The pickup truck coasts on the dry gravel shoulder of the road as the engine snorts the last fumes of gasoline, rolling to a sullen stop just before the Dell City welcome sign. The cab reeks of vomit and the radio is off— I can’t listen to any more desperate cries for help.
It’s still quiet here, thank God.
I left El Paso as soon as I was well enough to stumble out of the hotel and into my rig. Three days of the worst flu I’d ever had, retching and worse in the dark room the last day after the power cut out— didn’t dare call the front desk out of shame and I was still well-supplied for a weekend of debauchery in the city so I never inquired about the outage.
The gunfire started the second night while I shivered and sweat through my blanket cocoon, not the usual skirmishing of the Cartels across the river either; this was in the streets outside, frequent and alarming. Moaning in the hallway, sirens warbling, drifting in and out of consciousness.
I didn’t know what I was stepping into, even left a cash tip on the nightstand for the mess before departing shamefully by way of the stairs without checking out at the desk— just wanting to get back to my trailer and call in sick for the next week.
A rapid string of gunshots echoed from somewhere near the parking lot and I hopped in the truck and locked the doors, intending to top up my quarter tank of gas on the edge of the city… until I saw the state of the roads downtown.
No traffic— a car parked straight through the wide gap where glass had once lined a storefront, glittering in the morning light from the sidewalk. I pulled my Colt revolver from its holster and reassured myself of its load after another rattle of rapid-firing weapons. This is Texas, in case y’all forgot.
My phone wasn’t working by then, still had battery but it wouldn’t pick up so much as the hotel wifi signal. The first car yet came speeding down the street, disappearing with the screeching of tires up the block.
That’s when I saw the bodies.
I might’ve thought they were just homeless people if they weren’t lying bloody on the asphalt. I eased the truck forward and tried my useless phone again, pressing on the brake pedal and trying not to throw-up on my dashboard.
A cement truck barrelled into sight, ricocheting off a line of parked cars before righting itself in the painted lanes while one of the bodies in front of my pickup moved. The gear selector went to park and my hand to the door lever, but I could only watch in horror as the cement truck thundered into the woman, the driver seeming to actually seek her out as she came to her knees.
The machine left a smear twenty feet long in its wake of what had once been a human being… culminating in a pile of glistening, writhing flesh.
That was the last straw for my stomach, and what little food I’d eaten in the room came rushing up as I opened the truck door too late, gasping and leaning my head against the steering wheel; wondering where the hell the cops were. When I looked up again, two of the wrecked corpses had come to their unsteady feet.
The one nearest to me looked dead in my eye, reaching out with shaky arms as he stumbled forward, his feet catching in the mess of intestines trailing from an ugly gash bisecting his torso. I slid the truck into drive and hammered on the pedal, going backwards instead— into a parked sedan.
The man tripped over his innards, fixing me with an uncomprehending stare from the pavement as I actually put the truck into drive this time and sped out of there.
Everything after that is flashes and I never did make it to the gas station.
Leaving my vehicle and the strobing horrors of the road behind me, I skirt the perimeter through dry fields and long lines of irrigation pivots, dormant in the Texan winter.
God what an unlikely town.
I needed time to cool off and regroup when Patricia got the house in the divorce, and there was a hefty bonus for taking the job to offset the isolation of the place that a newly-single man could drink away in El Paso, but hot damn.
There ain’t nothing but desert for hours in any direction, yet Dell city springs from the sand where farmers in the 50’s established irrigated agriculture on the thirsty landscape fed by massive underground aquifers. The round fields, shaped so because the water pipes pivot around the centre, look like blank canvasses for crop-circles when viewed from above, dotting the desert like some sort of NASA experiment on Mars.
I learned when I moved there to sell fertilizer and chemical that the place had been named for the nursery rhyme and the tune hasn’t been far from my mind since. The rhythm of my boots over packed soil punctuates the song.
The farmer in the dell
The farmer in the dell
Hi-ho, the derry-o
The farmer in the dell.
The power is off in my trailer, the air cold. The plastic door lock clicks impotently behind me, the vacant stare of the disemboweled man in El Paso flashes through my mind and I fish the shotgun out of the closet to banish the thrill of panic rippling down my spine. The rest of the day passes with me sitting in the unlit room fondling the gun, checking my useless phone, and peering out of the cheap curtains to the lifeless cluster of buildings and infrastructure that lied about being a city while my body recovers from the sudden sickness it had gone through.
I slip into a deep, cleansing sleep sometime after sunset and wake up with the dawn. My phone is a brick— not even an emergency alert, so I decide to check in with my landlord down the road.
The quad starts, but the gas tank is showing low and the spare jerry cans lay empty under the tin-roofed lean-to. It’s enough to get me to Ralph’s. He doesn’t hear my knock but that’s nothing new— I figure he’s old enough to have been here when they first tapped into the underground springs, but he might be out back.
A handful of horses in the dusty paddock whinny when they see me, fighting and stamping around the galvanized steel trough. I glance over at the back of the house, still in the quiet morning. Ralph would have never let his animals go thirsty.
The electric pump sits inert, but the rusted steel of the old tap swings freely, creaking under my urging and gushing streams of cool water into the dry basin. The horses settle down and snuffle at the liquid as the level rises painfully slowly, all the while I check over my shoulder every few pumps at the empty sliding glass door. My muscles burn and my head spins from the effort by the time the animals have satisfied themselves enough for me to fill it.
The hair on my neck rises and my hand goes to the grip of my holstered revolver as I turn towards the house.
Ralph presses his naked, blood-slicked body against the glass doors like a bikini car wash in hell. His puckered mouth drools frothy spit obscuring him as it spreads over the surface.
The handgun slides free at my side as my boots crunch over gravel until I’m standing at the porch face to face with him. Fixing me with the same dead eyes from El Paso, he flails at the glass with flaccid arms loose with flesh and shot through with varicose veins where I can make him out through the smeared layer of gore and saliva.
I may be a bumpkin from New Mexico, but I’ve seen a zombie movie or two in my day. Even then I would’ve let him be if the glass had held.
Instead he came stumbling out over shards as the door gave, gurgling like a throat-cut hog, causing me to back up and trip over the low deck.
“Ralph! You’d better fuck off!”
The revolver bucks twice and he tumbles to the gravel at my feet. My aim shakes as my hands tremble, but he doesn’t move again. Acrid gun-smoke stings my nostrils as black blood dribbles down his wrinkled scalp, following the channels in his skin like water from a cloudburst down a parched arroyo; the dried riverbeds scarifying the desert.
I collect myself and lean in for a closer look at the glistening fluid, much darker and tackier than was right, but the stench of it mixed with the film of excrement and blackened blood coating my landlord’s corpse makes me retch and I leave him and his house well-enough alone after that.
I take the quad home and check the fuel tank with a flashlight— empty. I’ll have to go down to the bulk station with a few jerries and bring the a.t.v back with my pickup.
I corral a few of the empty canisters and the shotgun and start towards the near edge of town two miles away. I’ve lived here a couple years but I had the whole layout memorized in a week and the fuel station is about the most prominent stop around, second only to the Napa cafe.
There are strangers at the station. I creep back behind the cover of the last house next to the compound, it’s obvious that it isn’t the local farmers chewing the dog over a cup of coffee.
A handful of vehicles ring the chain-link entryway of the compound, a mix of El Paso Police Department, State Patrol and a National Guard logistic truck. The dismounted occupants look like a cross between special forces operators and gutter pimps, masked in balaclavas and brandishing blinged-out assault rifles glinting in the morning sun.
They shout to each other in Mexican, waving on a growing line of traffic to the pumps. Some of the traffic disgorges new narcos who form into groups and begin patrolling down the nearest roads. Vans and cars empty of their contents, human and material under the watchful eyes of the armed men.
Shots split the air from further into town. Shouts from near the pumps as the bandits try to separate the men of a family from the women, more shooting and then screaming as bodies fall.
Shit.
Leaving the fuel cans behind, I jog along the field edges until I’m back at the trailer. Most of my outdoors gear is already together in bags, but I cram extra ammunition into zippered side-pockets and tie every plastic milk jug I find onto a hank of rope. More gunshots, faint through the thin walls of the trailer.
The Guadeloupe Mountain dominates the landscape seen through my eastern window, glowing red in the growing light of day. Straight across the gentler northern peak, across days of desert, is my brother’s ranch in Hope, New Mexico.
In the heat of summer, there would be no chance, but one man and a couple horses loaded with water in the winter? I’ll take my odds over the warlords that just took Dell City.
Ralph’s shop has more than enough tack needed to outfit two of my favourite horses from the paddock, known to me from weekend rides and hunting outings in better days. I secure a leather scabbard to the pack saddle and load the shotgun into it, securing it to the other horse and both get full jugs of water secured wherever convenience allows.
We depart after noon, leaving the paddock gate open behind us. The gang hasn’t bothered to come out this way yet, but I can hear the wailing of their work and see the smoke of their fires even from here.
The day is cool and the rush of breeze in my ears drowns out the cries behind me. A hawk circles overhead, uncaring of the calamities of humans. Hooves clop over the graded surface of the service road we follow while the song runs through my head.
The farmer in the Dell
The farmer in the Dell
Hi-ho, the derry-o
The farmer in the Dell.
The mountain rises before me, forming a jagged new horizon. The desert is calmer now in the chill of the year than the last time I had taken the horses this way, during rabbit hunting season.
We stop at the head of a trail descending into parched gullies. The last images of distant Dell City burn into my mind as if onto film— a conflagration consuming the western edge of town serves as the flash, dwarfing the minuscule shapes of people and vehicles fleeing the chaos.
A deep, basso rumbling finds me even in the creases of the ancient riverbed, the fuel compound exploding no doubt. Images of friends and people I’d known in town flood me and I sing to banish them, my quavering voice reverberates from the crumbling stone walls.
The farmer wants a wife
The farmer wants a wife
Hi-ho, the derry-o
The farmer wants a wife.
Except the farmer had a wife… once. The horses are uneasy as we push past the boundaries of our usual haunts. We find a green-tinged spring of water pooling in an arroyo dip so I rest the horses while the sun sets, igniting the pastel smears of sandy stone blending into the greys and beige of the bedrock of Guadalupe, sporting layers of dry shrubs, patches of squatting cacti and swathes of air-dried grasses wherever the tenacious plants found a crevice to cling to life in.
Following the roots of the summit on my right hand, we should emerge past the long slope in two or three days ride, another four or five to my brother’s maybe… if I’m lucky.
Our path the next morning follows a rise and I pause at the top of it to look behind. The worn stone of the alluvial landscape stretches to the horizon, the channels and gullies formed by ancient flow spread like blood vessels on a landscape avulsed of its skin in the red glow of dawn. Movement in the distance.
My binoculars bring a human figure into focus, shambling along a rocky trail half a day’s ride behind me. Another palsied man stumbles into sight as the first topples from the path into a hidden gully.
“What the hell?”
I cluck my tongue and urge the horses— there’s no way they can track us through the false roads, switchbacks and treacherous drops making up the way forwards.
The shrubs are thicker and gnarlier as we follow paths through the shoulder of the mountain, catching on clothing, hide and saddle as we navigate blocked paths and sudden cliffs.
A wind storm blows in the second night, cold and heavy with lingering precipitation that snuffs the warmth from my body as the eddying current carries it swirling over porous stone and desiccated vegetation. The two horses and I huddle through the night to beat the chill with no fire.
Fog obscures the way the next morning and I almost follow my mount over the edge of a cliff, barely kicking free of the stirrups as the animal tumbles screaming to shatter against jagged stones below.
My hands grasp the reins of the packhorse until they’re bleached white as I collect myself. The wet, ragged sound of ripping meat floats through the fog. My hands tremble as I sink to my knees and peer out over the precipice— a thick bank of gray obscures the poor animal, but it appears to be moving.
Fuck’s sake.
I line up the front post in between the rear iron sights of the revolver and try a couple shots into the dark mass— the sharp report echoes monumentally around the enclosing stone. A shadow moves, separating from the larger blob of darkness below and resolving into the figure of a man pawing at the sheer cliff. I shiver as his undead gaze transfixes me.
Another shot and he sprawls backwards beside the horse, their bodies merging again through the obscuring mist. Empty brass tinkles over rock as the spent cartridges vanish into the abyss.
We push on through the day with the wind tugging at my clothes, pushing the cold deeper into my body as the storm shrieks through gullies. Creosote shrubs gather moisture from the air in ponderous dewdrops clinging to branches, leaves and stems that wick to my legs as I brush past in the saddle, soaking me through to my hips.
The surviving horse is ill-tempered far from its home and trough, manifesting its poor attitude as stubbornness and once an opportunistic bite when I dismounted to pass water. The song runs through my head like a mantra.
The farmer in the Dell
The farmer in the Dell
He got so mad he beat his wife
Halfway down to Hell.
By the fourth day I’m feeling the symptoms of withdrawal from technology. There is no phone to drown out my thoughts and they intrude, harassing me with past sins long buried under an ocean of grain liquor and low company while the damn song runs through the interludes until I’d kill for a different tune. Shit, even Neil Young would do.
I tie the horse’s reins in fading light around a gnarled pine trunk twisting and pointing the way further down the trail and make my bed in a natural cubby recessed under an overhanging stone. I creep back to listen on the path after the horse is relieved of its tack and watered.
The storm is moving off, pulling the wind whistling with it and allowing the moon to illuminate the northern slope of the range, rolling down to the badlands stretching eternally between me and my brother’s ranch striped with arroyos black with void like veins carrying poisoned blood across the desert.
I pull the bulk of the saddle to cover the opening of the alcove before I dare try for some elusive sleep, rolling and shifting to find an ounce of comfort on the vampiric stone floor draining me of the last heat I had managed to husband through the storm.
I dream of Patricia and our last night together, a scene I haven’t endured for half a year or more. Her screams grate on my nerves, filling me with rage like only she had been able to do with her shrill voice ringing in the dark, rising and shrieking and—
The screaming splits the pre-dawn morning, piercing high above a low murmur of moaning, snarling and gurgling. The horse fights against the tied down halter, bucking and whinnying in terror as a handful of zombies grasp at her blood-stained hide in the gathering light.
My mind tells my hand to draw the revolver but I’m paralyzed as my mount tears the scraggly tree free of the wall and disappears down the trail until the sound of her hooves are lost to the gasping and grunting of the ten or so walking corpses following her. Bare feet and odd shoes scrape against stone as they shuffle down the path and I tremble until dawn arrives and breaks the spell of terror over me.
Easing the saddle away from the alcove and leading with the revolver, I step over drying splashes of vivid crimson on beige stone to check the way ahead; clear at the moment.
The saddlebags are left behind with what I can’t carry as my riding boots tap a tattoo over gritty sand where the final slope of the mountain meets the infinite beige horizon. Water jugs strung together by twine dangle over my chest like teats, suckled equally to maintain their balance as I lean into the trackless road with the shotgun over my shoulder.
The farmer wants a horse
The farmer wants a horse
Hi-ho, the derry-o
The farmer wants a horse.
Up over banks of ragged stone sharp enough to taste my blood and down slopes of shifting gravel loose enough to tumble me, every fold of the desert is identical to the last. Following the natural flow of the arroyos would only lead me further into the ancient wasteland but the relentless scrabbling over banks is exhausting. After shivering through another night in the open plain, I leave the shotgun with its heavy supply of ammunition on a flat stone like an altar offering to the desert and step off.
The unyielding boot leather takes a flesh toll from my feet with every step, and by noon I stop to remove them, upending the pair and letting the blood drain out onto thirsty sand while I wrap my tortured feet in strips of ripped flannel shirt. Stifling a groan, I slide my clubbed feet back into their holsters and turn to descend the next slope.
Movement in my peripherals gives me pause. Squinting across the landscape, I make out a handful of zombies cresting a rise far behind on my back-trail.
“No… fucking… way.”
I cast off my empty water teats before night falls, now only the compass and the revolver remain of my tools. Every step is torturous and I find a low bench of stones in failing light to rest on while my fingers count the stubby bullets nestled in leather hoops at my side. Five at my hip plus the five in the chambers… how many of them are there out there in the night, stumbling towards me even now?
The waning moon rises, bringing enough light to reveal the lunar landscape, empty even of the coyote’s cry. A tumbleweed startles me as it bounces out of the darkness on its perpetual journey towards disintegration. The bench holds me as I slide away for unknown minutes, waking and fighting treacherous eyelids until I convince myself I don’t care about living and they close again.
I feel the sensation of falling and jerk back to reality as the first of the undead emerge from the dark of the ancient riverbed into the moonlight. Blinking rapidly to focus his blurry face, I settle the gunsights on his head and ease the trigger until the grip bucks in my hand.
The middle-aged man topples, exposing the open musculature and skeleton of his back where the flesh has been eaten away. My thumb hauls the hammer back, rotating the chambers and settling a new bullet in line with the barrel as three more corpses shamble into the light, catching the last four loaded cartridges before they collapse to drain into the fine gravel.
Practised fingers rotate the cylinder and work the slide to eject the spent casings, replacing them with the final handful as a rich gurgling noise approaches through the darkness.
Willing life back into my legs, I rise to face the next wave. Muzzle flashes strobe to reveal primal expressions and splattering fluids as the gun empties and clatters from my grip to the ground. More materialize from the shadows and I gimp hard into the night, finding a tolerable rhythm while my ragged breathing dries my throat.
The farmer in the Dell
The farmer in the Dell
Hi-ho, the derry-o
The farmer in the Dell.
The wind picks up, carrying gritty sand and stifling dust to obscure the endless riverbeds webbing over the desert like a vivisection slice of a cancerous and necrotic brain, exposed to let the malignancy be studied by men of science and medicine.
I hide my face with my shirt and lean into the wind, buffeted by abrasive gusts as I stumble blind with the flow of the arroyo. The howl of air over stone fills my ears, desensitizing me to everything but the song.
I trip on an unseen rock, scraping myself on the ground as I catch myself with my hands coming away wet with muddy water. Scrabbling forward, my bleeding fingers probe the stone until they find a spring-fed pool no wider than a hoof-print, thick with dust and sand from the storm.
I lie down over the puddle and suck the moisture through my ragged shirt as a filter until I satiate my thirst. Grit collects around my shoulders in tidy heaps as I pant in the mud.
Something kicks my foot and I feel the weight of a body fall over my legs. I recoil in terror as a hand darts out of the swirling storm and takes hold of my jeans, bringing the bruised arm and shoulder of my assailant into being as it drags itself towards me.
I kick out at the snarling face with its dead eyes as it resolves growling from the sandstorm, catching my boot with its other hand and wrestling it from my foot. The denim tears and I scrabble lopsidedly over piercing gravel into the shrieking wind.
I leave the other boot behind when I can’t stand any more of the shock on my unprotected foot as it makes up the difference in height. The parched riverbed flows forever under the obscuring cover of stinging particles while I trudge on.
The wind dies, noticed only because the sun blinds me. The desert stretches forever, trackless under a fresh layer of nothing broken here and there by skeletal shrubs. My wasted feet move only inches at a time, leaving a snail trail through chalky beige powder.
The hair on my neck rises, but I don’t care to look behind anymore. Only the desert matters. Gurgling and moaning that can’t drown out the song. Shuffling feet and shifting sand, snapping teeth and retching coughing from a chorus of corpses congregating in my wake.
I can feel the foremost just behind… overtaking me… moving on…
My feet lurch to a halt after a few more steps as the second follows the leader, crop dusting me with its death stench as it stumbles past. A dozen more stream by, but none come to embrace me.
The ragged, bleeding slabs of my feet plough through dust as I shuffle after them. All the while the song runs through my head.
The farmer in the Dell
The farmer in the Dell
He fucked around and found out now
He’s on his way to Hell.
The following link is the short story of the initial attack that collapses society, creating the ‘Afterwards’ timeline.
Right on! This might be my favourite one in the series yet. Intense from start to finish, and that "farmer in the dell" motif worked really well.