———–

The sun set and the temperature started to drop. We marched on, regardless, for a while. Our feet hurt from walking all day, our backs shared the pain lugging the packs and our very skin crawled with sweat and grit. When Edward discussed something with Franklin, they were far enough ahead that I couldn’t hear ‘em. When they turned and gestured to us that we were stopping for the night Sally puffed a gust of relieved air from her cheeks.

“All right, drop the packs and let us get set for the night,” Franklin said, “unroll the fence and get out the wood and wire and staples, will you?”

We did as asked, as quickly as we could, which wasn’t half as fast as they wanted us to I’m sure. Everything got laid out of the ground in front of us. Edward and Franklin walked around the supplies, nodding. Travel and packing hadn’t seemed to have damaged a thing.

“All right,” Edward said, grabbing the fence and starting to wrestle it upright, “get this up.” Sally and Billy moved to help him and together they strung the fence in a big circle around us. Franklin locked the fence in place and pocketed the keys in silence.

Then he took the two by fours and started to staple wire to them, weaving it in and out of the fence as he did. When he was done, and he asked for no help at all doing it, we were locked into a metal and wood barrier. The four by eights were laid down on the ground inside the circle, causing us to dance a bit as we tried to put boards under our feet.

It was getting cold by then and even with the gloves on I wanted to cram my hands into my pockets for warmth. After the bristling heat of the day the wasteland’s night chill burrowed into my bones. In town, at least, there were fires, other people, buildings. Civilization that kept us all warmed, not only in body but spirit. Out here we had ourselves and it was too bad if that wasn’t enough insulation.

Otto and Billy got the tents up, crammed though they were, and we huddled into them for a few. Our leaders stayed outside, watching the darkness. Without planning it, Billy, Otto, Sally and I all huddled in the tents facing the still open flaps, watching our watchers.

“Can we maybe light a fire?” Billy asked hopefully.

“What? Light the ground you sit on, now how does that sound good?” Otto asked in response before Franklin could say anything. Instead of speaking, Cleaver just nodded at Otto and went back to watching the land. Both of them slowly turned, taking in everything around us.

It fell silent. The silence of the waste, of death. In that silence I could hear something though, something muffled and out of place.

“What is that?” I asked no one in particular.

“Rabbit,” Franklin said over his shoulder, but it didn’t sound like no rabbit I had ever heard.

“Brainer rabbit,” Edward corrected.

At that we scurried out of the tents at speed. Suddenly we were all standing around looking out into the darkness. Now, even I could see it. See it and hear it.

The Brainer rabbit was trying to hop with back legs that didn’t work quite right any more. Moonlight cast irregular shadows on it as it came shuffling on. It would try to hop, back legs coiling and then extending, but the muscles weren’t connected right anymore and each hop turned into a horrible shuffling limp that sent the rabbit’s ass into the air and then back down a few inches further on.

One of its front paws was totally missing and the other didn’t look like it was doing so well, so each hop also shoved its body forward, scraping the front of its body along the ground. Fur and flesh was sloughing off in strips and chunks. Still it came on. Otto let fly with a ragged panicked laugh. Sally cuffed him for it, shutting him up quickly.

“Should we shoot it, maybe?” Billy asked before I could.

“You are a smart one,” Franklin said with his back to us, “neither one of us mentioned even having a gun, this whole time.”

“Not that we would travel without one. It’s like going for a trip without stopping to go to the bathroom first, isn’t it? You should always know better than to do that, too,” Edward added, turning to us with a shrug and smirk.

“But, to answer your question, no we should not shoot it. It’s bad enough we’re talking. Let’s not cause more loud noises than necessary.”

We nodded and went back to watching the rabbit shove itself onward, ever closer to us. Yeah, it was just a rabbit. Not a very big one, even. But even a Brainer rabbit could kill us if we were stupid. We all knew that and none of us took its existence lightly.

“Hey Frank?”

“Yeah, Eddie?”

“I did not think they were out this far, yet,” Edward said, stoking his chin and reaching for a cigarette.

“It’s just a rabbit,” his partner pointed out. Franklin then gave Edward a warning look and Franklin put the match he had taken out back in his pocket, leaving the cigarette dangling from his lips unlit.

“I do realize that, Frank. I just mean where there is smoke there is also fire.”

“We would have noticed them by now. Tomorrow.” Both men just nodded at that, but blanched. They had to be talking about Brainers. That we would see them was the whole point of the trip, but the idea that there were Brainers not two days march out of town was sobering.

“The rabbit then?” Edward worked the cigarette in his mouth, rolling it from one corner to the other with his lips.

“Would you? Thanks,” Franklin moved over and dug the keys out of his pocket, unlocking the padlocks until he could yank open enough of a gap in the fence for Edward to slip between.

Edward slid a knife out from under his poncho and crouched low, running straight for the rabbit. The rabbit saw him coming, or sensed him or something, and perked up, lifting its head sluggishly. It bared teeth and waited for the man to get close enough to kill.

Edward didn’t change course of speed, heading right for the rabbit. His knife flashed in the moonlight and the sound of it burying into the rabbit’s head was loud enough to feel like it was happening right next to us. He picked up the Brainer hare by the ear and worked his knife free from its skull. Then he flung it far away from us and walked back toward our camp, stopping to clean his knife on a low sitting bush.

“Smaller things are easy,” Edward told us, “they can move fast but they also get hurt quicker, which slows them down considerably. Don’t think a Brainer will be this easy. Hell I wish they were. But they aren’t, and don’t forget it.

We let Edward back into the camp and then locked the fence again.

“They are not much of a threat, when you can stalk them like that,” Edward said, “it’s when you don’t see them that you have to worry.” Then he sat down and put his back against one of the tent’s support poles and closed his eyes.

We went back into the tents, ourselves, and tried to force ourselves to sleep. It didn’t work and when the sun rose we were, all four of us, already watching its first rays brush the land. I poked my head out of the tent and saw that Edward was up, watching the land, and Franklin was asleep where Edward had been.

I didn’t say anything to him, I just watched the man in profile. Him and his partner were so different. They were both obviously in their 50’s but Franklin looked like he was on the later side of them compared to Edward. Edward was a smaller man, built for speed and sureness, where his partner was made for strength. They fit each other perfectly and I wondered how they had met, originally.

In the spreading daylight I could see a splotch of black tar-like goo where the rabbit had been. I remembered as a little kid hunting rabbits with my father in the woods. They were fast creatures, but more scared of you then you could ever be of them. Hell, you had to rile one to get it to bite, most times. They weren’t considered sporting fare, except for their speed. That thing out there last night hadn’t been remotely close to what I would have called a rabbit.

If whatever happened to Brainers did that to a rabbit what had it done to men? We’d heard stories but I didn’t know many who had seen ‘em, and most of those wouldn’t talk about it in detail. I wondered, yet again, what we were up against and what our chances were.

Breakfast was a solemn affair of dried meat and bread washed down with a few gulps of water. That shook me out of my revery. Brainer rabbits, Brainer men even, loomed in our near future, but running out of food or water would do us in just as fast. Whose side was the planet on, to give us such miserable hunting grounds. Maybe, just maybe, it was somehow as bad for them as it was for us. Maybe the Earth was an impartial third party to the life and death going on along its surface. Maybe.

We packed up the encampment and put it all back onto our shoulders. Otto nudged me as we started to walk and bent his head close to mine.

“Hey, man, if we have to take all these protections to keep alive out here at night, how the hell did those two do it by themselves without any gear? They didn’t have any of this stuff when they came into town, I swear.”

“You think it isn’t needed, that they’re trying to, what, scare us?”

“No, but then, how the fuck did they do it?”

“Ask them.”

“No way, you do it.”

We bantered like that for a few hours, taunting each other in quiet voices, trying to get the other to ask Franklin and Edward about their own survival skills. Neither of us did though. It’d be real easy, right now, to tell you that we didn’t do it because we feared them, or because we felt the answer would make us look soft and incapable of the inhuman feats that Bones and Cleaver seemed to live and breathe.

It wouldn’t be true though. No, we didn’t ask because any answer had the potential to reduce our guides to being simply human again, and without the reassurance that we walked with people who were somehow far more than we could ever be I don’t know if we would have gone on.

Around mid-afternoon we heard a low pitched keening sound. A banshee with laryngitis, maybe. Edward glanced back at us and grinned. Our pace sped up, which felt backwards to me. At the arrival of that sound I wanted to go faster—the other way.

“See, Frank, I told you he’d still be here.”

“Well of course he’s still here,” Franklin said, “where else could he go?”

“Exactly my point.”

“No,” Franklin corrected his partner, “your point was that I had somehow doubted the idea. Which, for the record, I did not.”

“Either way, he’s still here, just like I said.”

On the ground a twitching lump came into sight. The heat waves off the ground made it difficult to figure out what it was supposed to be that twitched, apparently left here by the men now returning to it.

As we got closer we could all make out what the shuddering heap was. A Brainer. It didn’t look like Brainers were supposed to, not by anything I had ever heard. Sure, there was the gray skin and the cold black eyes that shone in the sunlight at a distance. The swollen tongue lolled around like I had heard and the howls and grunts matched up. This Brainer left the garden of the known at that point. He was curled into a fetal position and looked like old leather, cracked and dried. When he tried to move he simply twitched a bit, his skin too stiff and shrunken in to allow for the movement his brain fought for.

Franklin turned to us and nodded. “Yeah, Brainer. The sun doesn’t treat them too well. Which is what we figured. We staked this one out last time as a marker, partly to prove a point. He can’t grab you unless you get real close. So don’t.”

With that little speech our march resumed. We gave the Brainer a wide berth, probably wider than necessary, but why take chances with a thing like that? The going was slower after spotting their twisted marker. Off in the distance we could all see a dark shape slowly moving. Cleaver and Bones started to move around it, positioning us directly behind the column ahead.

———–
High Noon of the Living Dead is copyright Adam P. Knave.