Rose sleeping, playing, smiling. And then there was one of me.
I stared at the drawing for a long while. I looked full of life.
Full of determination and hope. I never saw myself that way before.
“They’re amazing,” I said sincerely. Maria blushed.
I handed the sketchbook back to her.
“What about you?” she asked softly.
I shrugged.
“My family is… was… all in Texas. I was an only child. Spoiled rotten.” Maria snorted.
“I was in the Army when it happened, on base, and on lockdown. I wasn’t allowed to leave. My wife was at home.”
Maria breathed in sharply. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.
It really seemed like so long ago now. We sat in silence for a few minutes. I stood and walked over to the windows, taking a look outside. Maria followed behind me.
“Tex, I’ve been thinking...” Her voice was serious and immediately I felt the hairs on the back of my neck rise.
“What is it?”
“I know I have no right to ask this, I know I even promised you that I wouldn’t, but being back out here in the middle of everything… I just have to be sure of something.”
“Ask me,” I said, my jaw tight.
“If anything happens to me….” I flinched and took a step away.
Maria put a hand on my arm to still me.
“No. Please let me finish,” she pleaded.
I tamped down my own fears, my own insecurities, and nodded briskly.
“If anything happens to me out there, I need to know if you’ll do everything in your power to make sure Rose gets to the base.”
She tightened her grip on my forearm when I flinched and continued on.
“I meant what I said about you couldn’t possibly be held responsible for my actions or for mine and Rose’s lives. But I need to know that you’ll at least try to get her safety, that you’ll make sure she’s got a fighting chance at life if anything were to happen to me between here and the base,” she finished thickly.
“Nothing is going to happen to you, Maria.”
“You can’t promise that, Tex, and I don’t expect you to. I came into this with my eyes wide open. I need to know that if I fall my baby girl will have a chance. No matter how slight.”
I growled deep in my throat and pulled Maria roughly to me. She was one of the strongest and most intelligent women I’d ever met. I held her tightly as I whispered into her ear.
“Of course. I give you my word that I’ll protect Rose with my dying breath if anything happens to you. I’ll fight every zombie between here and the base with my bare hands if I have to. I won’t fail you. I won’t fail her,” I vowed.
She released a long breath of relief.
“Thank you, Tex.”
“Thank you for coming into my life, Maria. You and your little girl gave me a reason to keep going. A reason to fight another day. I owe you everything.”
She pulled back a little to look up into my eyes.
“I wish our circumstances were different,” she said.
I smiled sadly, knowing exactly what she meant.
“I’d loved to have been able to show Rose the horses my parents had on our little farm back in Texas,” I said.
“She’d have loved that,” Maria said. “I’d have loved that,” she added after a moment.
I ran my hand up her back and cupped it behind her head, angling it just so.
I brought my lips down to hers, savoring the way her eyelids lowered in desire and her lips parted in anticipation. I kissed her slowly and thoroughly, telling her without saying a word how much I wished we’d met when the world was a different place.
How much I was going to fight for her and Rose.
After we kissed as if it would be the last time either of us would enjoy the simple pleasure, we went over together to wake Rose up and to get her strapped on her mama’s back once again.
When Rose was securely in place, I pulled the little stuffed elephant out of my pocket and held it out to her. Her huge smile and immediate love of the stupid toy put an idiotic grin on my face.
Maria wiped at her eyes and glanced away.
I pretended that I didn’t notice the few tears she shed.
Maria cleared her throat.
“Ready?”
“I am,” I stated.
Chapter Seventeen
We All Die In the End
We exited the building, ready to be on our way and find a car that would take us to the Army base. The zombies were sparse, but we took down three of them before we’d even left the front of the toy store.
“Let’s head on around the building and see if there are any good cars on the other side,” I suggested. We took off in that direction, skidding to an abrupt halt when we made it around the corner.
“Where the hell do you think you’re going?”
A kid stood there. No older than thirteen, his tall lanky frame standing defiantly in front of us with his dirty brown hair hanging down over his ears. More importantly, he was pointing a shotgun directly at us, his finger already on the trigger.
Maria and I both froze in shock.
“Look, kid, we ain’t lookin’ for any trouble. We’re just moving through the area on our way somewhere safer.”
The kid’s blue eyes hardened as he stared at us.
“There’s no place that’s safe,” he said calmly.
His voice didn’t waver, his hand pointing the gun at us was calm. This kid had to have been through a lot to have survived this long. He had to have seen a lot of horrible things the past two years.
“Well, being just about anywhere would be better than being out in the open,” I said, keeping my voice as even as possible. The gun was making me jumpy.
I hated it being pointed at Maria and Rose.
“Inside or outside, we all die in the end,” he said.
It was then that I realized the kid was more than likely even younger than I’d originally thought. His eyes were the eyes of someone who’d been through a lot, seen too much in their short life time.
“That’s true enough, yet we’d like to fight as long as possible,” I said.
I still held my knife in my right fist, but Maria and I both were acutely aware of the fact that our guns were going to be of no use to us right then. This kid would have blown us away before we ever had a chance to pull our weapons.
I was certain he wouldn’t have blinked doing it either.
“That’s going to be hard to do without all your gear,” said a voice from behind us.
Maria sucked in a sharp breath and I turned to the sound of the voice. Another kid, a boy who was about ten years old, stood there with a frown on his dark brown face. Behind him stood two more children even younger than the first two boys… a little girl and another little boy, all dirty and all carrying weapons with homemade silencers.
When I turned back to the boy with the shotgun, I found a second kid had joined the first. He was the oldest of the group, a teenager, but not old enough to have been mistaken for a man. He grinned at us and I realized immediately that he was the leader of this little ragtag group of children.
“We’ll take your weapons and your bag,” the boy with the shotgun said.
I stiffened and took a step back.
“Don’t move. I will kill you!” the boy behind us yelled.
“If you take our weapons and our pack, we won’t survive,” I said through clenched teeth.
“Not our problem,” the kid with the shotgun said blandly.
I tamped down my anger and said to the children behind us, “If you do this, you’re killing us.”
The little girl glanced over at Maria and the baby and then back over to the leader of the group.
“If you do this, you’re killing the baby,” I added.
The boy who stood next to the girl flinched and glanced around his group.
Neither of them dared to say anything though.
“Hand
over your gear,” the shotgun boy said without emotion.
I hardened my jaw and started calculating all my options. Could I get to the shotgun before the kid fired? Would he fire if I moved? Just then the kid shifted his shotgun enough to have it pointing at Maria and Rose instead of me. I tensed and shifted, my heart thumping wildly in my chest.
“I said to hand it over,” he growled.
I glanced over at Maria and met her wide eyes. I nodded once.
She dropped her knife and kicked it out of her way. I did the same.
“Now the bag. Take it off and sit it on the ground at your feet,” he commanded.
I pulled the bag off of my back and did as he had instructed. His gun was still pointing at Maria and the baby. Inside I was screaming for him to point it back at me, to keep it far away from them.
On the outside I waited for the opportunity to help them.
“Max, Alexis, check them for more weapons.”
Shotgun boy nodded over to the younger of the two children and they immediately did as he asked. The little girl pulled my gun out of the back of my pants and the little boy removed the gun from Maria’s.
They both backed away and waited for their next orders.
“Now that you’ve taken everything that would have given us a chance at survival, can we go?” I asked harshly. My mind was spinning as it tried to think of where we could find anything we could use as weapons. We only needed to get to a decent vehicle, only needed to make it back to the base before dark.
Surely, even without our weapons, we had a slim chance. Our odds weren’t good, but I’d seen worse. The two younger children took down two zombies as we stood there facing the leaders of the children of the zombie apocalypse.
The boy holding the shotgun lowered it just a fraction and nodded to me.
“You can go,” he said. I clenched my jaw and turned to walk back to Maria and Rose.
“No.”
The word stopped me dead in my tracks and a tingle of unease dripped down my spine. I turned back and faced the teenager who was standing near the boy pointing the shotgun.
He had a grin on his face and his eyes were… dead.
“What do you mean?” the boy with the shotgun asked, his voice rising above the sounds of the few undead heading our way.
“I mean that they aren’t free to go, Carter,” he said evenly. I glanced back to the shotgun toting kid named Carter and saw for the first time a flicker of uncertainty cross his face.
His eyes narrowed.
“We are supposed to strip down any survivors we find of their gear and weapons and then let them go. That’s the way it’s always been, Nick, so what makes you think we should listen to you and change the way things are done this time?” Carter snapped.
Nick stepped closer to Carter and brandished his knife in front of his face. He moved the blade down his cheek and then pressed into the flesh there until a drop of blood appeared, trickling down Carter’s face.
“Because I’m in charge when Warren isn’t here, because it has been over a week since we’ve found any other survivors, and because my orders are Warren’s orders.”
I flinched from the malice in Nick’s voice. The teen was barely holding himself back. He wanted nothing more than to rip into Carter right then and there.
“You got a problem with that?” he spat, his face close enough to Carter’s that I could see the hair around the boy’s face move with the rush of Nick’s breath.
Carter clenched his jaw, still stiff and unyielding, still making no move to draw a weapon or jerk away from the tip of the blade digging into the flesh of his cheek.
“No,” he answered finally.
Nick smiled widely, clearly pleased with himself.
“Good,” he said after a moment of staring Carter down.
“I’d hate to have to tell Warren you didn’t obey his orders.” He pulled the knife back.
“You’ll be going with us,” he said, his eyes lighting up with glee.
“I don’t think we will,” I ground out.
“Really? Then how about I blow a hole through your friend and her baby.”
I flinched and held up a hand.
“Why would you want more mouths to feed?” I asked, taking a step back.
His smile calculating, he raised his handgun, which had a makeshift silencer on the end.
“Who said we were going to feed you?”
His eyes sliced through whatever he looked at. I couldn’t find even a sliver of humanity there. “And if you keep moving without me telling you to, I’m going to kill all of you here and now,” he said as casually as if he were talking about a baseball game.
“Okay,” I said, fully aware that we had been bested by a bunch of kids who wouldn’t hesitate to kill us where we stood if it meant their survival.
“Alright, let’s get going. We need to get back to the rest of the group before it gets much later,” he said to Carter. Carter nodded, bringing his shotgun back up to point at us. He walked over and placed the barrel of the gun at the center of my back.
“Don’t try anything. Just move when we say move,” he said stiffly, giving me a little shove. I caught Maria’s gaze out of the corner of my eye.
She had realized a while back that we were really up a shit-creek without a paddle.
The kids took care of zombies with eerie accuracy and efficiency on the move.
We came upon a plain white van a few blocks away and were unceremoniously shoved inside with Carter watching our every move and most of the other kids sitting in back with us, all of whom seemed uneasy that they had gone from pillaging supplies and weapons to kidnapping in the space of a few moments.
Whatever this Warren had planned for us, I knew it couldn’t be anything good. I just prayed that I would eventually have the opportunity to keep my word and get my chance to get Maria and Rose to safety.
No matter the personal cost, I had to get them to the base.
I was their only hope.
It was my mission.
It was my only hope.
Chapter Eighteen
Apocalyptic Kiddie Brigade
We didn’t go far by my estimation.
Maybe four or five miles at most before we came to a stop. When the doors to the back of the van were yanked open and we were pushed back outside, I had a fleeting question as to why the kids hadn’t blindfolded us to keep us from knowing where to find their hideout, but the question flitted away as quickly as it had entered my mind.
There was no reason to blindfold us if we were never going to leave this place. The kids’ hideout was an elementary school. An elementary school completely surrounded by a secure, chain link fence.
Sitting on the outskirts of town, it was in a prime location from the zombies that probably had overtaken the town just down the road and within our line of sight. With the town within spitting distance, I expected to see more zombies surrounding the chain link fence that separated the school from the undead, but there were only a few stragglers in the area and as soon as they came within two to three feet of the fence, a muffled shot would sound and the zombie would drop to the pavement with a hole in its head, truly dead at last.
“Quickly,” Nick said.
“We don’t have all day.”
I walked next to Maria, my eyes scanning the school and the fence line, trying to come up with a viable way out if we could get free. I spotted several shooters on the top of the school and two on the ground outside of the main building. They were there to watch the perimeter and to keep the area surrounding the fence clear of zombies.
Most of them were children, though a few of them had to be eighteen or nineteen, maybe even twenty None were older than that.
I counted six outside and then five in the crew who had picked us up near the toy store.
When we entered the school, we walked quietly down hallways with the crew who had grabbed us at our backs and Nick leading the way.
When we passed the gym, both Maria and I stopped, our
mouths opening in shock. There were probably more than twenty kids of varying ages in the gym. Some of them were working out, some were playing basketball, and some were practicing their knife skills on a set of mats nailed to the wall with human outlines drawn on them.
I hadn’t seen so many children in one place since before the dead reanimated. We stood there almost in awe despite our circumstances.
Rose picked that moment to cry and the noise echoed down the hallway all around us. The entire gym of children paused at once, instantly turning their heads in our direction. I was reminded once again that our world had changed into something twisted and ugly.
Some of the kids looked surprised, some looked curious, even more looked wary.
All of them looked at us with distrust and shuttered glances.
These children were killers.
Every single one of them, whether they had only killed the dead or whether they had to do worse things to survive, had all been touched by darkness and death.
They were all a threat to Maria and the baby.
“Shut that kid up and keep moving,” Nick barked at Maria.
We moved down the hallway and the baby thankfully quieted. We walked a little while longer until Nick stopped outside of a door at the end of a corridor right off the main hallway.
“Get in,” Nick commanded.
Maria entered in front of me and I followed, making sure I kept Nick in my peripheral vision. Everything about the kid put me on edge and I didn’t want him anywhere near Maria or Rose.
The room was tiny and bare except for a dingy mattress near the wall and a plastic chair in a corner. The single window in the room was not only high up, but also way too small for any sort of escape plan to work.
“How long do you plan on keeping us here?” I asked.
Nick and Carter stood in the doorway. I could also see the face of the little girl, Alexis, a little beyond them but no one else.
“That will be up to Warren,” Nick spat. He turned to leave.
“The baby will need her bottle, it has water in it, and a little food. Just a little,” Maria pleaded. Nick sneered at her, but Carter reached behind him to a boy who stood out of my line of vision who must have been holding our bag.
State of | Book 2 | State of Ruin Page 10