We were brought out into the front of the elementary school where Warren and a band of almost twenty children waited. All of the kids, including Nick and the young girl whose brother went out into the dark the night before, were armed with guns and knives.
“You six will be going in the van with Nick. Roger will be driving. Pull around the front area of the school as quickly as possible and drop these two off right in the middle of the street. Once they are cleared of the van, haul ass out of there and swing back the opposite way around toward the side of the school. Once the zombies start going after them, we’ll be ready to make our move on the side of the school, near where the buses picked up and dropped off.”
Everyone nodded.
Not a single child looked at us. We weren’t even there as far as they were concerned, we were just a means to an end. We could have been cattle for all they cared.
“I hope you guys make it, for your baby’s sake,” Warren said.
Without warning, Maria spat in his face, throwing Spanish curses at him.
Some I understood, some I’d never heard in my entire life, but one little Spanish kid standing nearby looked scandalized, and terrified by what he heard coming from Maria’s mouth.
“She says ‘fuck you’,” I translated in summary when she was finished.
Warren wiped his face on the arm of his long sleeve.
The entire group froze; the only sounds came from the dead in town and a few gunshots.
Even Nick was surprised into immobility.
“Let’s go,” Warren said, turning toward the vehicles that awaited us.
And just like that, we were loaded into the back of a van and heading right into the belly of the beast.
I grabbed Maria’s hand and leaned into her so I could whisper in her ear.
“As soon as we are clear of the van, you get the gun and ammo out of the bag. I’ll cover you until then,” I said as quietly as possible. Maria nodded once.
She removed one of the backpack straps, allowing the bag to hang from one shoulder. It would make it a lot easier for her to get the bag off and to be able to reach the gun.
Nick sneered from across the van. He thought she was an idiot.
Carrying a bag like that was risky. I was content to let him think we were incompetent.
Maria reached over and touched the baby’s head gently, whispering a prayer as she leaned up to kiss her brow. I wanted to reassure her, to tell her everything was going to be alright, but I didn’t want her to think was going to be easy, that our odds were any better than she thought, because it wasn’t and they weren’t.
The van was moving fast, faster than anyone usually dared to drive when there were shambling corpses everywhere, ready to stumble out in front of you and cause an accident.
“One minute!” the kid from the front yelled.
Maria’s hand tightened in mine.
“Here are your weapons,” Nick said, holding out two nice looking recon blades.
I reached out and grasped the hilt, noticing how the other three kids in the van all tensed and made sure I knew I had guns trained on me. Maria also took her blade firmly in hand.
If I were those kids, I would’ve been nervous too. Maria looked like she would have gladly plunged her knife through the throat of anyone in the van.
“Thirty seconds!” the kid shouted from the driver’s seat.
The van shifted and thumped along loudly when the kid sideswiped several objects in the street. I could only imagine those objects were the dead who’d walked into the path of the vehicle.
As fast as we were flying through town, the van came to an abrupt halt, nearly throwing everyone onto the floor. Two boys threw the van doors open and opened fire on the dead nearby.
There were a lot of them.
Nick grabbed Maria and gave her a shove toward the doors.
She barely kept her grip on her knife and the bag on her back slipped awkwardly on her arm. A large, silent kid pointed a shotgun at my back and then gave me a shove as well. As soon as my feet hit the pavement, Nick kicked his leg out and connected with Maria’s lower back, sending her sprawling into the pavement below.
I shoved my blade in the first zombie to reach us, keeping myself close to Maria and the van at the same time. Nick planted his blade in the skull of a zombie that had gotten close enough to reach the van’s door.
As soon as he jerked it free and reached out with a hand to close the door, I knew the van was one second away from speeding off. I reached up and grabbed Nick’s leg and jerked with all my might. No one anticipated the move and before they could react, the van was already speeding away and the dead were moving in.
Nick’s head had ricocheted off of the bumper of the van, knocking him out cold onto the road.
I spun around, not sparing a glance for the kid.
Maria and I moved several yards away from the unconscious Nick, hoping the zombies would go for him as an easy meal.
My knife stopped a zombie merely a foot from Maria as she grappled with the backpack to find the gun. The undead had found Nick and were tearing into him, his screams and the scent of fresh blood drawing a crowd of the zombies in his direction.
Not all of them were enticed away from us though. Several groups of the undead were still headed in our direction, and many more were coming from the area of the high school.
Warren’s plan was working.
My survival instincts took over and I cut and slashed my way through half a dozen walking corpses.
As the sound of moaning and gurgling rose, so did my apprehension.
We needed to get out of here, let the zombies feast on Nick, and make every effort to get to Buck Street. The longer we were in the middle of town, out in the open, the higher our odds of getting ourselves killed.
It seemed like an eternity passed until Maria pulled the gun out of the backpack and handed it to me. Her fighting arm began moving as soon as she handed the gun over.
Rotten zombie parts littered the ground around us and rancid fluids slushed along the streets.
We stood back-to-back, keeping the baby between us and slicing our way south toward a side street. We heard bones cracking and flesh ripping as the dead tore Nick into little bitty bite-sized pieces. I was still using my knife when we turned a corner and found an opening large enough in the horde to try and make a run for it.
“Run, Maria!” I shouted. “There!”
I pointed to the rapidly closing space.
We ran full out, dodging more than a dozen zombies that lurched into our path and killing several others, hoping against hope that we could get ahead of the zombies that teemed in the streets. We made it past several streets before we turned a corner.
The horde of zombies was thicker here. I pulled the gun Carter had given us and started taking them down with single shots to the head as rapidly as I could and still they kept coming. For every zombie Maria plunged her knife into, I took down three more with the gun.
And yet, they seemed to be multiplying.
“We could break into a house and wait it out!” Maria shouted as she plunged her knife into the eye socket of a thin zombie still wearing a McDonald’s uniform.
“We can’t, not with this many surrounding us. They’d box us in and we’d have no way out to get food or supplies. Our best bet is to try and make it the house Carter told us about.”
I lunged forward and brought my knife down into the top of the skull of a corpse that had gotten way too close for comfort.
“We have to move then,” Maria grunted, pushing a huge zombie back into the fray of bodies pressing our way. I jumped up on the porch of a house we were fighting in front of.
“Let’s go through here. We can go back out the back door or a window on the other side of the house.”
As soon as Maria got up on the porch, I wiggled the handle of the door. To my relief, it was unlocked. I swung the door open after shooting the three zombies that had already climbed onto the porch after us.
We slammed the door shut once we were inside and did a brief search of the house. Nothing dead or alive was inside. We ran to the back of the house and I sent up a prayer that the back of the house, the yard, and area surrounding would be a little better than the front. To my relief, the backyard had a privacy fence and was completely empty.
Maria and I both were breathing heavily, but I knew now was not the time to rest.
We had to keep moving and get to Buck Street.
“There’s a gate over there that leads into the backyard,” Maria said in a rush.
She wiped her gore-splattered hands on her jeans and then tightened her grip back around the handle of the recon blade.
“We should be close to Buck Street now, maybe another block. We’ll move fast, making as little noise as possible.”
I checked my gun. Six bullets left.
I shoved the gun in my waistband and pulled my knife back out. It was going to have to be hand-to-hand the rest of the way. We didn’t want to draw any more dead toward us if at all possible. We’d lucked out so far, no need to make stupid mistakes at this point.
When we got to the gate, I stood there trying to figure out if all the noise in the area was from the dead in the front of the house, or if we’d be walking out into even worse conditions in the back. Unfortunately, there were so many moaning and gurgling undead moving about in the area, it was impossible to tell.
“Ready?” I asked. Maria’s eyes flicked to Rose on my back and then back to me. Her jaw tightened and her eyes showed her resolve.
“I’m ready,” she said.
I opened the back gate enough for both of us to squeeze through. We walked right out into a tiny back alley, just large enough for a single car to squeeze through. Instead of a car blocking our way, we found dozens of zombies standing idle, just waiting for something to snap them out of their inactivity.
Even with the promise of fresh meat, though, these zombies were slow, their skin nearly bursting with fluids so near the surface that a single cut or poke of our knives would result in fetid liquids bursting forth like an unholy geyser.
We didn’t have time to contemplate the nearly liquefied state of the zombies though, even slow and sloshy, they still had numbers and teeth on their side. We moved fast, taking advantage of the fact that the undead in this specific area were having a hard time lifting their arms and moving.
By the time we’d sliced our way through the tight space, the back alley looked like a small river.
A river comprised of the most noxious smelling liquid zombie guts on the planet.
We moved further away from the scene that could have been straight out of a horror movie with a nonexistent budget. If I hadn’t been there myself, I never would have believed it had happened.
We ran for all that we were worth, cutting down however many zombies got in our way.
When we crossed a street in front of a boarded up Baptist church, I saw the sign that signaled we were coming up on Buck Street only two streets away.
Our goal.
We were going to make it. Just as the thought came to me, a low buzzing sound filled the air, almost like an odd white noise, but nothing natural, nothing that sounded like it belonged in this once picturesque little southern town.
It was a sound I knew all too well and it was the sound that I had only heard when I lived in Charlotte… the sound of hundreds and hundreds of the undead packed together.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Never Have Been Lucky
“Madre de Dios,” Maria uttered, crossing herself.
Zombies flooded the street in front of us, pouring out of the street that ran next to the church and the street between us and our goal. Hundreds of them staggered, some slowly, some quicker than the others.
The quicker ones were on us before we could formulate a game plan.
After taking down several zombies, we backed up, intending to go back the way we’d come. But the street we’d just been on, the one that had only had about two dozen zombies when we moved through it, also had dozens issuing out.
Where were they all coming from? It was like someone had opened up a flood gate and let them out at the worst time possible. If I didn’t know that Warren was at the high school, taking advantage of his well laid plans, I would have thought that he’d somehow orchestrated the whole thing.
But, the truth was we were just un-fucking-lucky.
Several groups of the undead had converged and then happened to meet up in the exact same place we were headed.
“What do we do?” Maria gasped, shoving her knife in the right temple of an elderly female zombie wearing a dress and a string of pearls.
I didn’t know what to tell her. I didn’t know what to do next, how I could get her and the baby to safety.
“Tex!” Maria shouted. “What do we do now?”
Her voice was panicked… just like I felt. Only, I didn’t know our next move. The baby on my back was a constant reminder of everything that was at stake. The undead making their way toward us from all directions were going to win.
My life had to mean more than this. It had to have meaning, even if that meaning was to die so that Rose would be able to live.
With that thought, I pointed to the old church behind us.
“Follow close beside me!”
Maria nodded, ready to do anything so long as we were taking some kind of action. I sliced through the undead as I ran. Each swing of my knife hit a zombie that led up to the church’s front steps. If I could get us there, just get us out of the mass of lumbering bodies that were quickly closing in on us, maybe we’d have a chance. Just maybe.
We made it up to the step, but dozens of zombies, squishy and slow or not, made it at the same time as us. We fought for what seemed like an hour only to keep the zombies far enough from us that they didn’t trample us or get between us and our target.
When we finally got to the front door of the church, I don’t know. I guess I thought it was going to be open just like the house we’d ducked inside was.
But it wasn’t.
It was locked and closed up tight.
The windows were also boarded up.
Maria took down three zombies while I beat my booted foot against the front doors, cursing them as I did. The doors were solid and there was no way we’d be getting through them. In an instant, all our hopes of surviving were dashed. Zombies were flooding in from every direction around us and all we had was a locked, impenetrable church door at our back.
I was out of bullets, out of time, and never had luck on my side to begin with.
“It can’t end like this!” Maria shouted, tears streaming down her face as we fought the zombies who staggered unsteadily up the steps of the church. We were both becoming fatigued and that meant we wouldn’t be able to hold out much longer.
Something had to happen. If I only had some way to distract the zombies, some way to get them headed in another direction so Maria and the baby could get free.
“Maria, you need to take the baby. I’m going to lead the zombies away, cause a distraction so you can have a chance,” I said over the noise.
She whipped her head around briefly, meeting my eyes, her own wide in understanding.
“You’d sacrifice yourself for me?” she asked.
“For Rose?”
“Without a doubt,” I replied, shoving back two zombies with a foot to their midsections, knocking them back into the fray trying to push their way up the church steps.
“We just need to figure out how to get the baby off my back and onto yours without letting these meat bags gain ground on us,” I said gruffly.
My knife penetrated the temple of the zombie in front of me and I once again used his body to knock back the undead behind him.
“No,” Maria said.
I thought I heard her incorrectly.
“What?”
“I said no, Tex. It has to be me,” she said, kicking her own zombie back down the steps, adjusting her stance to play the same g
ame over again.
“No, Maria. No way in hell. Rose will need her mother!” I shouted, angry she even said such a stupid thing. Maria’s wide smile took me by surprise.
“Rose needs someone who is strong, someone who has the best chance of keeping her alive. Someone who is willing to die for her.” Maria’s strength seemed to renew as she spoke, her arm moved quicker, her kicks were harder, and her entire body was poised in focus of her goal.
“Maria… don’t,” I warned, my own voice shaking from fear. Fear of losing her as soon as I’d found her and fear of being the person she’d entrust her most precious cargo to.
She didn’t turn back around, she didn’t look at me or at Rose.
“Kiss her for me, Tex. Tell her every day how much I loved her. Let her find the good in the world,” she said with a broken sob.
Before I could move to stop her, before I could form the words to beg her not to, Maria threw her backpack over to me, sliced her knife across her arm, and then leapt over the side of the balustrade of the church and right into the middle of the undead fray.
I bit back a shout, not wanting to draw even more attention to myself.
I moved as fast as I could, shoving my blade into the eye of the zombie nearest me. I heaved the rather large dead man with all of my strength, watching him take down several of the zombies closest to him.
I scanned the crowd for Maria and tracked her to the spot where zombies had already begun to turn, where they already decided their next meal would come from. Her blood was pulling even the slowest zombies in her direction.
She screamed and I died a little inside.
It should have been me out there.
I grabbed Maria’s bag up and let it hang on one arm.
I saw her from the corner of my eye, bloody and swinging her knife with all her might, drawing hundreds of the animated corpses in her direction.
She had been bitten several times, and still she pushed through the crowds, still on her feet and pushing even after they had ripped into her.
She parted the crowd, but I knew she wouldn’t last much longer, and I had to get Rose to safety. I couldn’t let her sacrifice be for nothing. I pulled my gun from my waistband and took aim at the zombies that now stood between me and my goal—safety for Rose.
State of | Book 2 | State of Ruin Page 14