by Smith, S. L.
“Dude,” Justin said. “He’s right. Where is she?”
“Did she have a gun?” Padre was asking. “Any missing from the truck, Patrick?”
“No,” Isherwood answered.
“And no,” Patrick followed up.
“Let me see that telescope.” Isherwood barked, finally catching up to Padre’s thinking. He jumped into the bed of the truck and yanked the aperture to his eye. They had set up the telescope in the bed of Old Blue instead of bringing it up onto the Fontenot’s balcony. They had decided it would be too high profile.
“Bi—scuits and cheese.” Isherwood cursed after wagging the telescope back and forth a couple times. Father Simeon and the others were standing along the fence looking through binoculars.
“How the –? She’s nearly through the cane field.” Patrick asked no one in particular.
“My God and she’s unarmed.” Simeon said, shaking his head.
“She’s dead,” Justin said.
“Nah, not yet,” Isherwood said. His eyes were still twitching with madness. “But, come on. Get in the truck. We can still try chasing her down.”
“Chasing her down?” Justin asked. “Are you nuts? We’ll just draw those things away from the weirdo church and toward her.”
Father Simeon shook his head. “No, we won’t.” He was following Isherwood hurriedly into the truck.
“Has everybody lost their minds?” Justin was calling out.
Patrick pushed him forward, trying to fish the truck keys out of his pocket. “Nah, man. Get in the truck. Don’t you get it? If we go crazy trying to chase her down, it’ll look like she’s running from us.” He quickly pulled his hands out of his pockets when he realized he had purposefully left the keys in the ignition for a quick getaway.
“She will be!” Justin marveled at his friends.
“She’s banking on it!” Isherwood said, getting out to help pull Justin in the truck. “She knows we’d never have agreed otherwise.”
Justin relaxed and let himself be dragged into Old Blue. “Can someone please explain all this to me?” He said from the backseat of Old Blue. “And what about the Escalade?”
Isherwood, sitting at shotgun, turned around to look at his two friends, while Father Simeon turned the key and cranked the truck into drive. “She’s trying to make it look like she’s running to them – to her old wacko friends – for sanctuary from us.”
Recognition dawned across Justin’s face. “From the crazy Catholics!”
“Right, it’s brilliant,” Patrick said. “They’ll swallow that bait – hook, line, sinker, and pole. Like always.”
Isherwood was nodding. “But she needs us to make enough crazy noise to, first, make it look like the crazy Catholics are trying to run her down rather than let her defect, and, second, to draw those zombies away from the back door and to us instead of her.”
Justin was looking out the back windshield in admiration. “Man, that lady’s got cojones.”
“Though she be but little, she is fierce.” Patrick echoed.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR: BOWLING ALLEY CHURCHES
As they watched slack-jawed from inside Old Blue, Tad’s plan – or so they assumed it to be – worked flawlessly. The zombies were spilling over themselves to chase after the honking truck as it bounced up and down, up and down driving madly through the cane field. Distracted, only one or two of them turned to see Tad banging on the back door of the bowling alley. Tad took care of these easily enough, stabbing a knife into their skulls between pounding on the metal industrial door.
It was the zombies that began streaming around the sides of the building that were the problem. Tad’s act quickly became real as the zombies started closing in from each side. “Let me in! It’s Tad – they’re coming for me!”
She paused a moment. She dispatched another pair of zombies with her knife, but groups of five or more were within just feet of her. Just when the prickling sense of impending danger was about to snatch her backwards into full-scale retreat, the door opened. She was pulled inside just the enclosing groups of zombies collided together smearing blood and rot against the closed door.
“Whoa!” Justin cooed from the backseat of Old Blue, letting out a deep sigh. “I thought she was dead on arrival. That chick’s got some serious survival instincts.”
“Yeah, glad she’s safe and all, but we’ve got problems of our own.” Padre said as the group of zombies peeled away from the bowling alley’s back door to join the rest of the growing hoard that was now throwing themselves headlong towards Old Blue. “What d’we do?” He asked. He was still driving the truck straight toward the back of the building and, now, straight into the oncoming zombies.
“Uh, just stop and growl a bit.” Isherwood said. “You know, gun the engine or something. Make it sound disappointed and frustrated.”
“How am I supposed to make the engine sound like that?” Padre asked shaking his head.
“I don’t know – ‘fly casual’.” Isherwood sneered.
“What?” Padre roared, finally losing his cool.
“It’s a Star Wars quote, Father,” Patrick said.
“I –!” Father Simeon slammed his fist down on the steering wheel, arresting its motion just shy of impact. “I know it’s a Star Wars quote. I know how to read a schematic!” Padre’s momentary mood swing was forgotten. He began gunning the engine and honking.
“That was a Jurassic Park quote,” Justin told Patrick.
They decided to let the zombies swarm the truck and then retreat backward across the cane field at the last possible moment. Once they were clear of the zombies and back on the smooth asphalt of Major Parkway, Padre pealed out loudly and pretended to tuck tail and run. Instead, they looped back around. They turned back on to Main Street and came back around through the back of the next subdivision. They re-entered the cane field from the opposite direction and under cover. There was, as they had suspected, an overgrown farm road running along the sides of the cane field. They followed this around to the back of the cane field, approaching the bowling alley again from the north side.
They tucked Old Blue under the drooping limbs of an overgrown willow tree. Isherwood, Padre, and Justin left Patrick behind to hide in the truck and be ready by the radio in case a quick getaway was needed.
The three men armed themselves with automatic rifles and pistols from the truck. They then climbed up a small embankment at the back of the cane field and took cover behind a brick shell of a building. It had been gutted long before the infected started showing up. They checked in quickly, but there were no signs of the church having posted a look-out there. They covered the open ground between the gutted-out building and the building that was closest to the bowling alley. This next building used to be a combination of restaurant, specialty meats store, and deer processing facility. They hid, crouching behind what used to be the place’s smokehouse.
“Justin,” Isherwood whispered. “Can you get up on top of this little building to see if they’ve got people on their roof?”
“Dude,” Justin said, shaking his head. “This little shed will buckle right under me. ‘Sides, they ain’t got nobody up there. They would’ve started shooting at us when we were driving right at ‘em. I don’t think these people were planning long term, buddy, no offense.”
Isherwood’s whole body lurched with the thought. He was keeping the mad rush of fatherly instincts and insanity bottled up inside of him, but only just barely. “Well, what’d’we do? Just sit here?”
“Yup,” Padre nodded. “The place is brick and steel and, from what I can see, has no windows. Not a bad place to hole up. Gross for a church, though.”
*****
So they waited. The zombies gradually re-formed their ring around the building, though the men couldn’t understand why. They couldn’t hear anything drawing the dead back to the spot. Nevertheless, the zombies again started beating on the brick and metal walls. Their horrible moaning drew others in, as well. Every once in a while, as a full hou
r passed by, a zombie would wander near their position behind the smokehouse. They came in already moaning, so they could dispatch them with their knives without caring about making more noise.
Isherwood’s resolve finally broke after an hour. Flashes of what those freaks might be doing to his daughter finally drove him to the brink. He cursed himself for ever reading The Shack. He raised himself from the back of the smokehouse and strode out from behind it before the other two could stop him. He was going to blow the sides of this building and nothing was going to stop him. He clicked his rifle to full automatic and began mowing down the layers of zombies banging against the bowling alley’s walls.
Just as he did, the back door rattled ajar and closed again under the weight of zombies pressing in. Isherwood flanked to his left and began drawing the zombies towards him and away from the door. As soon as they had advanced a couple feet, he mowed down a clean stripe of ten or twelve. The door opened again. Its ragged bottom scraped along a concrete sidewalk. It was Tad and she was holding Emma Claire on her hip. There was a small doorstop attached the inside bottom of the door. Tad stomped on it with a bare foot, wedging the door wide open. Isherwood could hear music coming from within. Half of the zombies began pouring through the open door. The others lunged after the woman and the child. These met with the full wrath of the deranged father.
Father Simeon had to run after Isherwood and pull him back, or he would have spilled into the church along with the zombies and likely for the same purpose.
“You just left the door open?” Justin asked Tad as he ran up to her and Emma Claire. They could hear Patrick already gunning Old Blue’s engine behind them. “There wasn’t anybody we could save in there?”
The older woman turned to him with a withering stare. “Let the dead bury their dead.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE: RADIO
Before they had turned back down Main Street, Padre asked that Patrick drive them through the front of the Wal-Mart parking lot. There, they would be able to see if anybody or anything was coming out the front of the church. Even if the occupants of the bowling alley had spilled out the front entrance to escape the zombies spilling in the back door, there were more zombies waiting out front to devour them.
In the end, they saw no one leave the church. “Guess they were waiting on the zombies to rapture them away.” Justin remarked darkly. They would later find out that Justin’s quip had been eerily spot-on.
Tad was eerily quiet on the way home. She and Emma Claire had been the only ones to see inside the church, and neither one seemed to want to talk about the experience.
Emma Claire, they were all relieved to see, wanted nothing more than to snuggle up in the back seat with Isherwood. She was sucking her thumb hard, but even this was not completely out of the normal. Her dress, they saw, was still clean. No rips, no blood. It seemed they had retrieved the little girl before any permanent damage had been done by her kidnappers. Padre was especially relieved to see her wanting to be close to her dad, but he knew there just hadn’t been time for Stockholm Syndrome or anything like that to have set it.
*****
Sara was still waiting at the church’s back gate when Old Blue turned the corner. Marshall, too, came running when he saw the truck return. Sara fell to her knees hugging Emma Claire when the little girl came jumping out of the truck’s back door. “Ma-mommy, ma-mommy,” she said. “Those people smelled bad.”
Isherwood eased himself out of the truck, feeling like he was just coming back from a bender. He hobbled over to where his wife and daughter were kneeling and just slid down until his head rested on Sara or Emma Claire, he didn’t know which.
Gran eventually succeeded in bringing her grandson and his family back into the Rectory. She had a pot of coffee waiting for them that she had French-dripped on the gas stove. Monsignor greeted Father Simeon warmly. Father Simeon was bringing the older priest up to speed on his own church and what had happened the last couple days, when Tad interrupted them. She whispered something into Monsignor’s ear, and he led her out the side door of Rectory.
Soon, they were all sitting around the dining room table beginning to unwind slowly. The wives informed their husbands of the progress made on the gardens and that only small groups of “Zacks” – that’s what the ladies had taken to calling them to avoid scaring the children – had been coming to the fences. The men just let the women talk, being too tired to do anything but listen. Padre was better at listening, anyway.
Denise, Patrick’s wife, went back over how Emma Claire had been playing with her boy, Huck, before she disappeared. They just couldn’t understand how it had happened so quickly – how they hadn’t even seen the car drive up. So much of it still didn’t make sense to them.
Chelsea tried prying information from her husband, Justin, but he was starting to fall asleep on her shoulder.
Isherwood, too, was beginning to nod off. Sara kept pushing him backwards as his head kept sliding slowly and inexorably down into his ceramic mug of coffee.
“I must not have put enough juice in this coffee,” Gran said, looking comically down into her old coffee mug. She soon joined in the laughter as Sara and the rest busted out laughing.
Just then, Vanessa came hurriedly into the Rectory. The ladies had forgotten about her in all the excitement of the men returning home with Emma Claire. “Oh, Vanessa.” Gran said. “They’re back – can you believe it? It looks like nobody was –”
“Yes, ma’am,” Vanessa interrupted. At the sound of her voice, the men suddenly grew alert again. “That’s amaz– I can’t believe how luck– but listen,” she said interrupting herself. “Sara.” At the sound of her name, Sara put her hand to her chest. She had already had a long enough emotional rollercoaster that day. “I’ve made contact.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me.” Isherwood said. His head and shoulders fell in dismay. “With who? With Whiskey Bay? Oh, please, tell me it’s good news.”
“It’s gotta be pretty good, right?” Sara was saying, growing breathless with excitement. Without knowing it, she had stood up beside the table. “They’re alive if they’re using the radio, right? Right?”
Vanessa was waving her hands for them to stop talking. “Let the girl speak,” Gran insisted.
“They’re under siege.” She said, relaxing a bit after finally getting the words out. “I-10 was just—there were just so many, spilling over the elevated roadway into the swamp and coming down the exit ramps. Even after evacuating from the mainland to the island or whatever, they’re still surrounded. Their camp is raised up on piers and they’ve destroyed the stairs but they’re pinned in. There’s just no way – they say the camp is surrounded by thousands of ‘em.”
“Did they say how long they’ve got until their supplies run out?” Isherwood asked.
“Yesterday.” Vanessa said sighing. “If it rains, they’ll be able to replenish their water. But they’ve already started fasting.”
Sara melted into Isherwood’s arms, sobbing quietly against his chest. Isherwood turned to the people at the table. “How many bullets do we have left? Just give me your best guess.”
“I’ve only got about 500-750 rounds left in Morganza split up between pistols and my .270. If I had more time, we could reload all the .22 casings. Give me the walkie, I’ll tell Jim and Agnes to step up production asap.”
“I’m thinking less than a thousand for the .22s, less than five hundred on the automatics.” Patrick said looking at Justin.
Justin nodded in agreement. “But hey, Isherwood, I think we’ve barely touched the stockpile you had been hoarding for your pistols. We’ve been doing so much with the rifles that we haven’t really touched the small arms ammunition.”
“Maybe we could alter our strategy to pistol range somehow,” Isherwood offered. “We probably have two thousand or more 9mm rounds.”
The others recoiled at the idea, though Padre stayed thoughtful. “It’s possible,” he said. “We could use the raised roadway to our advantage. I-10
is like two or three stories higher than swamp level through there.”
“Hey, maybe we’ve got a rifle that will chamber that 9mm luger ammo.” Justin said, leaning forward. “Let’s not give up on rifles yet. And we’ve found a lot of other toys in the armories besides, too.”
“And,” Patrick added. “We still haven’t raided the police and sheriff’s stations. There might even be another Wal-Mart on the way.”
Isherwood was beginning to smile. “I think we’ve got the makings of a plan. Vanessa, can you radio a message back to them?”
Vanessa nodded. “Oh yeah, sure. Glenn said he’d come back on the radio at 5pm this afternoon.”
Sara perked up at the sound. “Glenn?” she asked. “You spoke to dad?”
“Yeah, honey,” Vanessa smiled. “And you will, too. After a while, okay?”
“Good, that’s all really good.” Isherwood said, standing up from the table. “Tell him to hold out. We’re coming.”
EPILOGUE: THE INTERSTATE
All the men, besides Monsignor and Jerry, had volunteered to undertake the rescue mission to Whiskey Bay. This meant the Three Amigos would be joined by Father Simeon and Marshall.
Isherwood didn’t exactly feel comfortable with this following the kidnapping. He didn’t know for sure if the bowling alley church and all its wackos had been completely wiped out. They had seen the zombies spill into the compound, but they hadn’t actually confirmed any deaths or un-deaths. The driveway to the bowling alley had been filled with more cars than just the dirty sedan with the three crosses drawn through its dust. This made it more likely that it was their single base of operations, but there could still be others.
Tad had remained pretty tight-lipped about what she had seen inside the church, and Emma couldn’t describe much coherently. Isherwood had demanded, however, that she say whether the church’s pastor or leader was inside the building before she welcomed the zombies inside. He was, she admitted. “You don’t need to worry about that bunch anymore, Isherwood.” She had assured him before refusing to say anymore.