke, he woke, and he would be healed completely, as usual. He was just too tired to fight it anymore. “Just shoot me and get it over with.”
And then the sleep of the damned dragged him down and he was certain that he wouldn’t wake again, but couldn’t decide whether that was good or bad.
**********
to be continued...