“These pants are the most comfortable pair I own.”
“Okay.”
“My mama made ‘em for me. Said the ladies would like ‘em.”
“Okay.”
“Yeah. They’re real soft. The softest pair I own.”
“Nice.”
I’d already begun chuckling under my breath. Maria’s lip reading with the way the two kept talking to each other, avoiding meeting each other’s eyes, and his head bobbing down toward his crotch was a hysterical combination.
“They’d feel good to the touch, ya know?”
“Yeah.”
“Soft enough for even the womenfolk.”
“Okay.”
“You can touch ‘em if you like.”
“Um...”
“You can come over here and sit on my lap if ya wanna.”
“Um… I—”
“What are you two whispering and laughing about over here?”
Maria froze next to me.
“I was just telling Maria how absolutely clumsy I am,” I said easily. Michael stared at Maria as I spoke.
“My mama used to keep a fully-stocked first aid kit on the kitchen table when I was growing up because of how often I was falling down and takin’ lumps on the head.” I chuckled.
“Probably why my head is so lumpy now and I forget so many things,” I said with a wide smile.
“Could be,” Maria agreed.
“A lot of childhood head injuries could cause forgetfulness in adulthood.”
“What about you, Michael?” I asked, drawing his gaze away from Maria.
“What kind of kid were you?”
Michael glanced between the two of us, clearly not comfortable with us spending time together and wanting to say as much, yet he was torn. He’d have looked a little too overbearing and domineering for the image he’d built up for himself here at the camp.
“I was the careful type,” he said.
“The kind that knew how and when to pick his battles,” he said with a glint in his eye.
“I almost always won all of my battles by being patient and careful, knowing when to put pressure on and when to back off.”
He wasn’t just talking about his childhood any longer and all three of us knew that.
“Well, I was known to win a battle or two myself,” I said, standing from the table.
“Despite all the lumps, I mean.” My smile matched his and so did my mood.
Fortunately, the female sex is usually more levelheaded than the cavemen of the world.
“Well, I was a rambunctious, feisty child who liked to have time to herself once she got tired of company,” Maria interjected.
“If you two will excuse me, I’ve got to be getting back to my cabin.”
Michael held her chair out for her to stand. I nodded and murmured ma’am, and she took her leave of us. She didn’t spare either of us a glance as she left the building.
I did my best not to grin.
I liked Maria a whole lot.
Michael clearly wanted Maria and this was his camp.
Another reason to be on my way first thing in the morning.
Chapter Seven
Little Chapel of Horrors
“Hey, Mister?” I swatted away the pesky voice and turned over.
“Mister, you need to get up, we’ve got chapel in a few minutes and everyone’s required to attend.” I cracked an eye open and spotted the kid with the annoying voice.
“It’s morning?” I asked in a gruff.
Man, my throat was parched.
“Yup.”
My brain hadn’t caught up with everything, but I didn’t think I’d slept more than eight or ten hours. It wasn’t Sunday, was it?
“What day is it, kid?” I asked, opening both my eyes and swinging my feet off the edge of the bed. I realized there were several others in the room— an elderly man and two other men around my age, watching the kid and me with interest. The boy had the brightest head of red hair I’d ever seen and so many freckles on his face, I imagined he’d been picked on ferociously in school. Well, when there had been regular school.
“Wednesday”
I grimaced.
“Y’all have chapel services on Wednesday morning?” I asked, grabbing my boots.
“Sure do. We have chapel on Sunday, Sunday night, Wednesday morning, and Saturday mornings.” I stood up and stretched.
“Well, that seems a bit excessive,” I muttered beneath my breath. The little boy giggled and one of the men who had been watching stood up and walked over to us.
“Get on outta here, Kyle. Don’t be late for chapel,” he admonished.
When Kyle lit out of the cabin, the man turned his angry gaze on me.
“Chapel is the most important part of our week here at Camp Victory. It’d do you good not to forget that,” he snarled and then headed out of the cabin himself.
“Well, hell,” I mumbled a few seconds later.
“Guess I’d better head to church and repent then.” I heard a snort from the older gentleman in the room as I walked out of the cabin.
I followed the people I found outside, assuming they were all headed to where the chapel services were to be held. Sure enough, everyone was entering a wooden building, quite a bit smaller than the mess hall, but a little larger than the regular cabins.
When I got inside I found a plain, old fashioned church set up. Wooden benches were lined up like pews and a walkway went down the middle of them, leading to the front of the church where a wooden platform and pulpit sat.
I glanced around, taking note of how all the women sat on the right side of the church. I made sure to choose a seat on a bench on the left and in the back of the room.
Pretty soon the room was filled and I was surprised to see so many survivors in one room. It was a shock to the system. There were a couple of children in the bunch, though none younger than the boy who had been given the unfortunate job of waking me up.
The women all wore long skirts and sat stiffly on their side of the room. There were a few older women, no more than four or five though. All the rest were probably younger than thirty, and several were teenagers. I spotted Maria sitting in the back of the room as I was.
She made no move to acknowledge my presence and I didn’t want to put her in an awkward spot once again. The men’s side was fuller than the women’s, though that was no surprise. A few men had come in with their rifles on their back and it seemed a little odd to me.
I guess nothing could really be qualified as odd now that the dead walked among us and the world as we knew it had ended. I was curious though.
“Why do some of the men have their guns in here?” I whispered to the older man sitting near me. He eyed me up and down before answering.
“Those are the men who are on patrol right now.”
I blinked several times before asking the question that seemed ludicrously obvious.
“If they’re in here, how can they be on patrol? Do you mean they just got off of patrol or they’re about to begin their patrol?”
The man smiled, revealing a golden front tooth.
“Those are the men who are on patrol right now. Everyone is required to attend chapel. Even those who are supposed to be on patrol and protecting the camp.”
I blinked stupidly at the man several times until his smile dimmed.
“Then who is protecting the camp during chapel?” I asked, afraid I already knew the answer.
“God protects his own when they obey his commandments,” the man said seriously.
I shifted in my seat and searched the back of the room, considering how the entire camp would be completely unprotected while everyone sat in chapel, expecting God to do their work for them, to suddenly protect the people from the horrors of the world, when from my point of view, He’d allowed all of the horror to be unleashed upon the Earth in the first place.
I was about to stand up, to take it upon myself to watch the walls, even if all I had was my empty gun and my knife
. I couldn’t sit there and do nothing.
Just as I rose from the bench, Michael Hatten walked through the back door and strode by me to take his place behind the pulpit at the front of the church. The doors were then shut and two men stood there in front of them.
I wasn’t sure if they were there to keep the undead from getting in or the living from getting out. Either way, I didn’t like the position in which I’d suddenly found myself.
“Good morning, everyone,” Michael said.
The men all responded cheerfully. The women’s side was quiet. I sat stiffly, hoping he would get on with whatever they did during chapel times. I felt more and more uneasy as the moments ticked by.
Michael went through a few announcements and much to my dismay, he picked up a hymnal and told everyone to turn to page thirty-two and to stand with him. Everyone obeyed immediately. I joined them and flipped my own hymnal to page thirty-two.
Nothing but the Blood. I cringed.
How very fitting.
While people around me sang cheerfully about the blood of Jesus, I surveyed the room and the people. Most of the women sang softly while the men bellowed out their song. Maria looked like she was singing, but I was certain she was only mouthing the words.
After a moment, I turned to find Michael watching me. His eyes had been hard and calculating. He quickly covered the look with a smile and a curt nod.
I nodded back, my jaw already aching from keeping it clenched for so long.
After several more verses, Michael led everyone in a long-winded prayer and then bid us all to sit. He pulled out what appeared to be a very large bible and set it on the top of the pulpit with a resounding thud.
No one else took out a bible like they had whenever I’d gone to our little country church back in Texas. My unease tripled before he even opened up his mouth.
Then he began speaking and I knew right away that everything Uncle Gus had told me, the warning that Michael was a dangerous man, was the understatement of the century.
Michael wasn’t only dangerous, he was delusional.
A dangerous man could be dealt with easily enough. A man who was not only dangerous but also thought he’d been called by God to lead survivors to the narrow road of salvation was someone everyone should be terrified of. Hearing him talk, I knew that Michael thought of himself as some kind of chosen prophet or something.
He hadn’t just survived the apocalypse, he’d flourished in this horrible new world, assured that God had spared him for some magnanimous reason.
“God has chosen the righteous to inherit the Earth,” he intoned a few moments later.
“He has cut down all the unrighteous, all the wicked-doers from the face of the Earth, just like He did back in Noah’s day.”
Sounds of agreement and amens echoed throughout the room.
My stomach knotted hearing those words. Had Michael not been out there when everything had happened? Had he not seen that innocent women and children had died and turned? How could he infer that they had deserved what had happened to them? How could he stand there and say to all these people that their loved ones had been taken from them as a natural and righteous act of God?
I clenched my fist in my lap and glanced around.
No one seemed angry.
As a matter of fact, everyone seemed to be in complete agreement, watching Michael as he spoke fervently from the front of the room.
Everyone except Maria.
Maria had her head slightly bowed and her hands clasped tightly in her lap. Her entire body was tense.
“Zechariah 14:12. And the Lord will send a plague on all the nations…. Their people will become like walking corpses, their flesh rotting away. Their eyes will rot in their sockets, and their tongues will rot in their mouths. On that day they will be terrified, stricken by the Lord with great panic. They will fight their neighbors hand to hand.”
Michael glanced up from the passage he’d read and glanced around the room in the silence that followed.
“As we already know, our God is a just God. He knew, even back when the Bible was being written, that He would one day have to send a plague upon the Earth to rid us of unbelievers, to rid us of the apples that looked shiny and sweet on the outside and yet were as rotten, dead, and full of worms on the inside as they now are on the outside. We now see the unbelievers for what they truly are, their outer shell reflects the contents of their hearts. We know who God has chosen to remain upon the Earth, who he has decided will repopulate the Earth and live out their days according to His word and His commandments.”
Michael’s eyes had been on Maria for several moments, but her own eyes never raised to meet his. She sat there stiffly, surely aware that he directed his stare in her direction. I imagined he did that a lot and I chafed at the thought.
“We have to accept it as truth before it’s too late and God deems us as unworthy as those unbelievers who still roam the Earth, dragging their rotting corpses around and doing God’s will by ridding his new world of those who still might not have put their faith in His will and the words of His chosen messengers.”
I flinched.
By chosen messengers, I took it he meant himself.
Maria’s head popped up, her eyes wide as she met Michael’s glare. He had meant that last specifically for her and I once again wondered how she had come to be at such a place. She didn’t seem the religious nut type and she didn’t act like she really even wanted to be anywhere near Michael.
Would he not let her leave?
Had he threatened her?
As abruptly as the sermon had begun, Michael, sure he had gotten the point he wanted to make across, rounded out the morning with a few Bible verses about virtuous living and admonishing the women to make sure they gave the men no reason to make sexual advances outside of marriage.
My mind tuned most of his final words out. I was conscious of the fact that I was nearly the only person in the room who was astonished by how backward and absolutely medieval the entire camp operated. How two years of death and horrors had turned back time for women and civil rights for hundreds of years.
Just like that, with one man and one book, women were once again being treated like property and the Bible and religion were being used to control the masses.
I felt ill.
“Let’s bow our heads in prayer...”
I bowed my head, not in prayer, but in thought, wondering how fast I could get the hell out of Camp Victory and put the entire sickening place far behind me.
When chapel service was dismissed, I was the first person out the door and I didn’t stop until I was back in the wash house so I could splash my face with cold water and take a few moments to let my blood pressure lower. I could hoof it from where I was back to what was left of civilization, but it would be so much easier to get back to the base if I could get Uncle Gus to drive me into town.
Besides, I really had no idea where I was exactly, nor how far back into the woods.
Had to be back far enough that all the zombies from the neighboring towns weren’t a threat to the camp, but how far back was that exactly? Maybe Uncle Gus could at least get me a map or an idea.
I’d been in worse situations.
With my mind made up to find Uncle Gus and to get on my way as quickly as possible, I left the washroom and wandered through the camp.
I needed to put miles between myself and Camp Victory, and soon.
The more miles the better. The sooner the better.
For everyone.
Chapter Eight
Run. Run. Fast as You Can.
Out of only a hundred or so people, you’d think one older man who spat chewing tobacco wouldn’t have been a problem to find.
You would be wrong.
No one seemed to know where Uncle Gus had gotten off to and I found myself ready to strangle some folk just to get a straight answer. I’d been circling the camp for a half hour questioning people when I realized with a jolt that I’d wound up in the women’s section o
f the camp.
I stopped mid-stride and took two steps back the way I’d come when someone called out to me.
“You look like you are a lost little puppy.”
I turned to find Maria smiling sardonically at me from between two cabins. She was hanging clothes on a line.
“Which shouldn’t even be possible, seeing as how the camp is pretty small, but yeah, I’d say you’re definitely lost.”
I let out a sigh and walked over to Maria at the clothesline.
She glanced around before she spoke again.
“You don’t belong here, Tex,” she said simply, her smile gone as she reached down to grab a white shirt to hang on the line with old fashioned clothes pins.
“I know I don’t.” I breathed in deeply and met her tired brown eyes.
“I was just looking for Uncle Gus so I could talk to him about leaving. I thought maybe he would be willing to give me a ride into the nearest town or even provide me a map so I can get going on my own.”
Her eyes searched mine before she clenched her jaw and went back to her task of hanging laundry.
“Uncle Gus will be around in a little while. A few of the men have a meeting with Michael every Wednesday right after chapel.” Maria shrugged.
“It usually takes about an hour, so you have a few minutes before you need to head back into the other section of the camp. Uncle Gus will be near the chapel then,” she said brusquely.
After a moment of silence, with nothing except the breeze and the scent of clean linen on the air between us, I spoke up.
“You don’t belong here either,” I said gently.
Maria’s hand stilled above the line, a wet skirt and pin in her hand.
“Some of these people might. Some of them might even believe all that garbage Michael was spouting in chapel, but not you.”
Maria snapped out of her stunned silence and continued her job, pushing her basket with her foot further down the line.
“You don’t know me, Tex.”
State of | Book 2 | State of Ruin Page 5