Dead Lands Pass the Ammunition Read Free Page A

the war against the flesh bags? He doesn’t shit without thinking about which way the wind blows. Just think about it, baby. If you want something, sometimes you have to reach out and grab hold of it yourself. Sometimes you have to make it yours.”
    Mack grunted again, and then the squeaking came back followed by a few muffled moans. I rolled over and draped an arm across my ear, trying to blot out the sound.
    I’d imagined enough for one night.
     
    ~
     
    That conversation nibbled on me. It was still there in the morning, sticking in my side like a wood splinter under the skin. I tried to imagine Mack as leader of the compound, crown prince of thirty odd or so survivors all huddled together in our half-dozen shacks behind makeshift walls. I tried to picture Mack presiding over the gardens and the expeditions to gather food and cooking fuel and kerosene for our bombs. No matter how my brain worked it, I just couldn’t make it come out right. Mack as leader…
    Or Sasha as the queen, pulling his strings.
    But she already was, wasn’t she? She pulled hard enough for old Mack to tumble into a mess of trouble, filling his head with ideas of grandeur and delusions of a new order where he’d sit in the central hut on Big D’s old throne. Nothing but a stinking stained recliner pulled from a ditch, that throne, but that didn’t matter.
    I wanted to forget it, burn the whole stupid conversation from my head, but memories never worked like that—before or after the dead came back to life and everything we knew crumbled like a toothpick castle in a twister.
    I chewed on my thoughts along with bowls of bitter vegetables and tasteless potato soup.
    But then Mack and I were filling sandbags—we mostly used old plastic trash sacks filled will mud to shore up the outer walls—a few days after I overheard them. My thoughts foamed over into words.
    “Sasha’s got a big mouth.” I sank the shovel into the wet ground and twisted to face him.
    Mack heaved a bag onto the pile and then turned his square-jawed face my direction. “What the hell are you talking about?” He asked. Sweat trickled a zig-zag line down his reddened face. His eyes went cold like midnight.
    “Nothing.” I looked at my soil-stained hands. “Nothing…”
    He snorted. “Bullshit. Come out with it P.  You drop some shit like that about Sash, you better be ready to back it up.” His fists curled at his side. A quick flash of those meaty paws skittered through my head. Nobody really wanted to be on the wrong side of Mack.
    I swallowed hard and turned back to the shovel. “Just what she was saying about Big D the other night. Stuff she was saying about you being in charge.”
    “You were listening?”
    I shrugged. “Thin walls. It’s not like I tried.”
    Mack scowled. “What of it?”
    I heard it in his voice, anger like a volcano ready to pop—anger like the powder of a cartridge right before the pin sets it off.
    “She’s going to get you killed is all. She’s going to talk you into doing something stupid.” I wrapped my fingers around the shovel handle and lifted it from the muck. The wrong words crawled over the edge of my tongue and spilled into the air. “She’s got her claws in you pretty deep.”
    “Say it again,” he said.
    “You heard me.”
    His fist hit the side of my skull like a stone. White light burst in my head. My body flopped to the side, limp and broken like a scarecrow knocked down with the wind. I slid a few feet in the mud.
    “Motherfucker,” Mack snarled. He stood above me, his back to the corrugated tin wall of the compound. A couple of guys on watch shouted something, too, but my ears couldn’t grab hold of it just then. Blood throbbed in my head. “Lay off Sash, you jealous prick.”
    I shook my head, asking for more abuse. “She’s—”
    His boot caught me in the gut, and I doubled over.
    “She’s… She’s everything. We’re nothing. We’re fucking disposable, you know that? We’ve got to have women