by David Smith
I ran over, took a deep breath to support my broken ribs, squatted down and lifted the end of the couch. With his right arm, Dave grabbed it, still swinging with his left and we flipped it over onto the pile of bodies. It slowed them down just enough for us to run to the passenger door and climb inside before we were completely surrounded.
"Where is everybody?" Dave asked, looking around and noticing in the side mirror that the trailer was disconnected.
"I saw that .50 cal up on the roof." DeMarkus said. "I made everybody in here climb to the top of the trailer and dropped it out there on the road."
Dave looked at him, wide eyed. "Then you drove it through the wall with that thing shooting at you? Well, pin a medal on your chest!"
"Can we just get the hell out of here first?" DeMarkus said, nodding his head, his eyes as big as plates.
Dave put it it reverse and eased out on the clutch and although there was a small rock to the left and right, no backward motion. "Shit! We're a little hung up I think." He put it in another gear, eased the clutch up and I could feel it grab just a little before spinning. "Oh well, so much for your medal. You left the airbags down." He said and flipped a switch. After a few moments, I could feel the truck lifting slightly in the back. He flipped another switch, on the gear lever, and there was a quick sneeze from it. He put it in gear again and revved the engine slightly before dumping the clutch hard. The entire truck hopped forward and kept hopping, the dead bouncing up and down off the hood and fenders. With some fancy footwork on the clutch and the brake and slamming the transmission back into reverse, he caught it on the rock-back and we pulled out of the house taking half the wall and a pile of rotted bodies with us.
He flew through the gears, the acceleration throwing me down onto the floor as we headed back up the trail through the corn toward the massive hole in the fence. The blade on the front had smoothed a path across the furrowed ground.
"Where's the fuel truck?" Dave asked.
"It was there when I left." DeMarkus explained. "The bikers though, they took off when the dead started showing up, took the fat man with 'em."
"They didn't take the fuel truck?" Dave asked again.
"No, they left before, I told ya."
Dave was turning the truck around in the road, getting ready to back up to the trailer and I finally had a chance to get on my feet. "It was Spider."
"How do you know?" Dave said.
I thought for a minute. "Who else? He'll be taking it back to Choppa."
Dave backed into the trailer and it wouldn't hook. "DeMarkus, climb up there and tell the people on top of the trailer to hang on. There's a bunch of bodies trapped between the fifth wheel and the pin, gonna have to ram it in."
He climbed out of the hatch. "Hey, y'all lay down and hang on." He shouted.
Dave pulled up then put it in reverse and slammed it in. Moments later, Chontelle, Mac and the other two men from the farm climbed in and we were off. The truck shook a little as the trailer rolled over several bodies that fell under the tires. We went about a mile before he stopped and DeMarkus got out to raise the landing gear.
I was thinking about Stephanie and wondering why I wasn't more torn up about what had happened to her. As pretty as she had been, any romantic attraction I had felt towards her had been short-lived. I still thought I should have felt more guilty than I did and felt guilty for not feeling guilty. I'm not one to buy into the 'people are a product of their environment' philosophy. People are who they choose to be, the decisions they make. At her age and the way she grew up though, she only got the chance to make a few. They were all the wrong ones so that was on her, but if I'd have left her there at least she would have starved to death in peace instead of having been eaten alive. That's one choice, I felt like, I took away from her.
As we drove away, the diesel engine humming and the turbos whistling quietly, Chontelle was staring at me. "So, we have two less than before. We were supposed to have more, right? Not less. What happened?"
I thought for a moment. "I did the best I could."
"You can't save everyone." She said.
"I know, but..."
"No! You don't know or you wouldn't be beating yourself up right now. I can see it in your face. It's like looking in a mirror."
"If I wouldn't have gone after Kara, maybe I could've saved Stephanie."
"Sean told me all about her. You cannot save someone who doesn't want to be saved."
"I know."
"No. You don't. You think there is some good in all people."
"I don't think there was good in Jennings...or Choppa or Spider." I interrupted.
"And you were right about them, but that girl wasn't any different. You think she was because you hoped she was because she was just a pretty little thing. You thought you could fix her and y'all live happily ever after."
"It wasn't like that." I argued and it really wasn't, not at the end at least. "She wasn't like them. She never hurt anybody..."
"Anybody but herself." She interrupted. "What you don't understand is that some people are just bad from birth and they come in all shapes and sizes. They're put here just to cause people pain, sometimes by hurting others, sometimes themselves and that's the worst ones. Those, it's like they got a demon in them that just won't let them do right for themselves or anybody else."
Chapter 23: Chontelle’s Story
I grew up in New Orleans. In the projects, there's a lot of good people and a lot of bad people, just like anywhere else. The biggest difference was, we took care of our own. In the white neighborhoods, if somebody was dealing drugs or whatever, they'd call the police. They didn't stick together like we did. All the people dealing drugs and stealing and gang banging, they were all somebody you grew up with, played on the playground with, run the streets with when your Momma or Daddy was laid up in the house high, drunk or whatever. Everybody knew everybody and we were all family. Then the government, they didn't help either. You'd see every day on the news where some black man was killed by the cops just for being black, so we didn't trust nobody but our own.
It wasn't till I met Sean that I knew that evil or good don't come in no color. He is the whitest man I ever knew and the best one I've ever known. My own brothers weren't as good to me and we were blood.
See, I was the second of five kids. My older brother, Diante, was four when I was born and that's when our Daddy left. The other three were just from whoever had the money. I was only eleven when Diante started raping me. He did it as a gang initiation and after that I guess he just figured I was his. I told Momma and she tore his ass up but it didn't stop him. The next time he did it, she tore my ass up and told me not to go around telling people. She said if I told people that the police would come take me away from her. It wasn't until I met Sean and he told me, that I knew all she cared about was getting the extra food stamps. That went on my whole life, right up until I left for college. Even my younger brother would try when Diante wasn't around.
When the infection started, instead of seeing that as a chance to get rid of him like I should have, I thought it was my responsibility to save him. That's how blind caring about the wrong person can make you. Even if it's family, you got to be willing to see the evil in somebody. And that don't mean you don't love them or don't forgive them but you still gotta end it. You have to walk away and if they won't let you, you have to kill them.
When the infection started up in New York, Diante and all his friends, from the day it started, were out there looting and rioting, stealing shit they'd never get the chance to use. I should have left him out there to die when I had the chance.
I was a grad student at Tulane University and every day I would walk past the old Charity Hospital. They had shut it down after Hurricane Katrina and it had been abandoned for thirteen years, the bottom floors all grown over with weeds, even on the inside. It was a huge building, sixteen stories in the middle section and nobody had been there since it closed except for a few security guards. I figured they'd be long gone
so a week before the infection made it here I started sneaking everybody from the projects in there and told Diante to start stealing something useful. That was the only time he came through for me in my life and I thought maybe that would make him into a man, doing something useful. But a month after the infection made it to the city, it was just like it was when we were kids.
When the infection got there we stood on the roof and watched them come in. It was like an army, millions of them just like a flood washing over the whole city. They came right down Interstate 10, pouring down the exit ramps and down every street till they surrounded the hospital but none ever even tried to get in the fence. I had to make some of our people go inside because they couldn't keep quite and I was worried, that even that high up, they might hear us. My brothers helped with that too.
For the next few days it sounded like a war was going on; people shooting guns, people screaming, people dying. There were fires all over the city that burned for days. It was like sitting on the earth and looking down into Hell.
We ran out of food two months in but people started going crazy even before that, just wanting to leave. I told them once they left, we weren't letting them back in but they left anyway. They'd try to get back in and my brothers would go down and shoot them and leave them lying in the street. The shots would echo through the streets and bring them to us but they never did figure out where we were so they'd pass on by. When we ran out food though we knew we had to send people out to find some. I didn't trust nobody else to go out and not try to get back in if they were infected so I'd go with them.
Even though the streets seemed quiet from up so high, there were still hundreds of them in some places. They'd be hiding in parking garages or basements. Sometimes there'd be entire buildings just full of them and when we'd walk by in the street they'd come out after us. You'd get so use to that rotten smell and they were so quiet you wouldn't even know they were there till they were chasing you. When that happened it was every man or woman for himself or herself. If you were fast enough to be at the front of the pack you lived. We'd go out there and somebody'd get bit and I'd have to kill them to keep them from trying to get back in with us. I killed 53 men and women in the next two months, people that were like family to me, people who had cooked me dinner and who had woke me up and got me ready for school when I couldn't stay at home.
After six months of being in that place, starving to death, having to kill people I loved and being raped by my brother when he had the chance, I couldn't take it anymore. I hoped if we all left to go find some place better, maybe he'd get his stupid ass killed or maybe we'd all be killed. Either way, it would have been better than it was.
From the roof, it didn't look like there were many of them on the interstate, just cars, bumper to bumper as far as you could see. It was only a block from the front door to the interstate and there were a few just standing around but I knew if we killed them quietly, the rest wouldn't even hear us. But some of them idiots, I should have thrown them off the building before we even left because when we hit the street they took off running and shooting, not even hitting anything. There was about fifty of us when we left the building and by the time we got a mile up the interstate, there was maybe thirty of us left and the other twenty was the only thing that slowed the dead down enough for us to get away.
There must've been a thousand of them that followed us all the way out of the city. When somebody got too tired to go on we just left them behind. Wouldn't have had to if I hadn't been trying to save everybody. Instead, I could've saved the ones that were worth saving. It wasn't long before all the ones slowing us down were all dead though and we just took off running. By the time we got across the twin span, we looked back and couldn't even see the dead behind us anymore so we got off and went into Oak Harbor.
It was this really fancy neighborhood. Every house in there was as big as an apartment complex with a swimming pool and a boat in every back yard. My youngest brother knew a white boy in there that use to deal drugs for him to the neighborhood kids and some of their parents. They even let him use their Daddy's boat to dump a body one time down in The Rigolets.
That whole neighborhood looked like everybody just got picked up by a spaceship or something. There weren't any dead, no blood on the streets. The only way you could tell anything had happened was the grass wasn't mowed for the last four months. There were a few houses we broke into where the people were dead but it was just because they had killed themselves or starved to death, but no infection.
We stayed there all through that winter and into next summer, staying with different families. Some of them were really nice and others were just too scared to say any different. I stayed in a different house than my brothers and it was the first time in my life that I wasn't afraid of them. The man that lived there had two daughters, a lot of guns and he wouldn't let anybody but me stay there. My brothers and a few of the others tried to test him but after he killed a couple of them, they stayed on their side if the island.
There was plenty to eat because we'd all go out in the boats and go fishing and I could've stayed there forever but most of the others weren't happy. The rule was if you didn't catch the fish you had to clean them. You had to earn your keep and some of them didn't like that so they were looking for a way out. One day they found it.
My two youngest brothers were out on the island at the west end of the neighborhood, you could see the interstate from there. Every day for a couple of weeks, they saw a bunch of guys out there with a big military truck, shoving cars off the Twinspan, into the lake. They'd be out there all day and when the dead would come up to them, they'd just knock them into the lake too.
Once they got the bridge cleared off, that same truck that everybody's fighting over right now went across and came back about two hours later. My brothers got the big idea that things were getting back to normal again but that it must be a small group because the men weren't dressed like military and they just had the one truck, no big equipment. They wanted to follow it back next time it came, go in and take things over. They didn't expect there to be that many people or that they would be so protected. They were pretty smart to figure that out, but they don't think things all the way through.
I tried to convince them we should stay where we were but they said they were tired of being treated like slaves. They wanted to be in charge and show the white man they wouldn't be held down. Like I told you, some people just have demons inside them that won't let them see the truth.
They were going and even though I was happy where I was, I couldn't let them go alone. I still felt responsible for them. The rest decided to go with us because they didn't want to stay there without me. So the next time the fuel truck passed by, we went. We followed the trail cut through the cars all the way there, to Magnolia Ridge. We lost fifteen more on the way, running they way we always did before because they didn't care who died. They knew they were the fastest and that's all that mattered to them. I kept up with them because I knew I couldn't save the ones who weren't fast enough to keep up and that will haunt me till the day I die. Instead of saving the good people from the dead, I was trying to save the bad people from themselves and that's your problem.
We got to Magnolia Ridge and the Captain came out to meet us. He gave us his speech, I'm sure you've heard it, and just the way he looked at me made my skin crawl. My brothers and a few of the others thought they would take the place over but when they saw how many people there were and how many guns they had, they fell into doing the same things they had always done. It was just like living in the projects again but rather than having a government that didn't care and let them harass everyone, this man had very little tolerance.
He sent us all to live on the farm and I was in a worse situation than I had ever been. Sean asked the Captain if I could stay but when he tried to make a deal, Sean refused. Sean wanted to kill him and take over the community, change the way things were done but he knew the men who protected them would leave without the women
being shared and he, himself would be killed. He was willing to do it anyway and said we could just run away but I couldn't leave my brothers there. They would either die or terrorize anyone they found, to be able to survive. And if they came with us and Diante found about me a Sean, he'd kill him. Or if Sean knew about what Diante had done to me, he'd kill him. Besides, I didn't think he'd love me if he knew. So, I went to the farm with the rest.
There, it was worse than ever. The Captain told them they would either work or they would starve. They would eat what they could grow and if they wanted to be protected from the dead they would grow enough for the rest of the community as well. The called his bluff until two of them starved to death and the rest of us were on the edge of it. He was going to let us all die and that finally broke their spirits.
It didn't break Diante from raping me though. The only thing that did that was when Sean caught him in the act and beat him to death. He held him down and stomped his head until his skull was crushed flat and his brains were smeared into the dirt. I thought he would kill me too but when he saw my tears, he picked me up in his arms and covered me with his coat. He had to hide my brother's body so the soldiers wouldn't tell the Captain that he had killed one of his strongest slaves, so he butchered him like an animal and threw the pieces over the fence, into the woods. He came back a night later, alone, and took me up to the Leaf River to bathe me. He was gentle, kind and more respectful than any man I had ever known.
With Diante dead, my other three brothers saw their chance. It wasn't even about sex, not even with Diante. He blamed me our entire lives for our father leaving. And the younger three, I tried to save them their entire lives; from the streets, from themselves and from the dead and they only hated me for it. It wasn't until Sean explained it to me that I realized, they didn't hate me, they hated all women.