CHAPTER TWO: THE ROAD TO QUAD
He figured he must be losing his mind. It was the only explanation for being in Manhattan one day, and Blockland the next. Lou didn't know if insanity really could trick people into thinking they were somewhere else, but he knew there was no way he'd suddenly been transported to a land of connectable bricks. That simply made no sense in the worldview of modern science. He knew as little about psychiatry as the rest of the universe, but he knew for sure that books and movies portrayed mentally disturbed characters slipping away to fantasy worlds from time to time. And that was the only way he could explain his situation.
Grant's house was miles behind, and Lou's feet were tired. He grew thirsty. As the dirt road seemed to stretch longer and longer, he realized he should have asked Grant for some water and food for the journey. Even better, he should have asked Merriweather. Her father was hospitable, but she took caretaking to a whole new level. Preparing meals and washing the dishes were expected of her in that household, and she had been the one to originally suggest Lou spend the night there. He understood why her father called her dear so often—she was a nice girl.
Lou stopped at a small pond. It was nestled into the base of a mesa, jutting out of the ground parallel to the road. The pond water was brown, so Lou didn't intend to drink it, and yet he didn't dare leave. The pond reflected his image back to him, giving him his first look at himself as a blockhead. He had a six-sided torso in the shape of a rectangular prism, with the long sides pointing up. His head, an angular cube, sat atop the torso with a pair of shoulders beneath it. His hands were at his sides, and his feet were stuck to the ground.
And his body seemed to be made of plastic, like the rest of this world.
He fell back onto the solid ground and felt hopeless for a little while until he recalled night grew closer with each passing moment. Lou was feeling bad for himself, but he had yet to become suicidal, and he did not want to die at the hands of bloodthirsty zombies. So he got up and pressed onward down the road, and not long later, he was rewarded for not giving up. A thinly-leaved tree grew out of the red-brown soil, next to the mesa Lou had been walking along for the past ten minutes. The tree bore two orange fruits on its lowest branches, and Lou wasted no time grabbing and eating them. He was hungry enough to eat both, and it did him well. He felt full, with a renewed sense of motivation to continue down the road.
After the mesa ended in a dangerous slope meeting the ground, a dark gray picket fence began to run alongside the road. It was another plot of farmland, like Grant's, although owned by someone else. Lou peered over the fence into the land beyond, surprised to see small patches of green grass sprouting out of the ground. It was by no means a lush forest—grass was the sole vegetation beyond the fence, and it grew only in tiny clusters. Horses and cows were scattered sparsely across the land, lethargically feeding on the grass.
Lou paid little attention to where he was going as he walked along the fence. He tripped over a pumpkin in his path and fell face-first into the hard ground. He swore in pain.
When he got up he realized the pumpkin had a face carved into it. It resembled the faces of the zombies, with two sunken, lifeless eyes and that horrible gaping mouth. It startled Lou, and he scooted backward across the ground to get away from it. He felt utterly ridiculous when he realized he was thrown into a panic by a pumpkin, and got to his feet to keep walking.
Up the road Lou spotted a dot growing closer. He squinted his eyes and focused until its shape became familiar. It was a car, and it was speeding right at him. He sidestepped off the road and watched it come closer. The driver slowed to a stop right next to Lou and hopped out.
"Hey there mate," said the driver. He had a gruff voice. "Out for a stroll?"
"Uh . . . I guess. I'm headed for Quad."
"Quad? You making any stops?"
"I wasn't planning on it. Who are you?"
"Ah shit, I forgot my manners. My name's Argus Pearl, but you can call me Argus. You got a name?"
"Lou."
"Lou! Lovely name. You said you didn't intend to stop?"
"Well, I will if I have to. But I was told I can get to Quad in a day."
"If you sprint, maybe. You'll never get there by walking though. I could give ya a lift if you prefer not to be eaten by zombies."
Lou looked over Argus's shoulder. He had arrived in a dark green Jeep, with a bent up antenna and bags in the back seat. "You'll take me to Quad?"
"Well I ain't gonna leave you out here where the zombies can get you."
Lou nodded. It was a good idea. "Okay. Thank you."
"Marvelous, hop in."
Argus got into the driver's seat while Lou got in on the passenger side. The driver pulled off the road, turned around, and got back on, driving in the direction of Quad. The cacti in this desert seemed to be separated by miles each, but in the Jeep they zoomed by as frequent green blurs. Small bricks in the road were kicked up by the Jeep and sent flying into the air behind them.
Argus sparked a conversation. "Where ya from Lou?"
"To tell you the truth, Mr. Pearl, I don't know. I—"
"Whoa there! Don't call me Mr. Pearl, mate. That was my great grandfather's name. Me, my dad, and his dad have all been Argus."
"Oh. Sorry Argus."
"Don't worry about it. Where were you saying you were from?"
"I don't know. I woke up yesterday in a cornfield, and that was the first memory I have of Blockland. I can't remember being here before that."
"Sounds like a wicked case of amnesia. What made you decide to go to Quad?"
"It's the closest town. I'm just going there to get away from the zombies."
"That's a good enough reason. I'm a zombie hunter myself, I know how bad it can get."
"You're a zombie hunter?"
"Hell yeah. It's a solitary life, one only a person bred for action can handle." He grinned. "But it pays well, people love me for it, and I get to watch the sun set every night. It's also why I carry this name—my dad and granddad were both zombie hunters like me."
"Zombies are a big problem then?"
"Of course! You really do have some amnesia there, don't ya? You don't even remember how bad the zombies are out here."
Argus began to slow down. Lou had been looking to the right for the last few minutes, watching the desert pass by, but now he shifted his gaze to see why they were stopping. A watchtower stood next to the road, reaching so high into the sky it might as well have been a skewer to catch the sun with. The top of it angled out into a flat landing, enclosed by medieval parapets.
"We'll stay here for the night," Argus said, getting out of the car. "Well come along, now. Night falls faster than you'd think."
Lou got out of the car and looked at the horizon. It looked like a painter's palette had been knocked over, and the spilled paints were beginning to blend together into a colorful piece of abstract art. The abstract painting would soon be swallowed up by indigo paints, and night would fall as it had the day before, letting the zombies of Blockland roam free.
Argus stood by the door inside the watchtower and closed it once Lou had stepped through. The zombie hunter picked up a couple long bricks from the corner and stacked them atop each other in front of the door as a barricade.
"It's not the coziest place," he said. "But it's safer than any house around here, I'll tell ya that much."
"You don't say." Lou was looking at a wall with weapons fastened to it. A shotgun and two rifles comprised the small arsenal, opposite of a wall with cabinets full of food, and adjacent to a wall with a sofa against it. There was a ladder next to the sofa, leading up dozens of feet to the top floor of the tower.
"Eyeballing the upstairs?" Argus said. "Come on, let's have a look." He approached the ladder and took hold of the rungs, beginning to climb up. Lou didn't like the look of the ladder—it ascended the wall with nothing beneath it to catch a fallen climber, except for the ground floor. Falling off near the top would result in a long descent, which would undoubtedly end in death, or multiple broken bones at the least.
He followed Argus nonetheless.
The ladder was topped off by a hatch to the top floor. Argus threw it open and climbed out, then helped Lou up. The top floor was open to the outside air, which was chillingly cold out here in the desert when dusk came. Another watchtower was visible way, way out. And so was another in the opposite direction. They must have formed a loose barrier around the populous towns, with each tower manned by a single zombie hunter to keep the undead hordes from getting past.
Fire flashed behind Lou. He swung around, startled, to see Argus had ignited the tower's flame beacon at the heart of the floor. A broad brick, emanating orange light, spat a column of fire as tall as Lou up into the sky.
"Lou, take a look at this." Argus stood between parapets. He pointed at a mesa. The mesa had an overhang reaching into the air, and beneath it was a horde of twenty or thirty zombies. They were piled up, but as darkness fell across the landscape, the horde diffused and began to spread out into the night.
"The other towers can't see that cluster, we'll need to thin it out ourselves. You wanna come?"
Lou frowned. "Not at all, actually."
Argus was opening up the hatch and getting ready to descend the ladder. "You sure? I can give you a rifle. They're slow, too."
"I really don't want to, Argus. Sorry."
"Alright then." He disappeared down the ladder. "Leave me to kill all eighty of 'em myself. After I let you stay the night here, too."
"There's not eighty," Lou protested, and looked down the ladder shaft. "There's like, twenty. Twenty-five maybe."
"Don't try to persuade me to stay, Lou. I'll take care of 'em myself."
"Aw damn. I'll come."
Argus stopped near the bottom and looked up. "That's the spirit. Come on down now, we haven't got all night."
Lou exhaled, thinking he may be making a mistake, and started down the ladder. Argus stood at the bottom with a rifle in-hand. "Only the best," he said, and tossed it to Lou as he got off. Then he pulled out a shotgun, the same model as the one Grant used to kill the zombie in the outhouse, and started for the exit.
He opened up the door and walked out, looking left and right to spot any zombies that may have closed in on the watchtower. The area was clear, so he walked over to the Jeep with Lou following. They got in, and Argus started off into the desert. The subtle dunes of the land rocked them gently as the watchtower fell away behind sandy hills. The mesa got closer and closer, until they crested a dune and saw the zombie horde below. Many of the creatures were still piled up beneath the overhang, but a sizeable chunk of them had crawled free and now strode around directionless.
"This'll be easier than I thought," Argus yelled. He didn't need to raise his voice, the Jeep engine was silent, but he did it anyway. And it alerted the zombies beneath them of their presence. Judging from the smile that crossed Argus's face, he seemed to have gotten their attention on purpose.
The zombies began to shamble toward the dune in the dead black of night. They rasped and growled on their approach, but once they hit the slope of the dune, were all reduced to an infantile crawl that yielded no ground. Argus stood up in his seat to watch them form a pile below.
"What are you waiting for?" Lou asked. He turned around and scanned their surroundings for zombies that might sneak up on them. It was easy to miss movement out here in the desert, with no moon or civilization for light, save Argus's watchtower two miles away.
"You'll see."
The pile of zombies underneath the overhang wormed itself apart, and they joined the rest of the zombies in a new pile at the base of the dune. There was now a roadblock of the living dead at the bottom of the slope, perfectly lined up with the front of the Jeep. Argus sat back down.
"And we're off."
He accelerated down the dune and cut through the middle of the pile. The zombies were trampled under the car tires, many of them killed instantly and others wounded to the point that they could only crawl. Argus pulled the car underneath the overhang and stopped with it next to the mesa wall. He jumped out, brandishing the shotgun.
"Well don't sit there, Lou! Fire!" he said, then blasted the pile of zombies as they struggled to turn around and chase their prey—only, with Argus onsite, they were the prey. And they had no hope of ever elevating their status to that of a predator. Lou fired two shots from his rifle, with only one being a hit, before the horde was finished. The pile of corpses sat motionless after it was all done.
Argus stood watching the pile of bodies for a moment, breathing heavily. "Told you it wasn't that bad!" he said and spun around. A white smile was the most visible feature in the darkness. To see the man get so much joy from killing zombies frightened Lou.
"I guess you were right."
"They all say that." Argus got back in the car. "Now let's head back to the tower. The gunfire will have attracted zombies from miles around, and I'm a little tuckered out after that slaughter."
They drove back to the watchtower and walked in the front door. Argus replaced the long barricade bricks in front of the entrance, and they were secure once again.
"What are the sleeping arrangements?" Lou asked.
"You can have the sofa. I'll be upstairs."
"You're sleeping outside?"
"Oh yeah. The crackle of the flame beacon sends me off to sleep real easy." He walked over to an end table next to the sofa. It had a little black device sitting on it. "Don't bust my balls too much, Lou. You'll get ambience too." He switched the device on, and the room was filled with a resounding bass riff. It looped every seven and a half seconds, so Lou expected he would have to turn it off after Argus went upstairs to keep from going insane from the repetition.
"Bass 3," Argus said, closing his eyes and nodding his head to the beat. He exhaled. "You'll need to keep that on all night. The sounds of the dead outside will drive you mad if you don't." He switched the light off. "Night." And he was gone up the ladder.
Lou did not like Argus. The man had to be a sociopath, if such a disorder even existed in blockheads. He almost seemed to take delight in the zombie massacre, and right from the very moment he met Lou he exuded an air of excessive excitement, like a kid just beginning puberty who got pleasure from being obnoxious and violent. And sleeping outside was the strangest part of it all—he said Lou would need music to drown out the sounds of the undead on the other side of the wall, yet he was sleeping on the roof, where the crackling of the beacon would not be enough to beat the growling below.
Perhaps Argus enjoyed the mindless sounds of the zombies. Perhaps he had made it a point to yell and shoot his shotgun back at the mesa, so that they may attract as many zombies to the tower as possible when it came time to sleep. Perhaps the undead growls were like a lullabyto him, and the slaughter entertainment.
Lou scared himself with those thoughts. He slept poorly for the second night in a row.
• • •
"Fuck! Fuck! Motherfuckers!"
The obscenities were Lou's alarm clock. They came blasting through the walls of the tower from outside, and put him into a panic.
"This is some bullshit!" came another shout.
Lou got out of bed. It was Argus outside yelling. He must have snuck past Lou that morning, during the few minutes of shut-eye he was able to obtain. The thought of Argus stealthily getting past Lou scared him, especially as the events of the previous night crawled back to him.
Frantic, and with Argus's swearing continuing, Lou ran to the wall and grabbed the rifle he used the night before. He opened up the front door of the tower and looked around to see if zombies were the source of his host's distress, but saw none. Argus was far up the road, standing next to the charred remains of his car. Its chassis was the only thing left, overturned and covered in soot.
"Argus?" Lou called. "Are you okay?"
"No I'm not fucking okay! The zombies wrecked the Argo. Fucking blew it up!"
That revealed so much to Lou: The zombies were capable of serious destruction in large numbers; and, embarrassingly, Argus called his Jeep the Argo. Lou stood, speechless, watching the zombie hunter lament the loss of his vehicle. When he didn't respond, Argus broke the silence to rant further.
"They must've came in the middle of the night, after I dozed off. Fuckin' buggers! Do you have any idea how much the Argo cost me? It had a custom suspension, new tires, and was made from reinforced plastic! Do you have any idea?" He jerked his head around to look at Lou. "Do you!"
". . . no."
"Fuck!" Argus sat down on the ground. "Well Lou, looks like you're walking to Quad. The zombies really fucked us over, mate."
"That's okay." He stepped back into the tower and set the rifle down. "Uh, can you tell me how to get there? By foot?"
Argus nodded, but didn't look up. He stared at the ruined car. "Just walk that way." He thrusted a thumb over his shoulder. "Quad's a half day from here. You'll get there safe."
Lou nodded. "Alright then. Thanks for, uh, letting me stay here." He walked past the zombie hunter, whose response was curt.
"No," he sighed, "problem."
And Lou left Argus there, a broken man in the middle of a dirt road, watching his dead car stay dead. It would be a while until someone came to help Argus out, but he would be fine. A deep hatred for zombies manifested in him, though. Deeper than before. He would not stop hunting until the world was ridden of the undead.