by Olah, Jeff
“No idea, barely got out myself. Probably three, maybe four. I think the rest of them ran.”
Another lengthy pause, at least five full seconds. And then as Randy eyed a dark grey electric vehicle near the opposite end of the lot, Mason was back.
“Owen or Natalie around?”
“They’re with the others, already heading toward the bridge.”
Mason breathed into the mic, his frustration evident. “Did Ava make it back, anyone got eyes on her?”
Travis looked away, shaking his head. He breathed out slowly and reached for the radio. “No, she hasn’t.”
Mason came back quickly, like he already knew what the answer was going to be. “Okay, I’m going after her. I think I know where she might be.”
Randy put his arm around Savannah and pulled her in close. “He’ll be okay, you know that right?”
Savannah nodded, tears again starting to fill her eyes. She didn’t respond, and instead gave him another hug and then pulled away. Her voice was now flat, cold. “Go help him.”
Randy slowly nodded. “I will, there’s just one thing I need to take care of first.”
27
Mason had cleared the first and second floors before radioing his friends. The third floor was less destroyed, although the smoke hanging in the air seemed twice as thick and now collected near the ceiling. His lungs and eyes burned, his mind felt foggy and slow, and he was having a hard time remembering the exact location of the stairs leading to the roof. Removing his shirt, he tied it over his mouth and nose, and stayed low as he scanned the darkened hall ahead.
Another five minutes and without much relief, he was on the verge of forgetting his own name. He had found the stairs, but sitting on the floor trying to fill his lungs, he didn’t know if he even had the energy.
Mason reached into his front pocket and pulled out the folded picture. He knew there would be a moment when he needed a reminder of why he was out here, of why there was absolutely no way he was going to stop, a reminder of what was more important than anything left in this world.
His friends and his family.
He unfolded the picture and stared at the image of Ava and her little brother goofing for the camera. It was from a time before he knew either of them, a time before everything changed, a time when he still had a wife and a little boy, a time he could barely recall.
Mason closed his eyes, burning the image of Ava’s face into his mind. He tucked the picture back into his pocket, stood, reached for the twin rifles, and pushed through the door.
Out onto the roof, he propped the door open as thick charcoal-colored smoke poured out and mixed with the early morning air. There was still an hour or so before the sun would be up, and if he was right, he had less time than that to find her.
It was a longshot, but it was all he had.
From the northern edge and standing atop the three-foot parapet, Mason had a two-hundred-seventy degree view of the devastation below and the unnerving stillness of the rest of the world. He brought one of the rifles up, dropped his head to the right and placed his eye behind the scope.
Following the road that led away from the rear of Harbor Crest, Mason started where he had come out of the treeline and quickly worked his way back to where he imagined Lincoln’s community would have been.
No movement, nothing at all. The wind and rain from the previous night had died away, and that was a good thing, for more than one reason. He roved the scope between the wide open spaces, the flat expanses of green that dotted the landscape, pausing to search for Feeders and observing their movements.
After what felt like an hour, he finally came upon a tight grouping of six. At first it was just a few that had wandered out into an open area, their staggering movements nearly identical in pace. However, it wasn’t until the final pair joined the crowd that he noticed what had their attention.
Ava appeared unharmed, no obvious signs of injury, although from this distance there was no real way to be sure. She looked tired, like she hadn’t had a chance to catch her breath since bolting from Lincoln’s former home. Her shoulders were rounded and her hands rested on her knees as she hid behind the base of a large pine.
Ava, don’t move.
Mason tightened his grip on the rifle and blinked a few times. His eyes were dry and felt like they were covered in sand. He tracked the first Feeder in the group, a large male wearing an orange reflective vest and light denim, who had a massive hole in the center of his neck, and was outpacing the others. He locked on a spot just below the man’s nose, breathed out slowly, and gently pulled back on the trigger.
The large male Feeder, the man in the orange vest, rocked back and to the side as his face was pushed in and the back of his head sprayed out onto the others. He took another step forward, although his left leg buckled and he dropped to the cold hard ground.
The big male Feeder fell at an angle taking out the next two as Mason removed his finger from behind the trigger and swung the end of the scope back to where Ava had been hunched behind the tree.
As he expected, she had run. There wasn’t any way to keep her safe from this distance without also having her think that she was being hunted. He told himself that this was the only way, that there wasn’t enough time for anything else.
The three remaining Feeders had caught the attention of another group. So now instead of six, he was looking through the high-powered scope at more than ten. And while he was confident in his abilities, he wasn’t sure he even had enough left in the two weapons to finish what he’d started.
“Alright, let’s do this.”
Mason lined up his next shot. This time it was a tall, thin female Feeder. She looked freshly turned, but not familiar. Her hair was still pulled back and she wore green fitted cargo pants and a black leather jacket. Her face and neck bled, the hole in her cheek exposing her jagged teeth and the muscles tying her lower jaw to her skull.
“Come on …”
His head began to pound and he was having trouble staying focused as the scorching pain on the left side of his head came rushing back. He blinked again, his eyes now beginning to blur as he slid his index finger back toward the trigger.
He hadn’t yet pulled back, but the crack of a weapon being fired caused him to flinch. He nearly lost his footing and had to lower the rifle and drop from the parapet to avoid falling to the asphalt lot, forty feet below.
The man exiting the stairwell and running toward him had his right arm extended and fired a second shot before Mason knew what was happening. The man was short and had a big gut. He waddled more than he ran, and was yelling in between his labored breaths.
“YOU KILLED … MY NEPHEW … YOU ARE GOING … TO DIE.”
Mason instinctively twisted right, the round blowing a hole in the parapet six inches from where he was crouched. With one hand he brought the rifle around and pulled back on the trigger until the weapon clicked dry.
The man’s eyes went wide and his face contorted as he took three rounds to the chest and one to the right leg, just above the knee. He was rocked off his feet, his thick body driving hard into the gravel rooftop as his leg bent at an impossible angle and snapped under the weight of his compact frame.
Mason was up and had moved to the second rifle he set near the three-foot wall. He rushed the man who was now face-down, slowly starting to leave this world. He flipped him onto his back and dropped a knee into his bloodied chest. “Any more of your friends downstairs? If you lie to me, I will kill them.”
The man looked up at Mason, his eyes unable to focus, his chest rising and falling at twice the normal speed. Death wasn’t far off. He tried to spit at Mason, but couldn’t muster the strength. “You didn’t, you didn’t have to.”
“Last chance to do the right thing.”
The man looked like he was trying to speak, his mouth moving in slow motion as he started to swallow his tongue. He clawed at his throat, his blood-soaked hands painting his neck in a red velvet before dropping away. His eyes went
slack and his chest failed to rise. He slipped from this world as fast as he had run from the stairwell and fired his weapon.
“Sorry buddy, today just wasn’t your day.”
Mason tucked the rifle under his arm and started back toward the stairs.
28
Dawn was close, the sun now wedged just below the eastern horizon and the cloud cover from the night before was finally beginning to give way to clearer skies. Ava was close to the road, again pitched forward, her hands on her knees, behind a thicket of overgrown sagebrush. There hadn’t been another shot fired in the last several minutes and she was now hoping she’d lost her pursuers for good.
However, she was also lost.
It wasn’t from her lack of direction and also not because she had been running in circles for the last several hours. She knew what this was and feared it even more than again crossing paths with the larger horde from earlier that night.
Ava’s vision was starting to blur, her head continued to pound, and the pain along her left side was sending spasms into her lower back. She couldn’t recall when she last ate and was starting to forget where she was in relation to home. She knew she’d have to walk out to the road at some point, that she was as good as dead if she didn’t, although she couldn’t remember which way she needed to go.
She took another few seconds, her pulse slowly beginning to return to normal, before rounding the six-foot shrub and starting for the line of trees twenty feet from the road. The area looked familiar, but not enough that it stirred even a single memory.
“Come on Ava, think.”
Then came the anxiety, and at the worst possible time.
She tried to force it down, tried to talk herself out of it, tried to breathe through it, tried to tell herself that if she could just get through the next two minutes, everything would be okay. She had tried every single method Dr. Gentry had given her, but today was different.
Today she was all alone. She didn’t know where she was, the radio she’d taken from the street had died, and she was scared that she’d already faced death twice in one day.
She also didn’t like her chances at number three.
As a last resort, she took the nine millimeter from her waist, backed into a tree, and slid down into a sitting position. She held the weapon between her hands and closed her eyes. She just needed a minute.
Ava saw her brother and her mother. They were laughing and pointing, their eyes focused on something beyond her. She turned around to find her dad. He was riding a bicycle that was obviously too small for him, sitting on the seat, his knees up near his chest. He was also laughing.
She remembered that day, way before the outbreak, before all of this, but not in the same way. Her mother and father looked older, much older than even now. Her brother Noah as well. He looked like he was maybe twenty-five, maybe older. They looked happy but there was something in their eyes, something that looked like pain, like their wide smiles and their laughter was hiding something dark.
Ava called out to her father. She waved her arms over her head, but he didn’t seem to notice. He gave a quick thumbs up to Noah and to her mother, laid the bike near the sidewalk and began to run. Three houses down, he looked back at them, his smile now gone and his face void of all emotion. He ran to the end of the street, turned the corner, and disappeared.
Next, her mother went to Noah and hugged him. She whispered into his ear and kissed his cheek. He looked down into her eyes, kissed her forehead, and released her. She paused briefly, her pasted smile also fading as she turned and began to run. She didn’t look back, her legs moving faster as she cried out for her husband.
“No, Owen. Please, no.”
Noah watched them run into the distance and just stood there. He began to nod and then turned to face her. He continued to smile, but he looked different as he started toward her. With each step that he took, it seemed he became a year younger. By the time he reached her he was the little boy she remembered from Christmas of 2012.
“Ava?”
She knelt in front of him. “I miss you little brother.”
“You miss me?”
“I want to get back to you, and to Mom and Dad, but I’m lost.”
He tilted his head, looking up like he was thinking. “You’re lost?”
“I think so. I don’t know how to get back to you guys, I don’t think I can.”
A tear fell from his eye. “I want you to come back, Ava. Please, I miss you too. Mom and Dad can’t go on without you. We need you, we all do.”
Ava heard another voice. A man was laughing, someone she didn’t know, but also couldn’t see. Noah turned his head and looked across the street and into a wooded area fifty yards away.
“Ava?”
The man’s voice was there again. It was louder now, coming closer, although she still couldn’t see who it was. The voice was deep and slow, someone older. He laughed in between his words and sounded like he was talking to someone else.
Ava reached for Noah’s hand. “Yeah?”
“You need to come back to us, you need to do whatever you have to do.”
“I will,” Ava said, “I promise.”
Noah let go of her hand, turned away, and ran toward the wooded area.
“No, please. Noah, don’t go.”
The man’s voice was again louder, like he was shouting, like he was right on top of her. Ava threw her hands up, trying to deflect the sound and startled herself awake. She was laying on her right side, the nine millimeter a few feet away.
It took a moment for her to remember where she was and how she’d gotten there, but when she did, it all came flooding back. The incident with Lucas on the side of the road, the bedroom and the mean older woman, and having to watch as those men beat Mason.
She also remembered the promise she’d made herself and the one she’d made to her little brother only moments ago. And with the torrent of memories came a wave of adrenaline, one she didn’t understand, and one that seemed to suppress the fear and anxiety that had controlled her every move since being thrown into the backseat of the thin man’s car.
“So, what do we have here, back for round two I suppose?”
Ava reached for the nine millimeter, scrambled back to the tree, and got to her feet. There were three men at the side of the road closest to her. She thought she recognized two of the men from where Lincoln and his people lived. Although the third man, the one in the middle, the one speaking with the deep voice, she didn’t remember seeing. He was short and round, and had a thin, greasy ponytail coming off the back of his head.
The others stood on either side of the short man, looking off somewhere down the road. They held shotguns and laughed as their friend spoke. The one on the right wasn’t much taller; however his pants were at least an inch too short, his sockless ankles exposed to the early morning air.
The man with the greasy ponytail rested his shotgun on his shoulder. “Come on, let’s get this over with.”
Ava moved to the other side of the tree and stood on her toes. As the full scene came into focus, she had to put her hand up over her mouth to keep from shouting his name. Mason walked off the opposite side of the road, raised a rifle, and before any of the three men had a chance to react, he fired eight shots.
The two men she recognized from earlier hit the ground before the ringing in her ears subsided. The short round man was hit once, but remained upright. He stumbled to the left and brought his shotgun around as Mason’s weapon finally emptied.
Acting on instinct, and intending to keep the promise she made herself, Ava bolted from the tree. She held the nine millimeter in her right hand, lining up her shot as Mason noticed her, dropped the rifle, and held up his hands.
“Ava no … no no no.”
29
With both rear tires of the electric vehicle having gone flat, Randy kept a close eye on his speed. He wasn’t complaining—hell he even felt a bit of guilt for taking the last functioning vehicle. It was the only one that hadn’t be
en on fire, already torched, or had its windows busted out. Compared to what remained behind the gates of Harbor Crest, he was driving in the lap of luxury.
“Gil, where the hell did you go?”
He wasn’t yet worried. His older friend was more than capable. Not in the same way that Mason or Travis were, but the former Mayor knew how to take care of himself, and more importantly, he knew how to use his resources as well as his surroundings to his own benefit. Mayor Gil Walker was a survivor—he just did it differently than anyone else.
A mile outside the walls and Randy began to run back through the options he and his friends were going to have moving forward. He knew what Mason was going to want to do and how Ethan, Emma, and Gentry were going to try to talk him out of it. He would have to play mediator once again, and although it wasn’t a role he was used to, there really wasn’t anyone else who could get Mason to listen.
The group would want to get somewhere safe, make sure everyone was accounted for, and then give the horrific details a few days to sink in before even trying to come up with a plan.
On the other hand, Mason would lobby for quick action, a strike to counter what Vince had done. It probably wasn’t the right move, could possibly make matters worse, and the others would almost certainly protest, but right now the more aggressive option had an appeal Randy couldn’t deny.
He looked out over the road ahead. Mayor Gil should be close, and surely tucked somewhere just out of sight. He slowed the car again, now using the brake to control his speed. There was a small group of Feeders near the stop sign on the opposite side of the road, two on the ground and another four who had turned and noticed the almost silent electric vehicle.
At the center of the road he pulled to a stop and lowered his window. Randy’s stomach turned as one of the two Feeders moved higher on the body it was assaulting, allowing a view of the victim. A pair of dark running shoes pointed out in opposite directions and at a forty-five degree angle to the rest of the body.