Carver Pike - Scalp

As long as the damn animals stop coming at us.

Luckily for them, they hadn’t come in contact with any other four-legged bastards since they’d started their stroll.

They’d walked for at least thirty minutes when headlights shone from down the road. As far as he knew, these creatures couldn’t drive. That was good news. Somebody was headed toward them.

Hal was still surprised to see the oncoming vehicle when Grant and Sally threw their hands in the air and waved. They weren’t quiet about it either.

“Hey!” Grant yelled.

Sally was right beside him. “Stop the truck!”

The truck didn’t stop though. It kept coming, and it seemed like the driver was going to roll right over them.

“Get out of the road,” Hal warned.

“He’ll stop,” Grant argued.

“He’s not slowing down,” Sally said.

When the truck was so close Hal could taste the dust coming off it, the driver slammed his foot on the brake and the truck slid to a stop about two feet in front of them. The driver rolled down his window and called out, “Hal?”

Somebody knew his name, but he wasn’t familiar with the voice. It was too damn dark in the cab to get a good look at the driver, so he cautiously made his way around to the driver’s side.

“Get in the back, kid,” the driver said to somebody else in the cab with him.

Two kids climbed out. A teenage boy and girl. They jumped into the bed of the truck and finally, Hal was close enough to see the driver’s face.

“Andre?” he asked.

“Andre,” Sally whispered behind him. It took a few seconds to sink in. “Wait, Andre Andre? The Andre that went missing?”

“Andre, go!” a girl screamed from the back of the truck.

“They’re coming! Go!” another teenager yelled.

“Come on!” Hal yelled at his friends, and they piled into the cab of the truck.

It was a tight squeeze. Hal had to throw a leg over the gear shifter. Sally climbed onto Grant’s lap.

“Please! Go!” the young girl in the back yelled.

Dogs barked behind the truck, and Hal suddenly sensed what all the yelling was about. More of the damn animals were on their way.

Grant slid the rear window open and asked, “Any of you kids know how to shoot?”

“Yessir,” a big country boy replied.

“Take it,” Grant said as he handed the boy a pistol.

“Thank you kindly,” the boy said as he turned around and shot a big black dog that was too close to the tailgate. Any closer and it might have leaped right in the truck.

“Come on, come on, come on,” Andre slapped the steering wheel anxiously, begging the truck to drive faster.

The animals didn’t reach them, but then it looked like Andre was easing up on the gas. The driver checked the rearview mirror, saw the animals getting closer again, and then gunned it.

“What are you doing?” Hal asked.

“I need these sonsabitches to follow us. We need them all close behind.”

“Why would you want to do that?” Sally asked with a whine in her voice.

“So I can kill ‘em,” he said.

Hal looked at the guy he used to go to sobriety meetings with and wondered what he’d been through over the past couple of days. He looked like shit.

“Andre,” Hal said. “Everybody’s been looking for you, man. Where have you been?”

“Workin’,” Andre said as if it were the most reasonable explanation possible.

“Workin’,” Hal repeated and then chuckled. “Workin’ on what, man?”

“My cousin Carl got the infection first,” Andre said. “I saw it happen. Jumped all over his head. He changed. Like how you seen ‘em. And I knew it was some kinda bug that got in the hair. Like little flies or worms or—”

“Lice,” Sally interrupted.

Andre took his eyes off the road for a moment and looked at her. “Hey, Sally.”

“Hi, Andre,” she replied.

“Yeah, like lice,” Andre returned to his thoughts.

He paused and there was a moment of silence.

“Hal, you remember when I told you about my farm?” Andre started right back up again.

Hal had the feeling he should know what Andre was talking about, but he didn’t. Andre, from what he’d heard, was always trying some way to make money. At one point he was trying to burn images of American flags into wood so he could try and sell them to patriotic folks on Facebook. When that didn’t work, he inquired about opening his own gun range. Hal had even heard he was a moonshiner at one point.

“No,” he admitted. “I don’t.”

“It’s fuckin’ beautiful,” Andre assured him, then turned quickly to Sally and said, “I apologize for the language, Sally.”

She only smiled back at him. He was making himself sound like a lunatic.

“What’s beautiful?” Grant asked, speaking up for the first time.

A flash of recognition came over Andre’s face and then he said, “Hey, you’re that dude who makes furniture, ain’tcha?”

Grant nodded.

“We need to talk,” Andre said. “Might be some good business we can go into together.”

“Tell us about the farm,” Hal interrupted, trying to bring the man back to the present. They didn’t have time to chat about business.

“Ladybugs,” Andre said.

“Ladybugs?” Hal asked.

“Ladybugs?” Sally and Grant both said at the same time.

Hal did recall Andre mentioning something about ladybugs and organic farming.

“Ladybugs,” Andre repeated. “Those vicious little bastards are gonna help us.”

If Hal were a balloon, Andre had just stuck the pin in that would deflate him. All his hopes went right out the window. The excitement, that anxious, nervous energy Andre had that was driving him onward toward their destination was all based on pretty insects kids played with. He glanced into the bed of the truck and thought about these teenagers hoping the adults they’d stumbled upon would save the day.

And he’s got fuckin’ ladybugs.

“You… you were coming from the school?” Hal asked, trying to take the conversation as far away from insects as possible.

Andre nodded. “I was hiding out at my farm when I got the idea, but then I remembered what I’d heard about a school conference or something like that taking place out at Stonewall. Couldn’t leave these kids to fend for themselves.”

Hal admired Andre’s bravery. They’d had the same thought. Someone had to save the kids.

“I was too late though,” Andre went on. “The place was infested. Only these kids in my truck survived.”

“My God,” Hal replied.

“How many kids were there?” Sally asked.

“A lot,” Hal answered. He’d seen so many of them when he’d visited the campus. “A whole lot.”

Hal closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the seat. They were too late. How many kids had been at Stonewall Forge? Hundreds? Again, he thought about his daughter. Sweet Susanna. She would have grown to be one of the smart kids. She would have been a leader. She might have been at Stonewall Forge when all this started. He wouldn’t have been able to save her any more than he’d been able to save the others.

Get out of your head. Focus on saving the ones you can save now.

Would he be able to save them? With a plan like ladybugs, he wasn’t sure. He wished it were some kind of code word like in all the 007 movies. Goldeneye… Octopussy… Ladybugs. He doubted Andre was hiding a bomb in a shed though.

When they pulled off the dirt road and onto the main highway, Andre said, “We’re almost there. Only gotta go up the mountain a couple of miles. They still behind me?”

Hal slid open the window to the back of the truck. “They still hunting us?”

“It’s hard to see,” Nitsy said as she leaned forward and peered into the darkness behind them. The cloud of dust enveloped the truck like a thick blanket.