Jason was angry at the people in the minivan. He wanted to lash out at them, kick them, and beat on them. In that moment, he hated the other survivors for everything that had gone wrong in his life. Every bit of his pent-up rage that had been festering for weeks came to the surface in an instant.
The twelve year old grabbed George’s arm and pulled on it until the big man snapped out of his angry trance. Jason almost dropped his hand when he saw the seething anger in the man’s eyes. It looked like it was directed at him, and he was ready to move backwards out of the range of those large clenched fists. But the anger dissipated, and Jason realized George wasn’t angry. He was frustrated.
“We need to go after them. We have to leave here, now. I can’t stay here anymore.”
George had a surprised look on his face. His mouth opened as he tried to sputter out a response, but Jason spoke again before he could.
“I know those people took off and those dead things are out there, but if we go out back, we could sneak around those creeps, we can track those people down. They have to stop sooner or later. We have to try!”
George shook his head as he watched Jason’s face grow more panic-stricken with each word.
“It won’t work.”
Before the boy could blurt out a protest, George continued. “The van will be coming back anyway.”
Jason looked confused, but if what George was saying was true, it was all the better.
“Then we have to go downstairs. We have to let them know we’re here! Come on!”
Now it was George holding Jason’s arm, easily keeping him from racing for the steps. George continued to shake his head, a resigned look on his face. The tug of war lasted only a couple of seconds until George snapped.
“Jason! Shut up and listen!” The command had the desired effect, and Jason steadied, at least for a moment. George turned and pointed out the window down the street in the direction the vehicle had headed. “Can you see out past the schools?”
Jason’s vision was pretty good, but the road curved, and the church was set far enough back on it that it was hard to see that far. He shook his head.
“I’ve been looking out this window, just like you have, for a month now. I’ve looked at it from every angle. Believe me, I’ve tried figuring a way out of here … probably a million different times.”
George pointed, and Jason followed his finger. He saw the blue speck that was the minivan, way down the road.
“See them there?”
Jason nodded.
“That’s as far as they go. There’s a bunch of vehicles down there blocking the road … and here they come again.”
The van had turned around and was heading back toward the church. George’s resigned voice deflated Jason’s enthusiasm, but seeing the van return still excited him.
The kid turned to rush to the stairs and George did not grab him this time. Instead, it was the man’s words that stopped him cold.
“They’re dead already.”
Jason halted his progress and turned back to look at George, an angry and puzzled look on his face.
“See for yourself.”
Jason hesitated, fearful of what he might see, but his curiosity was too much for him to resist as he moved back to the window.
The van skidded around the parking lot next to the church. The angle wasn’t great, and Jason could barely see the vehicle, but the van was getting closer and was surrounded by crowds of the undead.
The driver was darting in and out of the horde and was having a small amount of success, but from their elevated vantage, George and Jason knew what was about to happen.
The van would run out of space. There were too many monsters to ram through. They would be forced to stop, and the driver and his passenger would be torn to pieces.
Jason watched the vehicle pitch and weave and knew in his heart that the driver and his passenger were doomed. He glanced over at George and realized the man was only watching the scene unfold out of some morbid sense of curiosity, not because he was hoping the driver would figure out a way to escape.
“I can’t stay here. I’m going to help those people.”
Jason turned and ran for the stairs. He had no idea what he was going to do, but he had to do it fast. He had hit the bottom of the steps when George caught up to him and whipped him around by the arm.
“Are you crazy? Have you completely lost your mind? Jason, I know being stuck here sucks, but that doesn’t mean you should go on some suicide mission to try to save some people who are already dead!”
The anger on Jason’s face as he wriggled free of George’s grasp startled the man. He was even more stunned when Jason slammed a fist into his chest.
“I’m not going to kill myself! I’m going to save those people, and they’re going to take me out of here. You and those creeps aren’t going to stop me either!”
Jason kept punching George as he raged. It was like hitting a side of beef, but he didn’t care. The anger he’d felt only moments before toward the people outside had been redirected toward the man he perceived to be his jailor. George, stunned by the outburst, couldn’t react. He could only watch as tears of rage formed in Jason’s eyes.
That’s when it all crashed down on George like a ton of bricks. He’d been sheltering Jason all this time, believing that the boy was some fragile child who needed to be kept safe from the horrors outside the door. The reality was that it was impossible to keep him safe. Not here, not anywhere. Jason already knew this, and was willing to take any risk necessary to get the hell out of this mausoleum in which they’d been dying for far too long.
If we hide out in this place any longer, we’ll die here. It was a simple thought, clear and precise in George’s brain. The clearest thought he’d had since they’d arrived.
An image of Helen popped into his head. She was listening to him talk on his cell phone from the high school gym. He was promising her would be home soon, that nothing would stand in his way of getting back to his wife and daughters.
So what the hell have you done since then, George Montgomery? A whole lot of covering your ass, that’s what.
Taking a deep breath, George grabbed Jason’s hands and held them tight, bringing his full strength to bear in an effort to control the erratic kid. Looking him in the eyes, he smiled at the twelve year old.
“Okay, let’s do it.”
He nearly laughed at the surprised look on Jason’s face.
Jason’s shock turned to joy, and he tried to move away, but George pulled him back until they were facing each other once again.
“But we do this my way, okay?”
George peered into Jason’s brown eyes with a steely glare, and an understanding passed between them. After a moment, Jason nodded vigorously. George smiled at him and winked, which elicited a confused grin from the boy.
“Come on, we don’t have much time,” George said as he wrapped his arm around the boy’s neck and gave it a squeeze.
They moved toward the gym, ready to get down to business.
***
The run out onto the street felt liberating this time. For the first time since that horrible night long ago, he was doing something. It was rash, and there was a good chance it would be fatal, but this was the choice George had made: opting for a dangerous risk rather than slowly dying with only dust and despair to mark his final resting place.
When it came right down to it, there it had been no real choice at all.
He told Jason to sit tight while he ran across the street. He would make a break for the water tower as the attention of the horde was directed toward the people in the van. Hopefully the effort—along with the screaming and yelling he would do once he got to the tower—would lure enough of the mob in his direction and give the van a chance to break free and Jason a chance to either flag them down or escape into the woods behind the church.
After that, the plan was for George to run away from the tower before it was surrounded, or for him climb the sucker if he had to
. He didn’t want to think too much about what would happen if he were forced to choose the latter option.
The first part of his plan went off without a hitch. There were some stragglers still roaming on the street as he ran across, but George only had to bowl over a couple. The rest were far too slow to react before he made it to the fence.
As he ran, he could see the woods beyond the tower, and a twisted urge to keep on running raced through his mind, but the temptation passed as quickly as it came. Far too many people had already died as George stood by doing nothing. He increased his speed and hit the chain link fence a second later.
As he climbed the fence, he realized that getting up the water tower would be next to impossible. There were X-shaped struts running between the metal stems of the tower, but no ladder to be seen.
George bit his tongue as nervous laughter almost escaped his lips. It was far too late to turn back. He reached the top of the fence and balanced there, one leg tossed over as he twisted his body around so he faced the mass of dead bodies surrounding the van. The few he’d passed were moving in his direction, though most remained focused on the van. He glanced over at the woods one last time.
Taking a deep breath, he closed his eyes. The buzzing noise he’d discovered a few weeks back had returned, bringing with it memories of that terrible night. The soldier on top of the truck, bodies being torn to pieces everywhere he looked, Al bleeding to death on the asphalt, and Jennifer’s last words.
Feeling dizzy, George opened his eyes again, fighting to maintain his precarious balance atop his narrow perch. He focused on the van and took another deep breath.
He screamed. It was a long, howling wail contorted with pain and a rage that George didn’t realize he’d been holding in all that time. He clenched a fist and raised it high, shaking it at the demons spread out before him.
In that moment, it came to him. The prayer he’d forgotten on THAT night—the one he thought he’d never memorized, but must have, years before. It thundered out of him, billowing forth as if he were an avenging angel:
“The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want. He makes me to lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside the still waters. He restores my soul. He leads me in the paths of righteousness For His name's sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for You are with me. Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me. You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies. You anoint my head with oil. My cup runs over. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the LORD forever!”
As he shouted, they turned. As he continued, his voice rising, more came forward as they forgot the van. They moved as one, drawn forward, it seemed, not by the promise of new prey, but by his words. It felt like that even as the rational part of his brain told George they were only coming to him because he was food, food that was screaming like a lunatic for all the world to see.
He didn’t care. What he did care about was how it felt to finally curse the monsters that had caused all this. All his emotions—the rage, the fear, the helplessness—were funneled into the words he spat out. As he shook his fists, it was as if he were calling thunderbolts down from heaven at the heaving mass of death dragging itself toward him.
In truth, his words bounced off his impassive congregation like everything else the human race had thrown at them. But at least they were coming for him; that much was certain.
Jumping down into the small compound, he watched as the first of the raggedy monsters slammed into the fence. George stepped back, getting the first daylight close-up of one of the creeps, as Jason called them. He had seen enough of them in the dark, but now was getting a full Technicolor display of the dead soldiers and refugees with whom he’d shared the high school gymnasium.
As gruesome as the crowd was, George was still relieved. He didn’t recognize anyone. He doubted he could handle facing Al or Jennifer as they surely were now. But if they were in the crowd, they were indistinguishable from the rest of the rotting mass of corpses, which was a small blessing.
The fence appeared to be strong enough to keep the army of slavering maniacs at bay for at least a few minutes. The rust on it didn’t inspire confidence, but at least the monsters pounding on the chain link didn’t appear to have much in the way of climbing skills. All they could do was press their swelling, overheated carcasses up against the fence as they bashed at it and hissed at George. They seemed almost insulted that the meat so tantalizingly close was not willingly sacrificing itself.
More and more corpses crowded up against the fence, drawing the attention of others. It was a domino effect: even those that could not possibly have seen or heard him were moving in his direction, away from the van.
Looking through the gaps in the crowd, George could see that there were fewer bodies pressed up against the Odyssey. It wasn’t rocking back and forth anymore, though many persistent attackers were still engaged in an effort to crack into it.
George frowned, his frustration with the driver of the minivan surfacing. Why hadn’t they tried moving yet?
The path was clear, or so it seemed, though it was getting harder for him to see over the bodies tugging at the fence. He did see a smaller group of the infected splitting off from the main force to lumber in his direction. They were on the opposite side of the street, still near the van, but moving toward the church.
Looking over at his old hideout, George groaned. The kid had done it. He’d disobeyed the order to sit tight and wait. When all the attention was drawn away from the church, Jason would have had his chance to take off. Until then, he was supposed to remain safe behind the closed doors.
Now that was shot to hell.
George watched in stunned silence as the twelve year old whipped a clunky textbook out one of the second-floor windows at the crowd of onlookers gathered around the front of the church. The book spun like an oversized shuriken and sideswiped what may have been an elderly woman. The only hints at its gender were its cloud of messy white hair and the tattered remains of a flower-print dress. The book spun the creature around, but didn’t knock it over. The blow did serve to draw its attention, and moments later, it was clawing and beating at the church doors.
Where the hell did he get the book? It didn’t matter much, but George surmised that Jason must have done some exploring in the classrooms and found a few teaching manuals. More rectangular missiles flew out of the window, smashing into the heads of the ghouls down below. Though it was hard to tell from a distance, it looked to George as if Jason were enjoying himself.
“Get out of there now, dammit. GET OUT!”
It was pointless; the kid couldn’t hear him. The maddening drone was too loud, vibrating every bone in George’s body. He could barely hear himself.
Resisting the temptation to launch his body at a part of the fence still bare of smashed bodies, George paced behind the walls of his prison as more stiffened corpses made the pilgrimage to the church. His movements were spreading the ghouls out around the perimeter of the fence. As they tried to follow him, more blocked his view of the van and the church. He wanted to signal for Jason to just cut and run, but it was fast becoming clear that, for the moment anyway, the boy’s fate was entirely out of his hands.
The crowd beyond the fence continued to shift, moving to the side of the compound to which George was closest—at least most of them did. There were more than enough to spread around, and those pressed up against the chain link appeared unwilling to give up their prime spots along the fence line.
George knew he would have to make a break for it soon. The fence was starting to sway as more bodies pressed against it. It wouldn’t be long before it collapsed.
He was still sizing things up when he heard the roar of the van’s engine. Finally! At least the people in the van would be able to escape this nightmare, even if he and Jason were screwed.
Even as he thought about how futile this whole rescue effort had been, George had
to smile. It beat sitting on his ass until he starved to death.
Moments later, George’s eyes widened as the sound of metal crunching against metal jolted him out of his reverie and he saw the blue prow of the minivan heading in his direction.
He dove out of the way as the Odyssey plowed through the fence, smashing at least five stiffs into its grill.
George wobbled to his feet, still in a daze, as he finally got a good view of the scraggly driver when he rolled his window down. At the same time, the cargo door on the minivan slowly opened. A thin, haggard-looking woman stood behind the door, a massive revolver in her tiny hands.
He was still staring at these ragged people, trying to comprehend what had just happened, when he heard one of them shout, “Get in!”
Jason, Alone
Author’s note: This particular story takes place before Jason ever meets up with George. I realize it is out of place chronologically, but feel that as an explanation of who Jason is, it fits better after his story with George has been read.
Everything had been screwed up since Momma dragged him out of school up in Detroit and moved him down to this white bread hillbilly paradise. They sure as heck hadn’t been rich up in Dearborn, but he’d gotten to see his father every now and then, and they had a nice apartment. Jason didn’t want a house, even if Momma insisted that they needed a place where they weren’t crammed in next to twenty other families. He didn’t want to leave his school either. It wasn’t like he had lots of friends there, but he was comfortable with his teachers and knew what was expected of him. Here, he stood out like a sore thumb. They had gotten a house like Momma had always wanted, but there were even more trailer parks in their new town than he’d ever seen back home. That Momma somehow thought moving to Gallatin, Ohio was a step up from Dearborn, Michigan was beyond Jason’s ability to understand.
The Dark Trilogy Page 63