State of | Book 2 | State of Ruin

by Martinez, P. S.

  When he came at me the final time, his head was smashed in on one side, the left eye was protruding from its socket, and it looked as though his body had been dead and decaying for a week.

  I clenched my teeth and swung at him, putting out of my mind all the time we’d spent together as Army brothers. Putting aside all the laughs we’d shared, all the pranks we’d pulled. And putting aside all the family I knew he had waiting on him at home.

  This wasn’t the real Sergio any longer.

  My weapon of choice, a broken lamp from Ikea, smashed into his already broken skull and he dropped to the ground in front of me. Still he gurgled, still his arms moved, reaching out for me.

  I brought the lamp base down again and again until the corpse no longer moved and until I was sure that the monster who had once been one of my best friends would never get up.

  I sat roughly on the floor of the hallway with blood and bits of bone and other stuff I ignored splattered all over my boxers and tee shirt. I sat there with my back to the wall while people came and asked me questions I didn’t hear.

  Until they moved the thing that I’d put down, and until they took me away to the medical ward.

  “Welcome to the new world” was the only thought I had that morning.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  What Comes Next?

  Fucking sandman won’t leave me alone lately, I thought, jolting awake with a pounding heart and a throbbing head.

  Too many memories all coming back to haunt me in my sleep.

  As if I didn’t have enough nightmares to deal with when I was awake. I got my breathing under control and sat up. Maria and the baby were still asleep. I watched them sleep for a long while, glad to have a simple pleasure to brighten up the darkness in my life.

  I was an idiot to have brought them out of the safety of Camp Victory.

  “Tex?” Maria’s eyes fluttered open and it took her a moment to focus on me.

  “How long have you been awake?” she asked.

  “Not that long. I was just sitting here watching you two sleep and wondering exactly what the hell I was thinking when I took you away from Camp Victory.”

  Maria’s gaze softened.

  “You were thinking you were helping me do what I would’ve attempted to do on my own eventually anyway,” she said.

  “At least this way I have you to help me, and I didn’t have to take Rose out on my own. I never would’ve made it.”

  “Fat lot of good that did ya,” I grumbled.

  “Here we are shut up in a room as prisoners, waiting for Warren to show up and feed us a few more lines of bull crap until he reveals what he really wants us for.”

  “It could have happened to me, whether I was with you or not,” she countered. I snorted.

  “Or maybe I never would have even made it this far. I could have been killed, along with Rose, long before making it to this point.”

  I let my head fall back onto the wall behind me. She was right, of course, yet it didn’t make me feel like everything that was happening was any less my fault.

  “Warren’s got something planned for us and whatever it is, it isn’t going to be good,” I said after a moment.

  “I know,” Maria replied.

  Rose wiggled around, her eyelids twitching, trying hard to bring herself out of a relaxing slumber.

  “Whatever it is, we’ll face it together.”

  Maria’s gaze was fierce, protective. She was a mama tiger.

  “I’ll die protecting you and the baby.”

  My voice was low, but Maria heard and understood.

  We both realized that whatever Warren was planning, he wasn’t planning on us liking it or even surviving. Why else would he not say it outright last night? He had paraded all of his “accomplishments” in front of us proudly, took the time to treat us to a nice dinner, and made sure he planted the seeds that we actually were going to have a choice in “helping” him.

  Maria and I both knew better, we both had our eyes wide open, the only way you can see your enemy’s next move. With eyes wide open, even if you didn’t like what was headed your way, at least you could prepare yourself.

  The baby had played, eaten, and fallen back to sleep for nap before anyone came to get us out of our cell. By then, we were packed up and ready to go. We knew we wouldn’t be coming back to the elementary school once we left it… one way or the other.

  “Do you need anything for the baby?”

  This came from the girl that followed us with a gun to our backs as we marched behind Carter and a few other armed children. It was the same girl that served us in the cafeteria the previous night.

  “We could use a few more old clothes for diapering and something soft for her to eat,” Maria said after an awkward silence.

  “We ran out of her snacks last night.”

  From the corner of my eye I saw the girl nod once before breaking away from the group and heading in a different direction. The two other kids behind us stayed and kept their guns trained on us.

  We were led back into the cafeteria where breakfast was provided by Carter.

  We ate hot oatmeal with cinnamon. Warren was curiously absent.

  “So, you know what Warren has planned for us?” I asked nearly half an hour later. Maria and the baby were finishing up her oatmeal and I’d caught Carter watching us, sometimes his features softening just a smidge until he’d catch himself and force a scowl.

  “I’m not permitted to say,” he said, uttering his first words since escorting us to the cafeteria.

  “But you do know.”

  “We just want to be left alone,” Maria said gently, her tone soft and motherly.

  “We want out of here, we’ll never come back.”

  She ran a hand over Rose’s tiny curls.

  “We just want to get the baby to safety.” Maria’s eyes pleaded with Carter to let us know what was going on. Carter’s jaw tightened and I thought that there was no way he was giving up an info, but he breathed out and his shoulders sagged in defeat.

  “Look, all I know is that Warren wants you to help with the high school. It has been overrun and we’ve had no success getting through the dead to loot the supplies there. The cafeteria canned food will feed our camp of kids for a long time.”

  His eyes begged Maria to understand.

  “What can we do that you all haven’t tried already? What would only two more sets of hands do to break through so overwhelming a mass of dead outside the school?”

  Maria sounded flabbergasted.

  I felt frustrated. Carter looked sick suddenly.

  “He doesn’t want you to help us break through the undead,” Carter said.

  Maria looked at me, an obvious question on her face. I was afraid I knew the answer to her unasked question. I turned and asked Carter anyway.

  “If he doesn’t want our help breaking through the horde, what does he want us to do then?” I asked through clenched teeth.

  Carter met my eyes, shutters beginning to slam down once again, to protect himself from the ugly truth.

  “He wants you to distract them,” he said.

  Air rushed from my lungs and I found myself on my feet. Every gun in the room was instantly on me, except for Carter’s. Carter knew I would not try anything that might end up unintentionally hurting the baby.

  “What does that mean… distract them?” Maria asked sharply.

  She stood slowly, aware of the tension coursing through the room. Then she gasped.

  “Bait,” she whispered beneath her breath, trying the words out on her own to see if they meant something other than what we both suspected.

  “He plans to use us as live bait, so that while the zombies are distracted by their hot, fresh happy meal, he can take a crew of foragers into the high school and loot the cafeteria. He might even be able to eliminate enough of the distracted zombies to make a second trip possible,” I said, rage building up inside of me.

  My fists clenched and a noise deep in the back of my th
roat rumbled out, making a few of the child-soldiers nearby antsy.

  “You should’ve killed us,” Maria said, and Carter flinched.

  I turned to her, my gaze landing on a woman, a mother, who had suddenly realized exactly how precarious our situation was. Our odds of surviving this were so slim that they bordered on nonexistent.

  “You’ve killed us,” Maria accused.

  Carter’s eyes widened.

  The teen girl had just walked up to Carter, she had an Army issued bag in her hand, her eyes widening when she let Maria’s words soak in.

  “Carter?” she asked, looking at him.

  “You’ve killed us. You’ve killed my baby!” Maria screamed.

  Carter stumbled back. The girl near him flinched, glancing between all of us. She had no idea what was going on. She probably didn’t know about Warren’s plans.

  “Now, now, let’s not be overdramatic.”

  Warren.

  We all turned to the sound of his voice. He stood in the doorway, dressed in Army fatigues. Maria’s body hummed in aggression as she stood next to me, holding Rose on her hip. If Maria thought she even had a chance, I know she would have launched herself at Warren and scratched his eyes out.

  “So, this is your little project,” I spat.

  “Feeding people, including a woman and an innocent baby, to the undead just so you can scavenge a school. You’re disgusting.”

  Warren walked further into the room.

  “I’m not proud of this, but I’m also not going to deny it. I’ve tried a lot of different things to get through to that school. I have over forty children here I need to take care of, to provide food and supplies for. That high school will help us survive for months,” he said.

  “So you’re willing to kill three people that easily… to survive?” Maria asked.

  Warren looked at her like she’d lost her mind.

  “I’m not going to kill you,” he said, seemingly offended. “I’m going to give you a bag of supplies, weapons, and everything any of my children would need to make it seventy-two hours alone in the infested world.”

  He sounded so very sure that he wasn’t doing anything wrong.

  “And then?”

  “And then I’m going to let you go.”

  “Right next to the high school,” I said sarcastically.

  Warren nodded.

  Oh sure, he was going to be letting us go and giving us weapons and gear, but only before driving us to a zombie hotspot and dumping us, veritably ringing the damn dinner bell. He knew what our odds were.

  He knew we would be overwhelmed and ripped to pieces within minutes, yet he’d convinced himself he wasn’t killing us because he had equipped us with survival gear.

  Well, la-de-fucking-da.

  “I’m going to kill you,” I said, not bothering to raise my voice.

  Nick, who stood next to Warren, moved to lunge forward.

  Warren put a hand out to stop him.

  “I hope you get the chance to try,” he said as if he really meant it.

  I stared at him. If he came anywhere near me, if I even got the slimmest of an opportunity, Warren would die. He saw it in my eyes and he nodded his head.

  Just so long as we were clear.

  “Get them ready to go,” Warren barked and turned to leave the room.

  Nick and a few other kids trailed after him. I turned to Maria and put a hand on her shoulder.

  She searched my face, looking for answers that were nowhere to be found.

  “We have a chance,” I said. “Not much of one, but it’s there.”

  She nodded and then sank back down into her seat. I sat down next to her, feeling the weights on my shoulders grow even heavier.

  “We have a chance,” she echoed.

  Her voice was hollow and so was my heart.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Hope Against the Odds

  “I put a box of baby cereal in the bag for you and a few things of applesauce, along with a pack of diapers I found,” the girl said softly, not meeting Maria’s eyes.

  “I also brought this,” she said, her hand outstretched with her offering. I took the black contraption from her and held it up.

  “It’s a baby carrier,” Maria said after I stood there like an idiot for a few minutes. She didn’t thank the girl, she was way past that point. The girl didn’t appear to take offense, though.

  “I found some of this stuff in a nursery about a block away from here a long time back. I stashed it away just in case we ever had someone show up here who might need it,” the girl said, showing me how the carrier worked.

  I could tell right away it was going to make carrying Rose a lot easier, a lot safer.

  “Thank you,” I said. The girl still didn’t look up at me.

  “Don’t thank me,” she said harshly.

  “I wish it could be different.” She cleared her throat.

  “I also put a bottle of baby fever medicine and allergy medicine in the bag. I thought maybe you could give the baby the medicine before…”

  Maria smothered a cry of distress and bowed her head over Rose’s.

  I nodded my thanks to the teen. We would give Rose some medicine in her bottle to help her relax and sleep. If we survived, she’d be knocked out during most of the struggle. If we didn’t… well, maybe she wouldn’t be awake when it happened.

  I tightened my jaw.

  “Jenna, you need to go now,” Carter said, glancing toward the doorway.

  “Nick will be back here any second and I don’t want you in any kind of trouble with him or Warren.”

  Jenna paused as she reached the door, glancing back at us, her lips parting to say something. She thought better of it though and clamped her lips closed and strode through the door.

  “There isn’t much time,” Carter said as soon as Jenna had gone through the door. He walked over and spoke in a hushed voice.

  “You both will be given knives right before they let you go. I stashed a loaded gun inside your bag, hidden in the diapers that Jenna gave you. There is also a second magazine to reload. You have about forty-eight bullets total. Make them count.”

  Maria perked up, listening intently to what Carter had to say.

  “Why are you doing this?” I asked him.

  “Really? We don’t have time for all that right now. I never wanted any of this to happen, so I want to help you guys have a fighting chance.”

  I nodded. No arguments from me.

  “Not far from the high school, about three blocks south, there is a street with a bunch of cottages, Buck Street. All of the houses are empty. We’ve been there, it’s as close as we’ve gotten to the high school without having to pull back. Head there and go to the white house with green shutters. The house is secure from the dead and I have a secret stash hidden there in a toy box under a bunch of stuffed animals in a pink bedroom. Enough food for a few days, hurricane candles, water, and another gun with ammo.”

  “A secret stash?” I asked.

  Carter shrugged.

  “I started preparing it a few weeks back just in case I ever needed to get out or if things ever went south,” he explained.

  “Anyway, there is also a car in the garage, it worked a few days ago and has a quarter tank of gas. I wouldn’t take off in it until you’re sure Warren and the rest of our crew isn’t in the area after looting the school. If they see you, no matter what Warren says, he will kill you.”

  “Got it.”

  Carter stepped back so as not to look quite as suspicious if anyone were to walk in.

  “I wish I could do more,” he said.

  “You did more than anyone else. You gave us hope,” I said honestly.

  A gun. A plan. I could work with that.

  Our odds were still bad, but I now had hope and sometimes hope could outmatch any odds. The baby started fussing. It was time for her bottle. Maria opened up the bag and took out the allergy medicine and added some to the baby’s bottle.

  She hesitated
only a moment before giving it to her. She rocked the baby and sang softly to her until her bottle was empty and she fell into a deep sleep.

  Maria met my stare and raised her chin.

  “I won’t let her die,” she said with all the conviction she possessed.

  “We won’t let her die,” I promised. I meant every word of that promise.

  Just then, Nick came through the cafeteria doors with two other kids.

  “Time to go,” he announced cheerfully.

  I ignored him and stood, picking up the black baby carrier.

  “Put the baby on my back,” I said to Maria.

  Maria’s eyes widened and she tightened her hold on her daughter. She had always been the one to carry her, to keep her safe in the circle of her arms.

  “Tex…”

  “Sweetheart, I’m stronger. I can carry her weight and hold my own in hand-to-hand combat. You’ll tire faster and that can make it more dangerous for you and for Rose.”

  She looked torn. I knew she trusted me, but it was hard for her to put her baby in someone else’s arms when she knew what lay ahead of us.

  “I’ll protect her with my life,” I vowed.

  Maria smiled and kissed Rose’s tiny head one last time and then stood.

  “I know you will, Tex.”

  Maria helped me place the baby in the carrier, snuggling her in tightly with the fabric from the wrap Maria had used to carry the baby before.

  Once she was on my back, we made a few adjustments until we were sure the baby wouldn’t be jostled too easily and that she was absolutely secure in the carrier.

  We tucked her little hands into the fabric so they wouldn’t be hanging out. The only thing visible of the baby on my back were her little legs hanging down in back.

  Maria kissed her daughter’s tiny face and then pulled on the backpack Jenna gave us. She had her game face on and we both knew that in this game it was win or lose it all.

  “You two ready now?” Nick said with a smirk.

  Neither of us answered him, or even looked at him, we just followed him out the door and toward our uncertain future.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Into the Belly of the Beast