“They were falling in the most random of places. One landed in some old lady’s back yard. Another took out an overpass during rush hour. One even hit a Seven-Eleven done in Charleston, South Carolina and blew up everything around it. None of it made any sense.” She shrugged. “It still doesn’t.” She finished and started to sob.
Jace hugged his sister drowning out her cries into his shoulder. When she had calmed, he faced her once more.
“What about her?” He jerked his head in Charlie’s direction.
“Well, she helped us search for the meds. She’s good people. I think we can trust her,” she whispered.
“I am not so sure,” he rubbed his chin thoughtfully.
“Well, she’s pretty well armed at any rate. From what I can tell, she’s got a mini arsenal that she’s carrying around with her.”
“Yeah, but what do you really know about her?”
“What’s to know? She’s alive. And she’s not a zombie trying to eat us. I say we stick with her.” Ellie’s voice was quiet but clearly desperate.
Jace dropped his head to his chest and sighed. “Fine, just keep her away from me. I feel like I’m tiptoeing around a hornets nest with her and I don’t like it.”
Ellie smiled at him. “Don’t you see? This can be a good thing. I mean look at them. They are just like us. We’re all orphans here.”
He glanced over again at the trio: a young teen girl armed to the teeth, a tiny waif of a girl with her stuffed penguin tied to her chest with old belt, and a dark complected man with a speech impediment that did not seem all there in the head either.
Yeah. I’m so excited. I think I'll start doing backflips.
“I guess we don’t get to pick who we partner up with during Armageddon, huh?” Jace shook his head.
Ellie gave out a slight giggle and hugged her brother close.
“Of course not silly. This isn’t dodge ball, ya know.”
Without saying another word, he walked over to Byron, feeling the need to be productive, and began hefting some of the furniture down that made up the barricade. He was feeling better now that the meds had begun to level him out. He still had moments where felt as if he were falling back into that pit of tremors again. Usually this was when he was left on his own while the others were accomplishing other things. They would last only during the interim of his solitude. He rebounded quickly when everyone returned to his immediate vicinity. What was once a man comfortable on his own, separate from the rest of the world, now he felt almost dependent on these people’s presence. He chalked it off as just another effect of being down in that hole. Still, something nagged at him that perhaps it was something more.
They were careful to move all of the chairs and tables out of the way very carefully as to not make any noise. Discovery now would mean a long drawn out wait, and none of them wanted to experiment whether the zombie’s collective “patience” would outlast their own strength and supplies. It was not something that was necessary to even discuss. It was all a matter of instinct now. Survival of the careful. Gazelles did not need to have conferences about strategy against lions.
Something in the weight of one of the tables triggered it. He stopped in mid-step, preparing himself for the onslaught. His hand twitched and he waited, not moving an inch, as if waiting for that painful hiccup he just knew was coming.
“You a-al-r-r-r-ight?”
Jace took a deep breath, bracing himself against the memory of pain. The edges of his vision clouded and the world around him distorted and he felt himself shrinking away. Falling, collapsing inside himself. This was how it started. Like an ocean wave at low tide, slowly ebbing and flowing at the edges of his beach. Except his low tide was only a short preamble to the long drawn out high tide. Excruciatingly painful and always overcoming his entire beach and over the dunes.
At the sound of Byron’s voice, Charlie walked over and looked Jace straight in the eyes. An eternity it seemed between the footsteps echoing in his mind. He looked up into Charlie’s face and back down to his hands again. He felt the spasms vise-grip release, the cold hands of his addiction letting go and pulling away. He shook his head and the world returned, snapped back in to focus. He looked up and realized Charlie was there, just about nose to nose, her hand on his shoulder. Her voice cut through the final mists.
“Yeah,” he nodded. Looking at his hands, he could scarcely believe it. His relief and astonishment was that of a prisoner on death row, a stay of execution granted in his last seconds.
He shrugged it off and continued to help Byron remove the barricades. She eyed him warily. Not because she did not trust him. He did not come off as being a danger to any of them. In fact in these lucid moments where he seemed most his true self, he gave off the aura of one who was trustworthy and almost kind to a fault. Still, she refused to let down her guard. He needed her help a hell of a lot more than she needed his.
The doorway, clear of all obstacles, awaited them. Byron eased the door open a crack, allowing the sunlight to pour slowly in. The rays made the dust in the air scatter and dance. Just another reminder to Charlie how stuffy it was in the non-air conditioned room. Byron threw a glance backward to Charlie and mouthed the number four. She grimaced and whispered to the group.
“We are gonna have to teach you guys all how to handle these freaks. I can’t always be the one that has to do the dirty work.”
Ellie walked in from the restroom her hand cupped to her mouth, shaking her head.
Charlie nodded. “Yes. You too Ellie. You want to protect your brother? You gonna have to learn how to arm yourself. The quieter the better. These things can smell you out. But, worse yet. Their hearing is super-human. They can hear the beat of a butterfly’s wings if it weren’t for everything else.”
She turned and cat walked toward the door, simultaneously pulling her samurai sword from its sheath. Noiselessly. She inched to take Byron’s place and she palmed the door handle.
“Watch and learn. This is not like the movies were everyone is shooting guns and screaming Geronimo. The trick to surviving is this. Hit them hard. Hit them fast. Make each strike count. All the while keeping quiet. Either a brain strike or a decap' counts as a win. Anything else and your dinner. Understand?”
The entire group stood wide-eyed and silent. Even Jace seemed struck dumb by Charlie’s whispered speech. She still seemed much larger than life to him and he was still grappling on whether she was real enough to anchor in on or not. Charlie twisted the handle and noiselessly slipped out the door. Through the slit in the blinds, they watched her stalk. She kept her sword close to her body, keeping it from accidentally hitting against the cars she was tiptoeing by. A man dressed in business casual lumbered between two cars parallel parked against the sidewalk. Despite being undead, his clothes were extremely clean, not frayed and tattered.
Must be one of those out-of-the-box zombies. Brand spanking new.
She shimmied up behind him, and noted the two other Zoms walking in circles, like lost children at a state fair. They looked as if they were stuck frozen in that moment of realization, when they knew they had misplaced the one of their parents. Panic mode stuck on pause. She waited until both of the other walkers were spinning in sync, facing the opposite direction, and raised her sword to call her strike. She hesitated herself, and missed her moment. From the outside perception, she looked fierce. Driven. Focused. In her mind, however, she still had to take the moment, and turn on the switch from apocalypse surviving teen girl, to killer. It was her kill switch. She didn’t consider herself a murderer. No. These things weren’t alive. However, it still took turning that little scared girl part of her off, and turning the practiced killer mode on. The flicking of the switch. Otherwise, she would never build up the nerve to even raise her weapon to swing.
Click.
She could feel the change in her own eyes and lips as they both narrowed into finely sharpened blades. She eyed the dancing undead circus, bringing her shoulders in and locking them down. Every muscle i
n her back tensed tighter than silk, as the Zoms completed another full rotation. She pulled her sword arm back in to a tight coil, and snapped like a rubber band straight across the suit’s neck.
It happened so quickly, the head just sat there on top of the shoulders. She was already past the standing figure, even before it began to wobble. Her second strike was the footnote of its knees striking the ground. Her third marked its head bouncing simply once in place where it once connected to its shoulders before the rest of the body pitched forward onto the asphalt. She used the tail-ends of the business suit to slide away what little blood she took away with the sword. She was done wiping the blood off just as the last kill dropped quietly to the ground. They let her back in quickly.
“You are seriously not one I wanna piss off” Jace spoke almost too low to hear. He stopped and looked in her eyes. They weren’t the soft brown eyes he remembered. They were red. Not just the whites. Even her pupils were tinged in red, like someone had swapped out her eyes for those of a desperate animal fresh from the fight. She closed her eyes and shuddered perceivably. She took a long drawn out breath and held it, allowing her boiling blood calm down to a simmer.
She heard him nonetheless. “I am already pissed off.” Her eyes were smoldering now, the breath caught in her chest. She shook her head and squinted at away at tears. She interrupted the question already rising in Jace’s throat. “We need to go get supplies. Lots of supplies. Then we need to make a plan on where we are going to go next. Some place safe.” She opened the door and led everyone outside where she stopped short in front of the car. Behind her Byron whispered to Fayte.
“Why is she so upset?”
Fayte stared straight at the car. Byron could almost hear Fayte’s gears turning.
“I think she just realized,” she paused. “That her car is too small for the five of us and supplies. We are going to need to get a bigger vehicle.” Byron nodded his head in understanding.
“I see. She’s going to have to give up ‘Lady’.”
(May 30, 2014)
“Park. Stop the bike.”
Phoenix squeezed her sister tight to get her attention. The bike was still going a pretty good clip. Parker refused to stop. Only the coarse sounds of Phoenix coughing and hacking made her groan and bring the machine to a halt. She half-turned to check on her sister. She had turned quite pale from the ride. It gave her a start to see a trickle of blood run down from her mouth. The wind from the ride had drug the streak upward across her face. The effect spoke volumes of the disease that was wrecking her apart on the inside.
Her mood was already a dark one. He sister had always been the weaker of the two, a fact not gone unnoticed beneath her. She had always felt superior to her in all ways. Off and on through her life, Phoenix would always be the one to get sick. Flu season kept little Phoenix Davies at home and often in the hospital, while Parker would enjoy never catching anything and be sent to school on her own. Yes, they were indeed twins, yet Parker secretly never felt more far from her twin. She would never ever give voice to the thought, but she often wished death would come for her little weaker half and put her out of her misery. Both of their miseries. Nothing could be worse than suffering for your sibling. They were meant to be exact duplicates of one another. Yet, somehow Parker had edged Phoenix out, even as early as the womb.
Parker had once overheard her parents talking to her Uncle Mac about how they both entered the world. According to the doctors, Phoenix had nearly died before she even emerged. Her cord had been wrapped several times around her own neck. She was a good three pounds lighter than Parker, who emerged triumphantly behind her sister. Uncle Mac joked with their mother that Parker had designs on this world and tried to take Phoenix out of the equation early on.
Truth was Parker seemed to have gotten all of the good stuff from mom, while nearly choking her sister out of the game. What remained was a weakened child that never ever seemed to be able to catch up, and remained a shadow in Parker’s life. She loved her sister. She did. But the duality of wanting her put out of her misery was the grey lining of clouds that always hovered over her head.
“Ugg. Girl you are going to be the death of me!” Her voice shook her sister in her weakened state, making her cringe and looking like half the sister that was in front of her. She said these words and instantly felt the regret that rolling in behind them.
“I’m so sorry Phee.” She embraced her twin and sobbed with her even as the tears started spilling out of eyes that were more hazel to her blue ones.
“It’s okay,” she sniffed. “I know I am just a big burden to you. I always have been.”
Parker ignored the urge to roll her eyes. Why does she always have to act so goody-goody? So self-righteous! If she really knew what she had done in order to get her the treatment she needed, she would feel even worse than the burden she claims to be.
The fighting, the lying, and the drugs were all going to
“No, hun,” she lied. “Its just all this stuff is getting the best of me,” she whispered and struggled to sound sweet and apologetic. “You know how I get. I don’t handle any kind of stress well.”
Phoenix nodded and managed a chuckle before falling into a coughing spasm again. Her younger twin reached up and made an attempt to clean her up a bit.
“I just wish I knew how to help you. Wish you weren’t sick all the time.”
“Me too.”
“You good for a little while longer? We got a ways to go. Need to find a place to hole up and get some rest.”
“Yeah. I can hang,” she cleared one last waiting cough out of her throat.
“Oh, Phee. What I am going to do with you?”
Under her breath, as the wind rose and canceled out both of their voices, Phoenix spoke aloud but calm enough to not stir up her coughing it again.
“Park, what would I do without you?”
***
Parker’s grip tightened on the bike’s handles just as the clouds raced over head, cutting off the last rays of sunlight. Leaving her with only the dimming headlight of the two wheeled death machine, as her mother would call her, to light her way as she weaved in and out of the sea of abandoned vehicles. Their owners were either trapped in their own escape or frozen in death as they clawed the pavement before them trying to flee the monster at their heels. Not one single soul survived this stretch of road. The interstate had become nothing more than a graveyard.
Even though her coughing fit had long ceased, tremors quaked over Phoenix’s frame. The wind was biting against their exposed flesh as Phoenix was finally able to break free of the maze of cars and leave the nightmare behind them.
Her sister’s health and survival were key now. No matter how heavy the burden was to keep her alive, she had to do just that, because without Phoenix, Parker was utterly alone. Their bastard of a father had bled out in a prison cell years before and their mother had met the reaper in a gruesome dance only a few days ago. A dance so bloody Parker could feel the bile rise in her throat at the memory of seeing her mother’s throat ripped open by what she could only imagine where two very large canine teeth. That was impossible right? Unless Fido had become susceptible to the disease that was sweeping across the world or there was something else out there, something with very large fucking teeth.
The blood splatter looked like someone flung it haphazardly all over the walls. It was also the only blood left of their mother. The poor woman’s body was bled dry. Not one ounce was left in her veins. Her pale skin was pulled taunt against the moisture deprived muscles, compressing them to the bones they were attached to. Giving a new meaning to liposuction since the woman was only five foot three and used to weigh well over two hundred pounds.
Pushing the memory to the back of her mind was becoming easier with each passing hour. Who was she kidding? With all the stuff she had seen and done since last October shouldn’t faze her anymore. Parker had sunk to an all-time low. No money to pay for the increasing doctor bills from Phoenix’s numerous visits to t
he local emergency room when she was struggling for every minuscule breath her lungs would allow her to take. After all the tests, all the pokes with the needles of various sizes, they got nothing. Well nothing that they wanted to hear….a date. If she made it passed that date, they were told to count it as her last.
The look on Phoenix’s face when the pudgy doctor with the foul breath and a piss-poor excuse for a toupee told her that she only had sixteen months to live, was what some would consider the Davies twin’s signature look. Defiant and unyielding to the end. A small smirk graced Parker’s lips just as her twins grip on her hand tightened.
Through clenched teeth Phoenix hissed “Fucking bugs...God one is in my throat.”
Parker started giggling at her poor sister’s expense. “Come on sissy, just think of it as a snack,” she said loudly over the roar of the bike. But under her breath she muttered, “One high in protein.”
“Fuck you Parker. Where are we going anyways? We’ve been at this for days. And my ass is going numb.”
“I’m supposed to meet a friend in Wichita. He’s got supplies we can use and where we go from there, I don’t have a clue. We need to figure out a plan. Ditch the bike, get a truck and get the hell out of Dodge. Wait this shit out.”
“Parker…” Phoenix was hesitant with her words. No matter how strong and smart her sister was, sometimes she didn’t see the big picture even thou it was staring her in the face. After the bloodbath she witnessed at the asylum, she put two and two together pretty fucking quickly, that and she read the confidential notice from the CDC taped to Ralph’s computer monitor telling her that the government had issued marital law and that all those “infected, bitten, or in the vicinity of those infected” were to be “disposed of on-site.”
Zombies Don't Ride Motorcycles Page 15