The Lost Castle Read online

  “No,” replied Frank. “Not much. You?”

  Ritter sighed. “Enough to do the job badly. My moms didn’t always pay the ‘lectric bill a lot, so we had to steal some so I could study. Occasionally.”

  Frank snorted.

  “Anyone else know anything?”

  No one did.

  “Well, we’ll just have to figure it all out then. Like I said, today’s a scouting mission. We’ll just go down there and try to understand where it all ties in and then estimate the distance between here and there... and then I guess we’ll just get as many extension cords as we can get our hands on to transfer power from there to here once it goes out.”

  “Electrical tape,” stated Ritter.

  “What?” asked Frank.

  “We’ll need lots of electrical tape and some other

  stuff we can probably get at the Home Depot.”

  “All right, make a list. Me and Ritter... and you.” He pointed at Holiday. “We’ll make the run. The rest of you... I want you to get the catwalk finished and then we’ll start on the eastern wall. We shouldn’t be gone long.”

  Later, when the flatbed truck was creeping along Bake Parkway, headed down toward the farm with Frank driving, Ritter in the passenger seat and Holiday standing up in the bed... Holiday tapped his hand on the roof of the cab three times. Urgently. Suddenly.

  “What?” yelled Frank, annoyed.

  Holiday bent down to the rear window and pointed. “Look at it!”

  “Look at what?” Frank was clearly irritated. And then he saw it too.

  They were at a spot on the road leading down to the coastal plain from the heights of Viejo Verde that afforded a clear view of the wide sprawl that had once been the El Toro Marine Base. For years it had lain fallow, a victim of defense cuts, a promise of state-of-the-art future urban housing. The old hangars and runway being overtaken by crops and weeds. The barracks and military housing looking more ghostly and abandoned with each passing year and each thrown rock that caused yet another window to go unrepaired forever.

  But all that was gone now.

  Now, from this distance, possibly two miles, a massive gleaming box-like structure rose up, its reflective walls seemingly leaning outward. Around it, other new buildings and some sort of fence. Flags even.

  “That’s impossible,” said Frank. “I drove that street the week all this started. On my way to the Trader Joe’s. Everything was still just like it was when I got out in seventy-two, except abandoned.”

  “Government?” asked Holiday.

  “Nah,” said Ritter.

  Frank shot him a look. A look that said, how does a street punk like you know what the government will do?

  How?

  “I mean...” Ritter shrugged and slouched down in his seat. “How could they? Things are a mess and all. Last I heard before I joined up with you, was they were pulling out to Hawaii. Was all over the radio.”

  “Let’s check it out,” urged Holiday. “Maybe they can help us.”

  Frank shook his head and put the big truck in gear. “That’s not the mission today. We told the others what we’re doing. So we’ll do exactly that. We’ve got to stay on mission just in case anything goes wrong. Then they’ll know where to come look for us. We go off on something else, and we could get them in over their heads. Frank turned at the next intersection and headed toward the small side street that led to the farm.

  Which really wasn’t a farm in the classic sense.

  It was a minimum-security jail with crops, dorms, and a large solar-power farm in a field at the back of the facility.

  Behind the fence, the dead wandered the dry grass and buildings. Guards and inmates penned together forever.

  But the solar panel farm was in a wide field before the security fencing.

  It took Ritter less than an hour to figure out that maybe they could splice in, and with enough cable, or extension cords, get some juice up to the Vineyards.

  “But,” he said to Frank, as Frank drew a map on his clipboard. “Do you realize how many extension cords we’re gonna need, boss?”

  Frank didn’t respond. Just kept making notes.

  “Like... lots, home skillet,” continued Ritter. “Many. Mucho. And then they’re extremely vulnerable. All someone’s got to do is cut one and we outta power.”

  “Zombies don’t seem the type to cut cables.”

  Ritter looked off.

  “Yeah, well maybe there’re others. People.”

  “Others?” asked Frank.

  “Yeah, y’know, people who don’t play nice. Survivors. Like us.”

  “And do you know anything about any of these others?”

  Ritter smirked and turned away.

  “Nah, it’s not like that, boss. It’s like...” he paused and rolled his bony shoulders individually. Then he fixed Frank with a gaze that was more teacher than thug life.

  “You know what people never get about zombie movies and horror flicks?”

  Frank says nothing.

  “See... it ain’t about the monster that’s trying to get you. It’s about the monsters that’re with you. Y’know... monsters aren’t the real monsters. We, the survivors, we’re the real monsters sometimes. Understand? And sometimes we’re inside the walls with you.”

  Frank looked up from his clipboard.

  Then, “Yeah, I think read you, kid. So what are you saying?”

  “I’m saying, if we meet some real monsters, not these stupid bio-infected brain dead zekes, and they spend some time figuring out your little castle, well then, they’re gonna know our power supply is vulnerable. Very vulnerable in fact. And they could be desperate.”

  “Then I guess we’ll have to hide it.”

  “Yeah, guess we will, boss,” said Ritter, and looked off at all the solar panels spreading away across the dead dry grass of the place. “Guess we will.”

  Later, as Frank walked back to the truck and Ritter closed up the power junction box they’d broken into, Holiday approached the older man.

  “Frank.”

  Frank kept walking.

  “Frank!”

  Frank stopped at the cab of the truck and put his clipboard inside.

  “Frank, I want to ask you something.”

  Frank stopped. He didn’t say anything, but he was looking directly at Holiday.

  Holiday cleared his throat. He looked at his Docs, remembering everything he’d planned to say as he sat in the garden drinking what ultimately turned out to be four cups of coffee in the cool early morning blue. Going over all his points and arguments and reasons.

  Everything had made sense. Then.

  Now it was different, as the hard angry eyes of someone Holiday respected bored directly into him. Daring him. Challenging Holiday to be anything other than contemptible.

  It was best to say it simply, thought Holiday. So he did.

  “Don’t give up on me.”

  Frank opened his mouth as though he’d been waiting to nail Holiday with a hundred hot reasons why he just wished Holiday would disappear again and never come back. Reasons that, even to Holiday, seemed to have more to do with something, or someone, else, not Holiday.

  “Don’t give up on me,” he repeated again.

  And that unknown known feeling came back to Holiday once more. The feeling from the dream in the night. And... The feeling from the hill when he’d heard the strange word in his head.

  Promachœ.

  And someone calling him “Maggot.”

  Everyone knows you’re wrong. Everyone but you, maggot.

  Frank nodded once. And then once again as though finishing some argument inside his head. Disagreeing, but surrendering, or accepting. Waiting for everything to come apart again just as he knew it would.

  “Okay,” grumbled the older man, and turned to climb in
to the truck.

  It felt to Holiday as though chains had suddenly fallen from around him. As though a great weight had simply been shrugged off. For one free moment he could breathe again, and it felt... wonderful.

  And then he remembered he could not let Frank, or any of them down, ever again.

  Never. Ever. Again.

  And the chains were back.

  It was on the way to the Vineyards, stopping to get gas, when they saw the zombies. A lazy, spasmodically surging river of them, drag-stumbling along Portola Parkway. Headed straight for the Vineyards.

  “Maybe two to three thousand strong,” said Ritter bitterly as they drove away, taking back roads to beat the crowd of corpses to the half-built castle.

  Enter The Man in Black

  The work was done in a place that never should have been and was now nevermore.

  The Man in Black stepped through that other Unfound Door and was gone, leaving the ruin and wake he’d made to be covered by the ceaseless hot Texas wind and dust of that dying other place filled with all its dead.

  Mayhem had been made.

  And a new door opened into a new world dying.

  “Dying to meet someone,” guffawed the Man in Black as he stepped out onto the hot grit-covered street beyond the shimmering mind-numbing portal that seemed a blank space in the universe. One-story bungalows that looked old and hip all at once layered the streets. And when he turned toward the northeast, he saw the nuclear fireball rising higher and higher over distant LA.

  He pulled the dented flask from his hip pocket and smacked his lips together as he drained the battered old thing. A moment later the wind picked up, and he could taste the sweet poison of radiation in it.

  “Just in time,” he said, smiling, and tossed the empty flask off into some manicured topiary.

  He found his children a few streets later.

  They were gathered around the barricaded remains of a pharmacy on Second Street of a city called Belmont Shore. They were mindless and as already dead as they’d been in all the other places and all the other worlds he’d been to and made his fun in. But here they were different, and he tried to remember exactly what twisty little bit he’d used to make this particular difference.

  These weren’t like his Slenderex junkies, his porn star wannabes. These were just, “Plain old dead!” he shrieked, as he waded through their milky-eyed midst unmolested.

  They were all pounding on the main door, a steel roll-down affair. He’d gone to the washed-out concrete alley around back and found the side door.

  He began to sing as he worked.

  “Buffalo gals wontcha come out tonight, come out tonight, come out tonight... and dance by the light of the moon...”

  He whistled at first, then hummed manically as he worked the lock with an old set of picks he always kept in his boot. He shrugged his dusty black cloak off his shoulders and cursed the lock for its stubbornness. When he heard the subtle click that meant everything to him, he began to sing at the top of his lungs, gustily belting out each verse with a deep baritone sure to draw all the nearby dead.

  By ones and twos, in minutes, a whole mob surged into the alley as though tiredly seeking something that must be found. All of them dead. All of them what he called his “Original Recipe” zombies. He beamed broadly and flung open the once-locked door for them.

  A woman, a man, and a small girl peeking out from behind the door seemed wholly shocked to see his broad, beaming, maniacal face. As though they couldn’t understand who’d ever want to jimmy the lock in the last safe place they could conceive of, what with all those horrible mindless killers killing everyone. Former loved ones and co-workers and the recently, and not so recently, deceased ripping and tearing and biting.

  Who would do this to them?

  Who would unlock the door to the last safe place?

  They must’ve thought that maybe the unseen someone jiggling the lock protecting their safe place, jimmying and clicking and unclicking, might be help arrived. Maybe the police? Or the government? Maybe someone who could rescue them by taking them away from here to someplace safer? Impossible as that may seem in these currently apocalyptic days.

  What they saw instead was a large, late middle-aged man dressed all in black. Black wide-brimmed hat. Black dusty coat and fading silk shirt, black also. Old worn hobnail boots. Dirty gray hair escaping wildly. His red face lunatic happy. Smiling like things were only getting better from here on out.

  Except the eyes were cruel.

  So very cruel.

  There had never been love in them.

  Never. Ever.

  And then the open door was filled with zombies flooding in at them as they passed the Man in Black who just laughed and laughed until he had a clear path to the liquor aisle of the barricaded pharmacy.

  Chapter Four

  They didn’t get gas. The flatbed was running on fumes by the time they crawled back through the gate. Dante was ready with the special forklift that moved the cargo container “door” back in behind them as they passed a pale Skully and giant Cory, each watching in their own distant way.

  Frank had muttered and cursed to himself the whole way back. The mood was so tense inside the cab of the flatbed that Ritter hadn’t been Ritter. He’d kept quiet instead.

  Now, with the gate closed and everyone gathering behind it in front of the gated community pool, Frank was pulling out a hand-drawn map from one of his many folders.

  “They’re coming,” said Frank, as he spread the scratch-marked paper on the hot hood of the old truck. “There’s a chance they’ll just pass by, but we’d better be ready regardless.”

  “What’s wrong?” asked Ash, just arriving. “What’s going on?”

  “We’ve got a Walmart Black Friday crowd of zekes comin’ this way, girl,” said Ritter. “Within the hour.”

  Frank seemed peeved by Ash’s interruption. But he continued on, his voice just shy of shouting.

  “We’re sealed in. We can do this. If we’re quiet, they’ll pass us by. All we have to do is stay calm and not make any noise and stay out of sight. They’ll pass along the road above us. If they don’t figure out we’re in here, we’ll be just fine.”

  No one said anything.

  For a moment.

  Frank had taken them this far.

  He’d been the only one with a plan.

  “And what if we’re not?”

  It was Holiday, and instantly he regretted saying anything in light of his recent elevation in status from a nobody to the barest acknowledgement by Frank. But this was too important. There was something not right about the mob they’d seen. They were too...

  ... too determined. Like they had some purpose.

  “I mean...” began Holiday, and pushed away thoughts of being liked by Frank. It was more important to be right and to be safe that to be liked. To air every idea. We’ll only get one shot at this, he heard himself think. So we’ve got to get it right.

  “What if they come straight for us? What if they spot us and try to come through the walls?”

  Something hadn’t felt right about the long line of dead people. They’d almost seemed as though they were being driven. Directed. Aimed straight at them. He’d run from them before. Dodged between them in the night. He’d been out there among them more than the rest. He knew how seemingly haphazard and distracted they could be. Something about this time felt different than all those other times out there.

  Frank leveled his gaze at Holiday. It was a hard glare. But it wasn’t some iron blue-eyed dare to challenge. It said something different... it said, “Clarify” and, “Because our lives depend on it.”

  “If this turns into something, something we have no weapons for...” began Holiday. “Because all we’ve got is a rifle with half a magazine. And some spears we made. That’s it, really.”

  Ash thought of the A
K-74u in the bottom of her olive drab duffel bag back at the aid station. She also thought of Frank’s nickel-plated, almost gleaming silver 45s. But she said nothing.

  “I think we should try and sit tight,” continued Holiday. “No, we don’t want to engage them. But we need to find help, or weapons, while we’re waiting them out. Or, we need someone outside the walls who can draw them away if they start... y’know, clustering.”

  “And that’d be you?” spat Frank.

  Holiday stepped forward and studied the map. One more time.

  “It doesn’t have to be,” he replied. “But I think you’ve made it clear that I’m the most expendable with regard to your plans. Isn’t that right?”

  Frank said nothing.

  “You don’t trust me on the wall if it comes down to it. All right... then I’ll go out now and head downhill to investigate what we saw before we saw the zom... the zombies. Right?”

  “Horde,” stated Ritter flatly. “Let’s call ‘em a horde like in WoW. Y’know... World of Warcraft? The bad guys? A big collection of zekes is a horde.”

  No one either knew, or admitted to knowing, what Ritter was talking about. Maybe Skully gave a slight nod.

  “Well... when this horde gets here... If there’s help out there... I can bring back whoever’s responsible for that building we saw down at the old Marine base. Bring ‘em back here to help get the zombies off the walls, or find a place for us to go next if we have to get out of here.”

  Frank said nothing.

  “And if something happens to me out there, then... then that’s probably for the best, isn’t it Frank?”

  “No, kid. No, it’s not. What happens if you find a whole new mess to deal with? What if you open a can of worms out there, which you have a knack for, I’ll remind everyone. And then we’ve got a lot more on our plate to deal with. We don’t need more right now.”

  Holiday lowered his head.

  He was on the verge of accepting the rebuke. It felt almost natural. As though it was something he’d been doing his whole life. Deferring to King Frank was becoming the norm. As though there simply wasn’t any other way things could ever be.