A Time to Kill Zombies

by Jill James

  She took a good look at him and cringed. Bloody furrows ran down his cheek, the blood dripping onto his shirt. Her sore fingertips told her she had done it. Her stomach heaved and only a lack of food kept her from vomiting in the car.

  “I’m so sorry,” she whispered, her fingers touching his cheek.

  He flinched but didn’t turn away. Her hand cradled his jaw. Paul was the last person in the world she wanted to hurt. But hurt him she had and he would be even more hurt when he found out she’d said nothing about the pills. Lies by omission were still lies.

  Her fingertips trailed down his neck to his shoulder. Wide shoulders that carried the weight of the whole camp on them. A weight he seemed to carry without effort. Only she and Josh knew the man he became when he let his guard down and worried about everything from a lack of schooling for the kids to the dangers of dehydration for the entire group. They saw the other side of Paul Luther.

  He sighed. “I’ll be glad when Jack is back with us.”

  “You know he might not make it back. You may be forced to be the leader permanently.”

  His eyes turned dark and hard. “He will make it to Ryde.”

  She nodded. How could she have forgotten that Jack wasn’t just their leader, he was Paul’s best friend? She leaned back and tried to move to her own seat, but his strong hand pulled her back.

  “We’ll get through this,” he said.

  “Is that your favorite saying, or what?” Josh called from the driver’s seat.

  The three of them laughed and broke the tension in the Humvee until Josh slammed on the brakes and Paul caught her before her head could slam into the back of the seat.

  Peeking out the windshield she spotted what made her brother stop. A raised pickup truck with enormous Monster truck tires stood across the road. A pair of men stood in front of it, their AK47s pointed at the Humvee.

  Paul reached to the front and flipped the switch for the PA system. Josh handed him the microphone. He pressed the button.

  “Clear the road. This is your one and only warning.”

  The reply came fast and deadly. The men opened fire and their shots pebbled the vehicle. The pings echoed inside like hail on a tin roof.

  Before the last echo died, Paul was over the seat and in the turret. The roar of the gun filled the interior. Suz slammed her hands over her ears. Shell casings clinked to the floor and her eyes couldn’t unsee what was in front of her.

  Blood spatter coated the side of the white truck and two torn bodies sprawled on the cracked asphalt. Paul slid down from the turret. His face white, the gashes she had put there standing out red and deep.

  “Josh, leave the motor running. Suz, you get in front to drive. We’ll move the bodies, which is more than they deserve, but I’m not running over people. Once we’re clear, you can push the truck off the road.”

  Suz and her brother moved swiftly. She didn’t know about Josh, but she wanted to be out of here as soon as possible. The men moved out in front of the Humvee, back to back as they checked the road, the ditch on the side, and the bridge to the left.

  In a moment, they had the bodies out of the road and placed in the ditch with more care than she would have given them. She stepped off the brake and put her foot on the gas and all hell broke loose.

  The road rocked and swayed and the Humvee joined it. Suz held on to the steering wheel with both hands as an explosion hit to the left and metal twisted and squealed as the bridge fell to the water in a cloud of dust and smoke.

  Cheers carried from the other side. The explosion had been planned and executed on purpose. The people in the town on the other side of the river sent a clear message—leave us alone.

  Suz shrugged her shoulders and put the Humvee into gear to push the truck off the road to join the pile of metal from the bridge. She stomped on the brakes and traded places with her brother and slid in the back seat. An empty back seat as Paul took the passenger seat up front.

  Her throat convulsed as she tried to swallow past the dryness and the lump. She stared out the window at the river and trees going by, wishing she were alone and could take a pill.

  Chapter Ten

  Jack and Lila

  Lila’s Notes

  On the road again

  Pittsburg/Concord

  Spring, 1 AZ

  As I suspected, Mary decided to stay with her brother. They tried to have us take the young boy, Jacob with us, but he refused and hid until we left. Selena always asked for a brother, but that young man is not it. When I see how this new world has scarred him, I wonder how Selena will be when we find her. My greatest fear is finding her and having her not want us or need us anymore.

  The rising sun was at their backs and made long shadows from the stranded cars on the road. Her eyes played tricks with the light and saw imagined zombies under every vehicle or waiting around the side of the trucks and vans. The whistling wind became the moans of the undead in her overactive imagination.

  She cocked her head and listened, trying to figure out how Jack moved carefully and quickly at the same time. His boots made a soft thud, while hers stomped and made an echo down the canyon of cracked asphalt. Constant glances to the left and right just leftover childhood lessons of not playing on a busy street.

  Lila exhaled a breath she didn’t know she was holding as they reached the parked SUV still sitting on the side of the street where they’d left it the night before. She would march over hot coals to find her daughter, but a drive would be nicer and faster.

  After a few miles, the cars came closer and closer together. Sometimes it seemed as if they’d been caught in a flood and stranded in a metal tangle beneath the overcrossings. The idea of a swift drive to Walnut Creek died in her mind. As if to prove her point, the SUV clipped a small sports car, sending it rolling across the pavement in a squeal of tortured metal.

  Soon, it was as if the SUV wasn’t going any faster than they could walk. Her fingernails dug into her jean-covered thighs. They had to get there. They had to stop whatever Juan was planning.

  As if God heard her silent prayer, the way up ahead cleared. The higher they drove up the hill, the fewer cars there were on the road. She started to smile until they reached the peak just before Willow Pass Road.

  Jack slammed on the brakes and the vehicle fishtailed before jerking to a stop.

  Her hands fisted on her lap and tears blurred her vision. It’s not fair.

  As far as she could see, it was a parking lot of cars, trucks, and buses. There wasn’t room between them for a bicycle, let alone a vehicle as big as the SUV. Even before Jack spoke, she was grabbing her backpack from the floor and yanking the door open.

  “We’re walking.”

  She rolled her eyes at him. “You think?”

  “Don’t be childish,” he said.

  “Childish. Is it childish to think fate or karma or the gods might just give us a fucking break once in a while?”

  “We got to drive this far, didn’t we?” He didn’t allow her time to answer. “We may find a car once we get down the road some. If we don’t, we can walk. We will get there.”

  Her breath huffed out and she swiped her wet eyes. “Fine. We walk.”

  “Lila,” he said.

  She turned toward him. “We have to take what each day hands us. We had a safe place to sleep last night. We reunited a family. You gave cookies to a group of kids who hadn’t seen any in months.”

  She smiled at the thought of the young faces at the battered box of stale animal crackers. You would have thought they were truffles or those outrageously expensive chocolates with the fancy name, not broken and crumbling lions, tigers, and bears.

  “That’s it,” Jack’s deep voice reached past her thoughts. “Enjoy every moment. It is all we have. All we ever had, we were just too stupid to realize it.”

  She nodded and started walking down the cracked asphalt at his side. Her hand rested on the knife strapped to her belt and her eyes darted from car to car. A deep sniff brought nothing to
her nostrils but the scent of oil and long-gone gas fumes. The cry of a hawk drew her eyes to the deep-blue sky. The raptor dropped like a bullet and came back up with a squirming rodent in its talons. A reminder of survival of the fittest constantly at play.

  A canine growl had the hairs on the back of her neck rising. Her gaze darted to her right. What looked like a German shepherd cowered beneath a car. His teeth gleamed in the semi-darkness where he huddled. Where she huddled, Lila corrected herself as a ball of fur rolled over and became a puppy at the dog’s side. Keeping her eyes on the dog, Lila stepped back until the hackles lowered on the dog’s back and she returned to giving her attention to her baby and not to the human interlopers.

  That’s all they were, she mused. Interlopers on this planet. They were just one species among millions. Not even the top species anymore. The undead had taken that spot. The living were just biding their time until it passed and none of them were left. No one left to remember music or art or technology. No one left to remember they had walked on the Moon. They had split the atom. They had created life.

  She shook herself out of her dismal thoughts. They still had survival and love and life. Where there was life, there was hope. She didn’t know who first uttered the saying, but it was becoming her new mantra.

  “Do you think we’ll get there today?” she asked Jack in a low voice.

  “We may if we step up the pace and don’t stop except for water and food. We’re both in decent shape, so I don’t see why not.”

  She started to laugh out loud, but caught herself in time before making enough noise to wake the dead. And wasn’t that a not-so-funny saying now? Her gaze swept over Jack. He’d been a jock before, but his years in the army and now daily survival had honed the man into a lean, mean, fighting machine. She, on the other hand, had been thin to start with. With the lack of food at the church and Juan’s withholding of food as punishment most days, she felt like a good wind would blow her over.

  She shook her head but Jack spoke up.

  “Do you remember those stories we heard as kids? How a mom pulled a car off their child with her bare hands?”

  She nodded, wondering where he was going with this train of thought.

  “That’s you. You could be on your last leg, but you would drag yourself to Selena. That’s what mothers do. What good mothers do. No matter what, I’ve seen what a good mother you are.”

  Wasn’t that a backhanded compliment? That ‘no matter what’. No matter you left me. No matter you dumped my ass. No matter you didn’t tell me I had a child. She felt each of those thoughts as if they were knife wounds to her heart. And she deserved every one of them.

  * * *

  Jack opened his mouth to take the words back, but they were already out there, hanging in the tense air between them. He shrugged. Maybe it was better this way. If he kept Lila angry he could fight the feelings struggling to escape. That he had to remind himself hourly she was a married woman warred with the memories of the past. Better to think about Selena and finding the girl before too much time passed. His teeth clenched and his jaw ached with the thought of what the delicate little girl could be going through. He’d seen too many small undead to think everyone got a happy ever after ending in the ZA.

  His mind whipped back to the current situation as a dull thump sounded up ahead. Off to the right he spotted the familiar silhouette of a school bus. Blood smeared windows painted an ugly picture. The gory handprints too small to be from adult hands. He pulled the knife from the sheath and squatted to peer under the large vehicle. The thumps grew in sound and speed as he drew near.

  He started to walk ahead when Lila grabbed his arm. “You can’t leave them there.”

  Tears pooled in her eyes and rolled down her cheeks. He cursed under his breath. “Probably twenty to thirty kids in there. We can’t risk going in that bus.”

  “We have to do something. What if Selena was in there? Wouldn’t you want someone to put her out of her misery? Those are someone’s children.”

  Her hand dropped away and he started pacing. Going in that bus was not an option. It would be a slaughterhouse, with him the slaughtered. Getting the kids out was impossible as well. They wouldn’t be able to get them all and if they got overwhelmed there would be nowhere to run. That left option C as his drill sergeant would say. Not a great plan, but at least a good plan, a doable plan.

  Shrugging out of his backpack, he set it on the road and opened the flap. He reached to the bottom and pulled out the crowbar and a lighter. Lila moved to his side.

  Her eyebrow arched. “What’s the plan?”

  “See the logo on the side of the bus?”

  “The flame one?”

  “The bus runs on propane. Just a giant propane tank on wheels. How about we make the bus a giant Molotov cocktail?” he replied, pointing to the side of the road. “Grab that T-shirt and tear it into strips.”

  Jack pried open the fill valve. A whiff of gas took him back a step. “We’re in luck. It’s probably full,” he said as Lila returned to his side with the strips of cotton fabric.

  The pounding on the windows reached a frantic tempo as they huddled by the side. Jack moved as fast as he could as Lila’s shoulders tensed and he heard the grinding of her teeth. “Just a little bit longer. Get your backpack on and get ready to run straight up the road between those two cars,” he said and pointed.

  “Tie the shirt into a long rope,” he instructed her. Once the material was a long cotton rope, it took it and shoved one end into the fuel tank.

  She hefted her backpack onto her shoulders and set his by his feet.

  “Ready?”

  She nodded and Jack flicked his lighter and set the dry cotton ablaze. The flame caught as Jack grabbed his pack in one hand and Lila’s hand with the other. The only sound was the pounding of their boots until with a whoosh the bus exploded.

  He pushed them to the side of a car and huddled over Lila. Metal fragments rained down amid other parts of things he didn’t want to identify. A wave of heat passed overhead and then he rose.

  The once-colorful bus was a mass of burned, twisted metal, flames shooting out the sides. He focused on spotting any zombs who’d escaped the inferno, but the only sound was the crackling of the fire consuming flesh and metal and the only smell was fuel and burning flesh. He’d smelled enough of it in Iraq to never forget the stench.

  “Thank you,” he heard Lila whisper just before her lips found his.

  He allowed himself two seconds of pleasure before duty and honor reached up and slapped him upside his head. His hands gripped her upper arms as he pushed her away. His hold tightened and he stared at her wince. He didn’t know who he wanted to punish more; Lila or himself.

  Chapter Eleven

  Cody, Miranda, and April

  Ran’s Journal

  RV Yard

  3 days after breakup of camp

  Spring, 1 AZ (After Zombies)

  I’m so never having a baby. We have sat here with barely any food, not enough water, and crying babies. Jed and Carla are so cute. When they aren’t crying. They cry for food. They cry for going poop in their diapers. They cry for no reason I can see, but what do I know, I’m not a mom and never going to be. Ever.

  She looked up from her writing to find April yet again draped all over Cody. Technically he was Ran’s boyfriend or mate or something, but in the ZA nothing was permanent, not even relationships. Cody could move on if he wanted to. Her heart twisted in her chest. When she’d found him in the library in Concord it had been like fate. The feelings she’d had for Seth Ripley had been revealed as the crush it was. But Cody had been different. He accepted her; her history meaning nothing to him. Cody lived for today and that’s what he had with her. Today. But tomorrow was no guarantee, for life or love.

  Pulling her knife out of the sheath, she sat sharpening it as Cody and April approached her. The redhead had the grace to blush in a color as bright as her chopped off hair. Ran winced. Not so long ago she’d been where April
was, a victim of abuse and rape. She slammed the knife back into its holder and stood up.

  “Ran,” Cody said, putting the basket of clean clothes on the picnic table. “I thought we could clear out the area so there are fewer skinbags when Seth and Teddy are ready to leave.”

  A smile broke out of her face with a matching grin on Cody’s. “Let me get a machete and I’ll meet you at the gate.”

  April’s whine carried as Ran hurried to the weapons shed. Running back, she caught the tail-end of Cody’s speech.

  “You can’t go with us, April. We need to know the other has our back. You’ll get loads of training on the journey, and then you can be a fighting team with Ran and me.”

  Ran smiled wider. Since the girl couldn’t even fight with a knife yet, it would be a long time before she had to worry about the newbie edging into her zombie hunting time with Cody.

  Cody tied a bandana around his head to hold back his bleached blonde hair. Along with his tie-dyed shirt, he looked like a surfer minus the board. He knocked on Teddy’s trailer door and the large black man filled the opening.

  “We need you to do the gate, bro,” Cody said.

  “No problem, kids. What are you up to today?” He walked over and stood by the large button for the gate.

  “I told Seth we would clear out the area a little so it will be easier to leave in the morning.”

  Ran laughed. “You didn’t say we were finally going tomorrow.”

  “I wanted it to be a surprise. I know you’ve been antsy and I thought a little zomb’ stomping would help.”

  She ran up and hugged him, kissing his neck and face. “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” she whispered.

  “Yo, you don’t have to thank me. I’ll do anything for you, babe. You are my one and only.”

  “Okay, you two. Break it up. Keep your head in the game out there. I only spotted a few from the walls this morning, but that doesn’t mean you can’t be surprised by a cluster or a surprise ambush. We don’t have the repel sound anymore since the others took the ham radio and the recording,” Teddy lectured as the gate glided open.