by Siara Brandt
“Where the hell did that shot come from?” she heard the Captain shout.
There was another rattle of gunfire which caused an immediate reaction. Another man jerked forward then collapsed in the street. Women screamed. Children cried and a general stampede ensued.
Ailin scrambled for cover, too. She ducked down in the nearest booth, the only hiding place available to her. She clutched the little dog closely to her pounding heart. What had started out as a bad day was turning into a nightmare, one that Ailin fervently wished she could wake up from.
Chapter 9
_______________
Eli knew they had to stabilize the situation. But as he looked around, he wondered how they would even begin to do that. He gave the order to take cover and looked up. There was another helicopter flying in low from the east. Even as he saw it, he knew it was too late to contain these people. The situation was degrading fast.
“Who’s shooting?” he aked his men, but no one seemed to know.
He heard Brannet Sneadley give the order to lock and load.
Where the hell had he come from? Eli wondered. Brannet Sneadley outranked him, but nobody liked the pompous little tyrant. Everybody called him Snead behind his back. He was arrogant, self-serving, and as annoying as hell.
“Shoot anything that moves,” Snead ordered.
Eli looked down at the man. At his full height, Snead only came up to his chin. “We’re not in a military zone.” Eli’s jaw hardened and his eyes narrowed, dangerous signs for anyone who knew him. “This is a civilian zone.”
“There are no civilian zones anymore,” Snead informed him with a nasty curl of his lip. The feeling of dislike was mutual. Snead hated Eli like poison. “The civilians are the enemy.”
“Bull shit,” Eli gritted.
“We have to clear this place out,” Snead informed him. “One way or another. That’s how we stay alive. We gain control.”
“Not by shooting down unarmed American citizens,” Eli argued, knowing full well what it meant to disobey a direct order. “I’m a soldier, not a freaking, cold-blooded murderer of women and child- ”
There was another explosion. A much bigger one this time. Smoke and bodies burst out of a window across the street.
“What the hell- ”
“Take a good look, McShane,” Snead’s gaze narrowed. “That was a militia bombing. Local milish. About twenty of them. Those aren’t toy grenades they’re playing with. What do you think we’re supposed to do? Let them blow the town off the map? Let them blow us off the map? It’s time you realized that this is a military zone because the infected are already here.”
Eli hadn’t seen any infected yet. He did agree that any militia that might be out there was a threat. But outnumbered and underequipped, Eli knew they didn’t stand a chance against battle-hardened soldiers. He still thought of them as civilians who were scared like the rest of the people. There were better ways to deal with this.
Snead gave another order.
“You’re going to use tear gas on these people?” Eli breathed in astonishment. “You’ll lose any hope of control then,” Eli promised.
“You got a better suggestion?” Snead sneered. “The government will gain control. In whatever way it takes. And I intend to be on the side that is in control.”
Snead gave Eli another order, one that had Eli grinding his teeth. When Eli hesitated, Snead made the mistake of shoving him. Hard.
Eli spun around. As he towered over the smaller man, he warned in a deadly rasp. “Look, you little weasel. Don’t push me again.”
Snead blustered around like a rooster fluffing up his feathers to look bigger. “Remember who you’re talking t- ”
Snead’s last word ended in a yelp as Eli twisted his fist in the front of the little twerp’s shirt. Snead still wouldn’t stop fussing, so Eli slammed him against the brick wall of a building with a sign above it called Beau’s Bar and Grill. Despite the man’s sputtering threats, Eli still didn’t let go of him. He jerked him up to the very toes of his combat boots.
“You’ve gotta be outta your mind if you think I’m going to give the order to shoot these people down like dogs.” Eli shook Snead once like a rag doll to get his point across.
When he finally did release the man, Snead tried to raise himself up to his full height. But anybody could see he looked scared. “Are you disobeying direct orders?” Snead asked incredulously.
Striving for control, Eli clamped his teeth together so hard that the muscles in his jaw bunched up. ”What the hell is really going on here?” Once again Eli got a firm grip on the man’s shirt. This time Eli wasn’t fooling.
Snead wheezed as he tried to get air into his lungs. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down like a fishing lure as he gasped,
“We . . . have to keep ‘em on . . . this side of the river. Not let ‘em . . . through.”
Eli gave a quick glance at a woman who was backing away from the window inside the bar and grill. He looked back at Snead.
“Our back’s against the river now.” He gave a brief sidelong glance at the soldiers stationed at the bridge. “What are they going to do?”
“Deal with the infected the only way they can,” Snead croaked. “You haven’t seen them yet. You haven’t seen what they turn into or what they’re capable of. They’re not even human anymore.”
“If the infected are as dangerous as you say, these people will be trapped here. Just like rabbits caught in a snare. Has it even occurred to you that you’re signing their death warrants?”
Snead was still laboring for breath. Eli released him and let him slide down the wall.
While Snead rubbed at his throat, he coughed and said hoarsely, “You’re gonna pay- ” he promised. He looked up at Eli with a hate-filled glare. “You want to know what’s going on, I’ll tell you. But you’re not going to like the answer. What’s going on is that someone’s got to be sacrificed.”
Eli already knew the answer, but he had to ask. “Sacrificed how?”
“We’ve been authorized to use deadly force,” Snead went on. “We don’t have any other options.”
“Being authorized doesn’t mean that’s the way it has to be. There has to be another way.”
“There isn’t.”
Eli looked around, his bad feeling growing. He looked at the soldiers at the bridge. He looked at his own men. And then he looked at Snead.
“You have no idea what you’re fighting yet, do you?” Snead snarled with a smug, fierce look on his face. “The enemy is the undead, you clueless bastard. And they’re here. This disease could be the apocalypse, the last plague, the end of life as we know it.”
“Looks like you’re on the wrong side of the fence, too, Sn- ” Eli began.
A spattering of gunfire interrupted them. A man trying to cross the street fell down and stayed down. Another man who was running arched his back and cried out.
Snead twisted his lips into a nasty imitation of a smile. “Yeah, maybe I am. But looks like you’re trapped here, too.”
“Shut him up.”
“He’s only praying,” Ailin heard a soldier say.
“Shut him up. That’s an order.”
A woman ran up to one of the soldiers and grabbed hold of his vest. “Why won’t you tell us what is going on?” she sobbed. “What should we do?”
Taken by surprise, the soldier shoved her away, so hard that she fell to the ground.
Yong-Sun, who cooked at the diner, came running down Main Street. “They’re coming,” he shouted. He looked terrified, like the hounds of hell were close on his heels.
A roar went up from the crowd. It was the sound of unbridled fear and panic. Even the soldiers looked like they were close to panicking now.
Ailin didn’t know who or what was coming but it was like a cattle stampede. People were running in all directions, trampling down some who were in their way. The ones who had agreed to go with the soldiers were now pouring out of the backs of the trucks, mindlessly trying to escape
. Like any herd, they were driven by fear and an instinct for self-preservation.
“What do we do?” she heard one of the soldiers ask.
Before he could get an answer, the soldiers on the bridge began firing.
The result was devastating. It was pure carnage. Soldiers and civilians alike were dripping blood from horrific wounds. One soldier was half-carrying another soldier who was coughing up blood. Another one with a leg wound staggered for cover towards one of the buildings.
That’s when it hit Ailin. That’s when she knew that the bridges had been intentionally blocked so that they would be cut off. Soldiers and civilians alike.
As the people reacted to the first wave of the infected coming down the main street of the town, blind panic gave way to sheer terror. Some people, the lucky ones, disappeared into buildings. People were crying for help. But there was no help. They were caught between two deadly forces.
Ailin never got a clear view of the infected because they were too far away, but she knew she had to find a safe place. She couldn’t stay here in the middle of town. She didn’t wait any longer. She grabbed up her purse and the dog and ran for the back door of Beau’s.
The school was several miles outside of town. By the time Athan and Rietta Clune pulled up into the long U-shaped driveway, they already realized that they were too late. Racing into the school, their worst fears were confirmed. Sisha was in the seventh grade. Her classroom was empty. Zachary was in his second year of school. They raced down the hallway. That room was empty, too.
That wasn’t the worst of it. The books strewn across the classroom floors and the papers that littered the hallways were evidence that everyone had left in a hurry. It must have been chaos a little while ago, but the place was silent as a tomb now.
“They’re not here.” Athan heard the panic in his wife’s voice. He was close to panicking himself, but he knew that wasn’t an option. He could only help his family if he stayed in control. And that meant he needed to control his emotions, too.
He looked out the long row of windows. “They must have known something was wrong and someone made the decision to get the kids home early.”
He didn’t blame anyone for the decision. He might have made the same one himself. But he also knew that the lack of communications was just the beginning of their nightmare.
He turned back to his wife. “We can’t panic. We have to think our way through this.”
Rietta Clune was terrified for her children and she was shaking like a leaf. But she knew her husband was right. They couldn’t give in to their fears. Not if they wanted to find Sisha and Zachary.
Chapter 10
_______________
There were just four kids left on the bus. Every other child had been delivered directly into the hands of his, or her, parents. Caitlyn Cohen had been her last stop and her mother had been waiting for her. There were just two stops to go. But Tessa knew that for Sisha and Zachary Clune there would be no one waiting at home for them. And no one would be waiting for Caleb and Bobby Sefton, either. Not at this time of the day. As Tessa turned off the blacktop and onto the gravel road leading to Crevyn Ridge, she tried to think of the best thing to do. She didn’t know if she even had any options, but she had a bad feeling about leaving the children on their own.
She knew that something bad was happening. Or was about to happen. The helicopters, the explosions and the sirens convinced her of that. If it was a terrorist attack, as she suspected, that could mean anything from bombs, or bio or chemical weapons to mass shootings. Even power outages. Her mind was racing. What was the best thing for the kids?
She had managed to put Mace in the back of her mind. The kids depended on her to keep them safe and she took her job seriously. She knew these kids individually. She had watched them grow up, most from pre-school or kindergarten. She knew their families. As for Mace-
She shook her head. Decent men, only, were worth crying over.
“Tessa?” It was Bobby Sefton. “I heard Miss Tolley talking to Mrs. Pruitt, and they were saying there were zombies over in Arundel.”
“There are no such things as zombies, Bobby.”
“That’s what Mrs. Pruitt said. But Miss Tolley said she heard it from Mr. Hopping who said they were already in Creyvan, too.”
Creyvan? Tessa’s face tightened with worry as she glanced at her mirror.
“You don’t have to worry about zombies,” she tried to reassure Bobby. “You know I’m not going to let anything happen to you.”
Sure, she thought as she glanced into her side mirror again, something was going on. But it wasn’t zombies. It couldn’t be. But why would the teachers even be talking about that? And in front of their students. Amy Tolley was very soft-spoken and proper. Tessa couldn’t imagine her even knowing what a zombie was. Hester Pruitt was so strict and stern that the kids called her the wicked witch of Willow Grove. Tessa had had her as a teacher herself. This all had to be some kind of a joke.
Except, Tessa thought as her frown deepened, Hester Pruitt probably didn’t have a humorous bone in her body.
Her words had seemed to reassure Bobby, but he started an argument with his older brother, Caleb, about whether zombies could run fast or just shuffle around slowly. And whether a zombie getting run over by a school bus would actually die.
“Only if you run over the head and squash it,” Caleb informed his younger brother.
“Eeew,” Bobby dragged out the word and made a face, showing off his missing teeth. “You mean like a pumpkin? The brains would squirt all over.”
A call came over the radio. It was Virgene Larkin from the bus garage.
“Don’t leave the kids unless there is someone waiting for them. Turn the bus around immediately, return to the school and bring back any kids still with you.”
There were no further explanations and no one would answer Tessa’s call. The dispatcher had sounded so distraught that Tessa knew that whatever was going on wasn’t good.
“Why are we turning around?” Zachary Clune asked Tessa.
Zachary was the oldest of the children on the bus. And the quietest.
“I don’t know, Zach,” Tessa answered him honestly. “They want us back at the school for some reason.”
By then, Bobby and Caleb had started a heated argument over whether you would even feel the bump that a zombie would make if you ran over it with a bus.
Tessa shook her head and concentrated on her driving. Whatever was happening, whatever might be out there, she was going to deliver these kids safely. Somewhere.
Zach, who had changed seats and was sitting right behind her now, leaned forward. “Do you think there really are zombies out there somewhere?”
That’s when she noticed that everyone, Bobby and Caleb included, had grown unusually quiet. They were watching out the windows, she realized. For zombies. She wished Zach hadn’t said that.
But she couldn’t help glancing at the woods herself. The kids were still quiet as the bus rumbled over the bridge that crossed Snake Creek. After several more sharp, winding curves, the granite cliffs that rose up from the river bottom came into sight. They were in a remote, unbroken part of the county. The woods went on for miles down here and habitations were few and far apart. The road often washed out and became unpassable when Snake Creek was over its banks.
“I see something,” Bobby called out in a strained voice that was higher pitched than usual. Pointing, he exclaimed, “Look!”
Bobby Sefton was only eight, and he had always had an extremely vivid imagination. With all this zombie talk, if he thought there were zombies out there, then Tessa was sure he was going to see zombies.
“I see something, too.” It was Zach and Tessa couldn’t dismiss him so easily.
At first she didn’t see anything but the alternating light and shadow of the deep woods as the bus rolled on. And then she saw something moving along one of the ridges above the white granite formations. Dividing her attention between the road and the ridge, she scanne
d the tree line. There was definitely something moving up there.
“Zombies,” Bobby began to whimper.
Not a zombie surely, Tessa thought, squinting. But something. It could be a deer. No reason to start thinking that everything that moved could be a-
There was a sudden opening in the trees and the sun nearly blinded her. But not before she saw another figure flailing about in the trees high above them.
Tessa watched in horror at what looked like someone skewered by a branch and writhing there, helplessly impaled. How, she wondered, could anyone survive that? Just as she was about to apply the brakes, a truck came tearing around the next curve. Right towards them.
Her stomach turned upside down in an instant as she hit the brakes. At the last second, she swerved to avoid the truck, bracing herself for the impact that she knew was coming.
She knew they were taking the corner too fast, but they were going downhill and the big bus continued to pick up speed as the brakes locked up. The right tires left the gravel road and plowed through the soft shoulder where another loop of Snake Creek ran over its banks after heavy rains.
The bus teetered precariously, then tipped over on its side and started a skidding slide. There was a tremendous screech of metal against gravel and rock. Tree limbs shattered or made a horrendous sound as they scraped against the bus. The children were screaming. It all combined to make one horrific sound in the deep silence of the forest.
The bus garage was calling her, but Tessa couldn’t answer. It was taking forever to stop and she didn’t know where they would end up. The bus bumped and jerked violently a few times, jarring its occupants. Finally, as the behemoth of a bus came to a shuddering stop, there was silence. A terrible, awful silence that echoed and re-echoed in Tessa’s ears . . .