by A. K. Meek
She’d done this so he could live, so he could get his family to safety. He had to respect that. Her sacrifice was for a greater good. He needed to remember that. He wouldn’t forget that.
“Goodbye, Aubrey,” he whispered. Then he exited the back of the sheriff’s office into the field behind the building.
There, Calliope pranced nervously with terrified eyes. And Kurt didn’t blame her.
Approaching slowly, he held up his arm so she could clearly see in her round, wide eyes he didn’t mean her any harm. Gently he stroked her muzzle, giving her a moment to settle.
“Take it easy, girl. It’s all right,” he said through his tears. “It’ll be okay.” He saddled her quickly and checked her tack. After slid his shotgun into the scabbard he gingerly climbed into the saddle, having to take extra time to manipulate his injured leg.
Without a look back, Kurt trotted away from his office for the last time, headed home.
The streets were mostly deserted. If everyone was hiding, they were doing a good job. Only once or twice did he see people peeking from windows. The bodies of dogs and citizens were scattered like leaves. He had to leave the bodies where they fell.
It amazed him how empty the world had become. Calliope’s hooves were the only distraction to his racing mind. He turned corners, trying to keep his horse in the open, in case he needed to make a run for it. Whatever it was he needed to get away from.
But he didn’t encounter any resistance. He hoped Aubrey’s bomb—suicide bombing—as he should be calling it, paid off. He wanted every miserable person from the Dog Pound to have been caught in the conflagration. A swift, painful death. He wouldn’t feel much regret for them. Except his brother.
It disturbed him to think of his kid brother as just one of a band of killers. Did he deserve to die like the rest? Just because he shared the same blood, did that make him more worthy of redemption than anyone else? No, but there were the family ties that bound them together.
There were the endless summers of playing in the backyard pool on sweltering days. Johnny would be some type of leviathan, rising up from the depths of Atlantis, and Kurt was the mythological warrior that had to wrestle the beast into submission.
Those dark days after Dad drank himself to death, when he thought he’d never be able to pull himself from his funk, it was Johnny who joked and goaded him, lifting him from his self-imposed misery. They needed to team up as brothers, in order to help Mom through her grief.
Countless other moments they shared, two brothers, growing up. One went left, the other right.
He’d reached his home before he actually realized he’d made it, guiding Calliope on autopilot. As he climbed from the saddle, adrenaline left his body and his leg began a new round of throbbing pain. He limped over to a pole on his front porch and hitched Calliope there.
The click of a pistol hammer caused him to freeze. Slowly, making no sudden moves, he lifted his hands in surrender and turned to whoever got the drop on him.
“Hey bro.”
Kurt breathed a sigh of relief, which quickly turned to curiosity. “Johnny. What are you doing here?” He paused. “You look like garbage. What happened?”
His brother, face red from burns with welts already forming, shook his head, dismissing Kurt’s concern. “I could say the same about you,” he replied, his eyes fixing on the rent in Kurt’s bloodstained pants. “Are you happy to see me? I’ve come for my girls.”
Kurt’s mind went to his house and his family inside. Were they still there? If they were, he hoped none of them were looking outside. Johnny didn’t look good. Not just on the outside, physically, but on the inside, too. He could see it in his eyes. He’d seen his brother in so many altered states, he couldn’t keep track of them all. But he’d never seen him like this. Johnny’s eyes were like coal. “I’m always happy to see my brother,” Kurt said flatly.
“Like last time?” Johnny said, thinking of their fight that pushed him out of town, straight into the waiting arms of the Dog Pound. In a way, Johnny figured, it was Kurt’s fault all this happened. He was the reason all this came about. “Why did you go to the pound?” Johnny asked, suddenly curious why Kurt would bring Bob’s wrath on Bartel. “All this killing is on you.”
Kurt felt helpless staring down the barrel of his brother’s pistol. So many times Johnny had tried to learn to shoot, but never had the eye for it. His muzzle control was all over the place. But this close, something serious could happen, whether Johnny intended it or not. He doubted even Johnny could miss point blank.
“What’re you doing here?” Kurt asked, ignoring Johnny’s faulty logic. “What’s happened to you?” Trying his best not to alarm his brother, Kurt scooted over to his saddle. He rubbed Calliope’s hindquarters, trying to give the impression he was calming her.
“There was an explosion. A bad one.”
Kurt knew that. For a morbid instant, he wondered how many of the Dog Pound Aubrey had taken out.
“I’ve come for my girls,” Johnny said.
“The ones you left? Those? The ones you wished you didn’t have, every time you were drunk? Those daughters? You’re not taking them.”
Johnny inched forward, held his pistol a little steadier. “Who are you to tell me I can’t have my own daughters?”
“What’s happened to you?” Kurt repeated.
“I already told you, I was caught in an explosion. Some crazy person blew up a truck.”
Kurt shook his head. “No,” he said. “What happened to you? Janelle’s in the house. I know about LaTonya.”
The color drained from Johnny’s face. His gun now trembled slightly. Kurt had seen this look a thousand times. The look of a man who realizes he has nothing left to lose.
“Why did you do those things, brother?” The emotion cast by the new world came down on Kurt, beginning with the murder of his son. Countless loved ones had their lives taken away, stolen. His deputies, innocent citizens, and now one of his oldest and dearest friends, Aubrey.
He smacked Calliope’s haunch, sending her forward in a lurch. The shotgun slid from the scabbard. Kurt aimed it at his younger brother. “I can’t let you take those girls, not after what you’ve turned into.”
Johnny eyed Kurt’s shotgun curiously. Then he looked at his brother with a smirk, his mouth curling into a sneer. “You can’t stop me. You’re not the law anymore. You couldn’t even save this disgusting town. You’re as good as dead.”
Kurt squeezed the trigger.
He dropped to his knees, his head swimming, about to faint. He tore his eyes away from his brother’s corpse, twisted on the ground in front of him. His burned face and neck, his arm wrapped in bandages. Days old blood dried on his shirt. A shotgun slug-sized hole in his chest with fresh blood pumping out. This horrible last image of his brother would be etched in his mind forever.
He might’ve lost the town, but he could still uphold justice. Sometimes justice demanded terrible consequences.
Using the shotgun as a cane, he got back to his feet and with renewed sense of urgency, he clambered up the stairs. He tried the doorknob but found it locked. He banged on the door. “Marcia, it’s me, open up!” Peering through the pane next to the door, he caught movement through the sheer curtain. Intentionally he crowded the window so anyone inside couldn’t see out, what lay at the bottom of the steps.
“Kurt?” came his wife’s voice from inside. “I heard a gunshot. Everything all right?”
Kurt recognized the code they’d created for emergencies. “A-oh-K,” he replied, his countersign to indicate everything was all clear. The door unlocked. He rushed inside so she didn’t see his brother’s body, slamming the door shut and locking it. “We’ve got to leave. Get our bugout bags.”
Marcia stared at him quizzically. “They’re ready, but what’s happening out there?”
Janelle entered the living room holding little Susie. Once she got over her shock, Kurt knew she would recover quicker away from town. Marcia was more than happy to welco
me her. They had grown close, and Janelle loved tending to the girls, despite what their father tried to do to her. If anything, that made her more sympathetic to their plight. And she’d even overcome her fear of dogs.
“Something bad is happening,” Janelle said. “I can feel it in my bones.”
Kurt nodded. “Very bad. The Dog Pound attacked us.”
Her hand flew to her mouth and she looked like she was about to burst into tears.
He saw her concern. It was his concern, too. “It’s okay for the moment, but we need to get out of here.”
At that prompting, Marcia went through the house, gathering everything she could think of for her and the girls. Kurt bolted into his basement and cleaned out his collection of weapons and ammo, what he thought Calliope could reasonably carry.
As Marcia got the girls ready, she made an otherwise horrible situation fun. She told them they were going on a great adventure and would be camping outside, sleeping in the wilderness. It would be fun and grand.
“We need to leave out the back,” Kurt informed them when they were ready to depart.
In less than two hours they left their house of twenty years, with only hastily packed bags to show for all their hard work. The girls sat on Calliope’s back while the three others walked alongside the horse. Susie rested in a homemade sling over Janelle’s shoulder.
As they maneuvered the few blocks that would eventually lead them out of town, Marcia leaned close to her husband. She spoke in a soft voice, sure the girls couldn’t hear. “Did you find him? Did you find your brother?”
His last memory of Johnny on his front porch played for the hundredth time. He nodded.
“You couldn’t convince him to leave that awful place?”
“That awful place was made for him. That’s where he belonged.”
Her face saddened as she gave a glance back at Johnny’s girls. “Where are we going?”
Kurt hadn’t thought about where they were going, so much as he knew they couldn’t stay in town. He didn’t know what damage Aubrey had done. But between the dogs, Reverend Farah’s men, and the machine, he’d rather take his chances outside the city in the wilderness.
Then he remembered the Orange Angel of Death. The other threats were physical. Those he could handle. He’d been doing it his whole life. But the orange fog was different. It wasn’t a person. He didn’t know anything about it but—wait, he did know one thing: the fog didn’t cross the stream. In fact, the stuff seemed repelled by water. Then he thought of when he’d first heard of the fog, when the zombies came into town. They were heading south to escape the orange fog. That sounded as good as anyplace else.
“South, dear.” Kurt said. “We’ll be safe south of here.”
“How far south?” she asked.
He put his arm around his wife and limped along. “As far south as it takes. To the Gulf, to the end of the world if we need to.” He looked backed at the girls who’d begun singing a song. “We have a family to raise.”
That was a promise Kurt made to his dead brother, to raise his daughters, to make sure they’d be safe in this new, cruel world.
A New and Fiery World:
25 Bombs Fell Season Three (Book 3) Excerpt
Chapter 01.01 THE HUNT FOR JAVIER
(rough edit)
Colton flew through the undergrowth, ducking and weaving in reckless abandon through thorn-riddled vines and clutching branches, a white-man American Aborigine mastering a forest he had grown to love. There were many things in this new and fiery world Colton loved. Hunting was close to the top of the list, probably number two. He loved hunting so much because it invariably led to number one on his list: killing.
“Slow down.” Henry said in gasps as he struggled to keep up with his thinner, quicker, hunting mate. Despite a diet of berries, fish, and occasionally a hapless hog or deer over the past year, Henry hadn’t lost much of the gut that plagued him since the tenth grade. Colton often said Henry was the only man who could be starving and still gain weight. At least once a week Henry would remind everyone how he inherited ‘mom’s robust mid-section,’ chalking up his hanging gut to a bad thyroid condition.
His blue flannel shirt, sleeves abandoned long ago, snagged on every passing vine. At this rate it would be nothing more than a strip by the time the hunt is over.
Henry almost barreled over Colton, who had stopped almost on a dime and now squatted, staring into the forest.
“Shh,” Colton mouthed as he peered through the trees, his brow furrowed intently. With lips pursed he nodded to the east, a silent indication he’d found the trail. Henry couldn’t see a thing but trusted his hunting partner’s sense.
The two moved forward, slinking through the trees at a slower, cautious pace.
The day was overcast, like virtually every day since the bombs fell. Early morning fog now drifted over the humid Florida Panhandle, hindering what little could be seen through the dense forest, undeveloped land between highways and nesting towns. But all this didn’t seem to affect Colton as his measured pace transitioned to a jog, manipulating the forest with skill like he'd been born out in the woods.
Eventually he stopped, lifted his head and scanned the area.
His breath coming in ragged chunks, Henry consciously fought to minimize his heavy, noisy breathing. He pulled up alongside Colton. “What’s wrong?” he asked between puffs. “Lose his trail?”
After seconds of studying the trees, Colton said in a low voice, “I don’t think I’ve been here before.” Then added after a few more seconds. “I’m not sure where we are.” He lifted his left leg, pulling his boot from the ground that had turned soft and pliable, like they were on the edge of stepping into a marsh. Stay in place too long and you would start sinking.
“Wanna turn back?”
“Are you kidding. It’s just now getting fun. I can feel Javier’s near.” Just then a noise off to their right caused Colton to dart away in that direction, using his .308 Winchester as a ram to shove obstructive shrubbery out of his path. Henry, gripping his M-16, followed.
They pushed through the marsh and fog. Several times they had to redirect their path to circumnavigate an area that had become too soft. But within minutes they were back on the trail. Ahead of them, Javier crashed along, just beyond eyesight but still within earshot.
Another forty yards and Colton came to a stop. He wiped his shoulder length hair, soaking wet with humidity and sweat, from his face and wiped his eyes. Henry stopped just a little behind him. Slowly, Colton lifted his rifle to his shoulders. “I can’t see anything,” Henry whispered. Colton ignored him.
Finally he said, “I see him up there, that mass of grey.” Colton nodded with his head in the direction his rifle pointed. Slowing his breath, he cracked off a shot.
The round echoed in the fog-silence. Unexpectedly, it reverberated off metal.
“What the…” Colton said as he squinted into the forest. But he couldn't make out anything.
“That wasn’t Javier,” Henry said, sagely.
Slowly, with their rifles ready, they pushed through the saturated foliage, the only sound being mosquitoes and gnats buzzing around eyes and nose and mouth.
They came to an area of swamp that opened up, cypress trees having been violently broken off near the base. A monstrous tank with arms and legs leaned in the swamp, sunken up to its knees in marshy water and mud. A foreign mechanized robot, at least twenty feet high.
“That’s definitely not Javier,” Colton said.
###
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