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Now this was back in the early days of the dead west. Back then it didn’t have a name or anything, It was just where man was losing the fight to survive. The desert was bad enough on its own, but add the Brainers and their mounts to the mix and, well, to be blunt we were losing bad. Most civilized areas had already collapsed. The future wasn’t lookin’ too bright.

By then, this was only ten or so years after the Brainers had come in you understand, the whole of what used to be called Texas and most points west of it clear to the ocean had already fallen. The Brainers moved fast, faster than anyone thought they could. The disease they spread with them affected mammals of all sorts and made ‘em hunger. It made ‘em kinda stupid too, at first, but they got smarter as they adapted. That was our mistake in the first days, we showed ‘em all what we could do and they learnt from it like children.

They swept clean across the land, legend has it they came right out of the sparkling ocean in old California and just started marching east one day. They hit the rest of the globe too, the same way, walking at first. Damn them anyway, they learned. They started riding horses again, Brainer horses to be sure, and training dogs and everything. They couldn’t eat no Brainer steer but then they didn’t eat anything but the brains of the living anyway so what did they rightfully care? Still they were kinda smart, even if they didn’t talk except to grumble and growl like old men arguing without teeth.

We stopped ‘em around the Mississippi for a while, superior firepower still meant something even if we hadn’t learned some of the tricks to killing them that we know now. Most of us had given up on the west. When the Brainers came across California they started to bunch up in the west, see, and what with us holding them back from moving much further the west became their stronghold. Not that I would credit them with enough smarts to think in terms of conquering strategy, their natural movements just gave them the appearance of it. They were smart, yeah, but they weren’t that smart. Some higher brain functions would always be lost to them, and they only had crude hand signals and gestures to coordinate themselves.

Once they had a natural stronghold growing though, they learnt to use it. Hand signals increased and patterns started to form up out there in the harsh sun. You gotta understand, it wasn’t as if they had killed every living person in their path. They needed the food source, but they also needed the fine control labor.

With memories came wants and with wants came the problem: the Brainers couldn’t rebuild things. They could tear a house down just fine, but they couldn’t work together well enough to build one. So they took living men and women and forced them to do the hard work. At first, to be sure, work was refused. Then again how many people around you do you have to watch die for refusing to lift a hammer and work some nails before you find that same hammer in your hand a-swinging?

We all gave the west up for good. There wasn’t a good clear choice otherwise, that we saw. Two folks found it in themselves to disagree. Franklin Cleaver and Edward Bones was what they called themselves, if pressed. Most folk called ‘em simply Cleaver and Bones but they always called themselves Frank and Eddie.

This is where a lot of historians, if I can use the word to describe myself, disagree. Some say the two men were assassins until the Brainers came, fingering their expertise and willingness to kill as explanation. Some point to evidence, namely Bones’ crockery collection, that they were just lowly chefs in some low military outfit. Still others like to claim, and Lord knows what they base this one on, that the two men were sports players who got separated from their team and struck out on their own. They certainly didn’t play any sports that I ever saw.

Yeah, I saw ‘em. I was with ‘em when they… but that’s later on. The rest, including how they came to the point that they considered their plan, I heard tell from others in town, like I’m tellin’ you now.

They came into what was left of Logansport, Louisiana early one Saturday. Thing was, they came from the west. No one, by then, came in from the west unless they were a Brainer looking for a snack. The sentries on the town wall, a hastily constructed thing of wood and mud, almost shot ‘em. Bones and Cleaver were covered in sand and dust and they looked for all the world like statues come to life.

The sentries shouted warnings to each other and readied their guns, hoping for a clean shot, when Franklin shouted right back at them. Brainers didn’t shout, even the guys dumb enough to land sentry duty knew that.

“Hey, buddy, open the damned gate, will ya?” Franklin asked.

The sentries were too shocked to do any opening of anything besides their mouths at that point, so they stood there, jaw-dropped at the two men. Edward sighed and took a rifle out from under the sand colored poncho he had draped over his small frame.

“Frank here asked you to do us a favor,” he said cheerily, “think maybe you could get to doing it? Today?”

The sight of the obviously well kept gun shook the sentries into action. Two of them rushed down the rickety old hand-lashed ladder and started to work at getting the gate open. The other two sentries stayed where they were, taking in the sight of men. Men from the west.

“We’ll get it open, it’s just,” the first sentry stammered, “we don’t use it, see.”

“Yeah it… no one comes from this direction. No one that’s still talkin’ at least,” the second explained.

“We gathered,” Franklin said mysteriously. He yanked his bandana off his head and his scarf off his face and started to wipe the grime clear from his skin. Franklin had the ability to loom over people even while the people he was loomin’ over stood twenty feet above him on a wall.

Edward pulled out a bent and broken cigarette, hand rolled but crushed in the folds of his poncho. He shook his head sadly and looked at it, turning it this way and that in his fingers. “Hey, Frank?”

“Yeah, Eddie?” the bigger man answered without looking, spitting into his scarf and trying to wipe his face somewhat clear.

“This ain’t right,” Edward Bones said sadly to his partner, “I didn’t even get to smoke the fucking thing.” He presented the broken smoke to Cleaver like a child handing over a broken toy.

“And what,” Cleaver asked, “am I supposed to do with this?”

Still, Cleaver took the broken thing and studied it for a second before muttering under his breath, breaking it in two and handing half to Edward. Then he stuck the remaining half in the corner of his own mouth and started to dig out a match.

They went on like that, smoking and talking as if nothing was unusual while they waited for the gate to work its way open. The sentries on the wall fell silent, out of awe or fear depending on who you asked later. The two sentries who couldn’t see any of this, but only hear the mutterings on the other side of the thick and stuck gate figured the two men on the other side to be insane.

Either way, the gate got opened with a bit of teamwork and, more importantly, closed and firmly locked again once Cleaver and Bones were through. Edward waved at the sentries and the two men just walked on past, uncaring, aiming right for the bar. They had no way of knowing where it was, but somehow their feet took them right to it with only a stop at a horse trough to finish washing off the dust from their faces.

The air in the bar was hot and unmoving, like the beer, but that didn’t stop Cleaver and Bones. They ordered up two mugs of the local swill and found a cracked and leaning table to sit at, Franklin Cleaver putting his feet up on the edge of the table and causing it to sway.

Sammy Burns, the bartender in the Last Drop, swore till the day he died that they looked right at home from minute one, never stopping to give pause or consideration that they were somewhere new. They had a sense, Sammy would say, that everywhere they stopped to sit was their home and you were welcome to share it with them so long as you played by their rules.

No one wanted to ask the two strangers any questions at first. They didn’t exactly go out of their way to hunt down people to interview ‘em, either. A week passed. Then two. The town got used to them, as much as they could, lettin’ them go about their business, which seemed to consist of drinking and talking to each other and no one else. They always had money for their drink and never seemed to do nothin’ to earn it. Which is what eventually broke the mutual silences I’d say.

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