DEAD: Darkness Before Dawn

by Brown, TW

  And then the police kicked in the front door.

  Deanna stood there splattered with blood. Anthony’s head was a shattered mess—any proof to support her wild claims that she had walked in to discover the man eating her mother was obliterated.

  It did not help that Deanna was no stranger to the police. Of course up until now it had been shoplifting and a few “minor in possession” charges. She had spent the first night “under evaluation” after she had given her recount of events. However, they had moved her to juvenile detention the next day.

  And then the world ended.

  ***

  “You okay?” Sean whispered in her ear, snapping her out of her trip down memory lane.

  “Fine,” Deanna lied. She looked up to see that the supposed adults were still at it.

  “I think we need to look into some way of transporting as much of this as we can,” Aleah was saying.

  “Great, maybe you can go find us a U-Haul truck,” Catie quipped.

  “And maybe you can offer something helpful instead of being a bitch,” Aleah shot back without missing a beat.

  “Can we perhaps act like grown-ups in front of the kids?” Heather asked, giving both Catie and Aleah a hard glare. “Look, the fact is, Kevin is just not able to run the show right now. First the cat, and now the bite…we need to stop coming apart every single time he is down. If, God forbid, we were to lose him for good, this group needs to be able to push on.”

  Aleah and Catie did nothing more than glare. Heather stood up and faced first one, then the other. She briefly wished that they were sitting closer together because she felt like she lost some of her power having to turn back and forth.

  “If you two can’t handle acting like part of the team, maybe both of you should take off on your own.”

  “But—” Aleah started, only to have Heather cut her off.

  “No, I don’t want to hear it. The two of you bickered the whole time that he was down and out. Catie, I have no idea what your deal is. You left your military group to join us. In case you forgot, we bailed on your camp.

  “I have been with Kevin for the longest…and I trust him with everything. I would not be here if not for him. We picked up these kids, and almost from the start, they have acted more like adults than either of you.

  “Aleah, Kevin loves you, but if you think I would not hesitate to send you packing, you are wrong. And that says a lot since you are almost like a sister to me. And Catie, you bring a certain skill to the group…if you would start acting like part of us instead of somebody just tagging along until she can find a better deal…life here would be much easier. Before you came, we talked things through and everybody got to say their bit. This is not the military, and whatever rank you might have had…that is nothing now. You are just part of the group.”

  Heather felt she had said all she could on the subject and decided that her strongest move at this point was to just walk away. She left the room and made her way down the hall to where they had put Kevin. She wanted to take one more look in on him before going to bed.

  Peeking in, she was only a little surprised to see Rose sitting at his bedside. She was holding his hand and whispering something in his ear. She decided to leave them be…he was in good hands.

  ***

  “…and I think some of them kids didn’t maybe belong in there. They just got mixed up with something bad, but none of them that I ever talked with done nothing too bad. One girl put a knife in her daddy’s belly ‘cause he kept sneakin’ into her room at night and doin’ stuff.

  “And another girl, she didn’t mean to catch the house on fire. Her whole family died that night…and she cried about it for the first bunch of weeks she was in lock up.

  “But me…I meant to do what I did. And I didn’t even feel bad about it…still don’t. Where I lived, you either cliqued up, or you got beat up. My mama been in a gang, my daddy was in a gang ‘til he got wasted, and my brother is the one who brought me to the Southsiders and shoved me in the room with ‘em. Said, “Rosie…” he always called me that on ‘count he knowed how much I hated being called that, “Rosie, you gonna either live or die today. You see the sun come up in the morning, then you a Southsider…if not, you end up in the lot behind Old Man Fergusons’ store.” And I didn’t even cry. I knew it was gonna happen sooner or later, Nobody makes it to twelve in the hood without either joinin’ or runnin’ and I wasn’t gonna run.

  “I fought three girls that night. I don’t think I kilt none of ‘em, but I never saw any of ‘em again. And then they give me this.”

  Rose glanced up at the sleeping man and sighed. His closed eyes could not see the dark blue “S” done in calligraphy on her left forearm. She had been proud to get that letter…and even more proud because her brother had been the one to lay down her ink.

  Rose Ortega had always been small for her age. Most folks would not believe it if they were told she was fourteen. Hell, most folks thought she was ten or eleven at the most. That had served her well in juvie. Some of the kids who targeted her never expected the ferocity in which she came back at them.

  However, that was a lifetime ago. She still remembered that night after they had seen all that terrible stuff on the television. That night, she had a terrible nightmare, but she was convinced that it was more of a vision. Her brother had come, but he looked like those monsters on TV with his body all torn up and bloody.

  “Rosie, it’s just you now. Everybody else is all gone…and I got bad news for you…Hell is real. Change while you can, girl…or I’ll be seeing you in Hell.”

  She had woken up in a sweat. Her body was clammy and damp. She had been afraid to go back to sleep. And for the next few days, she had not been able to shut her eyes without that vision returning.

  Then, they had brought that sick girl in. Rose still believed that the guard did it on purpose, that he was doing his best to make sure none of the “bad kids” survived. She had seen things that night and many others since that made her believe very much in the idea of Hell.

  When Fish and some of the other boys came, Rose was hiding under a bed…reading a bible. That was the day she decided that she needed to change. She could not know for sure if there really was such a place as Hell, but she decided it was not something she cared to risk if all it took was saying she was sorry (and actually meaning it) and promising to believe. After all, Jesus had hung out with hookers, thieves, and tax collectors. If they had a chance, there was definitely hope for her.

  “So I just want you to know, Kevin, I got your back ‘til the end, but if you do something stupid like this ever again, you gonna have to explain to Aleah how you got that black eye. You feelin’ me?”

  With that said, and feeling like she had finally gotten out a lot of what she had been carrying around inside, Rose laid her head down on Kevin’s chest and closed her eyes. She could hear his heart beating slow and steady.

  “Oh yeah,” she added after a big yawn, “and you better damn well be immune…’cause if I wake up and you turned into a zombie…I’m gonna bash your brains in.”

  ***

  Catie climbed up the ladder that was bolted to the wall and made her way up onto the roof of the school. It was starting to change seasons. The bitter cold of winter was almost gone, but there was still a nip in the air.

  Pulling her jacket up around her neck and tugging her knit cap down tighter over her ears, she sulked over to the lip of the roof and looked out at the ruins of Chicago’s South Side. She had only ever heard about The Windy City, and all she had ever heard about this part of it was that it was not someplace you wanted to find yourself after dark.

  The low moan of a nearby zombie carried up to her ears. So not much has changed, she thought, amused by her own dry wit.

  She made a complete circuit of the building and noticed a few small groups of walkers here and there, but nothing too worrisome. She also saw a flicker of firelight from more than two dozen locations in every direction.

  She wondered whe
re everybody hid during the day, because a few of those fires were back the way they had come. That made her more easily accept the idea that perhaps they had actually just stumbled onto this place with all of its supplies. Still, if that was the case, where did these people go…and why?

  She sat down and let her legs dangle over the side. In that single act, she was transported back to the days when she was a young girl back in rural South Dakota.

  She had grown up in a pretty normal middle class home. She played sports in school and was better at many of them than some of the boys. That had gotten the whole “dyke” rumor started. Of course it could not be skill, talent, and practice…no, the only reason Catie Rose was any good at sports was because she was a carpet muncher.

  That had set her on a course that she was not proud of and had regretted to this day. For most of her junior year, Catie slept with just about every single guy she could. Considering that she was above average in the looks department, it had not been difficult. Of course she was no longer being called a lesbian or any of the more colorful euphemisms, but now she was a “slut” and a “whore”. She eventually discovered that she preferred the lesbian rumor to the slutty truth.

  Then a day came along that changed her life. A recruiter visited the school shortly after 9/11. She saw a few things right away that appealed to her. For one, she would get to shoot guns…really big ones. And second, she could give a little payback to those bastards who had dared to do such a terrible thing.

  Enlisting on the spot, Catie left for boot camp the week after graduation. The recruiter had even told her that she could enjoy her last summer first, but she saw no reason to delay getting away from home and the town where her name was more often used as a punch line than anything else.

  Of course it did not take long for her to see past all of the smoke and mirrors of the recruiter’s spiel. But in the end, she had not regretted her decision. By the time she graduated boot camp, troops were fighting and dying all over the Middle East and the bastard responsible was living in a cave and laughing.

  However, she still remembered the day she got off the plane and found herself in Baghdad. Those first months, they were treated like heroes. And then she lost her first friend (of many) to an IED.

  After her first reenlistment, Catie was shipped back to the states, but she had really found her niche in life overseas and begged to be sent back. For some reason, she found a great deal of satisfaction and personal reward in being able to help people who had lived their lives as victims. She picked up enough of the language to be able to communicate with the locals and found that the media was missing the big story: these people were finally being allowed to live their lives without fear of death squads.

  It would all change when her convoy that was loaded down with supplies for a village that had been hit by terrible flooding was attacked by insurgents. Her APC was flipped by an IED and she suffered a terrible injury to her spine. Doctors said she might never walk again. Catie never believed them for a moment.

  After three years of painful rehab, she became an ambassador for the Army and spoke at a lot of fundraisers, but they would not let her have anything beyond a desk job ever again. Her days in the field were over…and then the dead got up and started eating people.

  She was on a plane to Washington D.C. and on a layover in Columbus of all places when a message came with top priority. The president’s daughter was close and needed to be saved if possible. She made a few calls and discovered that there were over a dozen National Guard units within less than twenty miles.

  The one she ended up with was strictly luck. She could have just as easily hooked up with that lunatic Major Beers. The thing is, she had no idea how it would have turned out. Sometimes she actually saw the major’s point. This was a new world and it was about survival. But then she would think about all those she had encountered over the years that had seen her uniform as a sign of hope. She remembered her oath to protect against all enemies…foreign and domestic.

  She had melded in fine with her new unit…until order started to crumble. When that group of men had been discovered that were basically running a black market based on their fellow female soldiers, Catie had found her first real mission.

  After they were dealt with, she had hung in the background, letting some of the higher ups think that it was their idea. That was something that had always amazed her about most officers…they were fantastic at taking somebody else’s idea and accepting the credit for its implementation.

  As time passed, she started finding more and more that her thoughts returned home. Not the people who had tormented her, she could give a damn about their fate, but she had friends and family. She had seen how the big cities had fallen, but she held on to a fantasy that it would be different for her hometown.

  Still, Catie was no fool; she knew that to embark on such a journey by herself would not end well. Then, Kevin and his group arrived. She tried to keep her distance and observe, but they had been the first civilian survivors that she had seen in months that were not living out some sort of deranged Mad Max fantasy.

  On a few occasions when she had hung out on the fringe of this little group, she heard something that made her pay closer attention. More than once she had heard South Dakota mentioned. Still, she had not dared to hope. These people had stumbled into safety. They could relax now; and from the sounds of it, Kevin and his people could use the break. All of them were suffering at least mild malnutrition and varying degrees of frostbite. Yet she saw a spirit in them, and it emanated from the unlikely hero, Kevin Dreon.

  She was not surprised when the word leaked out that they would be leaving. It seemed that none of them were too keen on a new life under the military umbrella. She had gone on one field mission with Aleah and seen firsthand how the woman would never fit in with soldiers…no matter the gender.

  She had followed them when they left. To be more specific, she had deserted the unit. They were becoming the bully and had stopped even trying to find survivors. In the early days they had been sending out patrols in an attempt to find women and rescue them. This zombie scenario had turned into the perfect storm for every abuser, rapist, and pedophile to come together and act with impunity on every sick and twisted fantasy that they ever imagined.

  The last few months, the missions out to find and help had turned into scavenge and take. It was time to move on.

  At first, she had just been so glad to be away from the constraints of the unit. However, she bristled at the lack of routine. For a decade, her life had been all about order and knowing what came next. And then there was that desire that burned inside her to help others in need. Yet this group actually seemed to be focused on survival of themselves and nothing more.

  When they found the children, she finally felt like things were right in her world. They had done a good thing and rescued those in need, and now they were on the way home. Sure, Kevin had his spot all picked out, but if her hometown had in fact survived like she had imagined in all her fantasies, then maybe he would see that he did not need to travel any further.

  When he went down, Catie had simply shifted into military mode. While the commanding officer was absent, the group needed structure and a purpose while they awaited his recovery. The only problem with that was her ideas and priorities did not always sync with Aleah—self-proclaimed queen of the realm in Kevin’s absence. She could not explain it; there was just something about the woman that bothered her.

  “You need to snap out of this, soldier,” she chastised herself as she looked out over the dead remains of Chicago. She made a vow right then to let the soldier retire.

  ***

  Sean was afraid to move. Deanna had snuggled in tight and he was scared that if he so much as twitched, she would get up and go climb into her cot. He really enjoyed these moments when she was all his and not trying to save everybody at once.

  He pushed them down, but he could not deny that he often had to struggle with feelings of jealousy when she ran around
all day making sure that every single person in their group was taken care of except him. Of course he should be able to take care of himself, but he liked it when she fussed over him.

  As he sat here reveling in her closeness, he had to wonder if she would get tired of him eventually. After all, everybody else did…even his own parents.

  Sean let his mind drift down that dark path that he tried to keep closed most of the time. It was always more difficult when he was tired.

  He thought of all the choices in life he had made that led to his current situation. Sean Fields had been in and out of juvie most of his life. Shoplifting, petty theft, breaking and entering, a few minor assaults; all of these led up to the day that he got tired of hearing his drunken excuse for a mother tell him what a huge disappointment he had been to her since his birth.

  “I got pregnant with you right after graduation…I never had a chance to live my life,” she slurred after staggering in one morning around three. “I had my whole future ahead of me and then you had to come and ruin it!”

  Sean just stood there; after all, he had heard this story a hundred times if he’d heard it once. Next she would tell him that his behavior was constantly ruining any chance she had to meet a nice guy.

  “If you could just straighten up for a few months, I could meet a nice guy and we could have a real life,” Julia Fields said as she staggered down the hall.

  Sean knew the last bit was coming, but when his mother stumbled into her room, he thought this time he would not have to hear—

  “I wish you would have never been born!” his mother’s voice echoed down the hallway. It seemed to amplify and almost slam into him with a physical presence.