Zed's World (Book 3): No Way Out

by Rich Baker

  “Nelson Farms. We copy. Who is this?” He asks.

  “I’m Marcus Montero, from the Montero Auto Group. Hold on; my dad wants to talk to you.” There’s a long pause, and another voice comes on.

  “Hi Nelsons, this is Cris Montero. Who’s there?”

  “This is Bill and my brother DJ is here with me.”

  DJ motions for the mic and Bill hands it over to him. Cris is two years older than DJ and went to a rival high school, and they played football against each other when Cris was a senior and DJ a sophomore. Cris was a standout wide receiver who ended up playing college ball at the University of Colorado on a scholarship. DJ was the only defensive back in the state that season to hold him to less than 100 yards receiving in a game. DJ would have likely followed Cris to CU, or at least gone to Colorado State, had things gone differently for him. DJ also went to school with and was in the same class as, Cris’ wife. Antonia Winchester – now Montero - was one of those rare beauties that never tried to look stunning, but always did no matter what she did with her hair and makeup or what she wore. DJ had a crush on her and dated her briefly, but she went on to college at CU where she met Cris. In DJ’s memory, she looks like Salma Hayek. Again, had things gone differently…

  “Dude, are you going to say anything?” Bill asks, shaking DJ out of his reverie.

  “Hey Cris, it’s DJ. Good to hear from you. How’s the family holding up?”

  “We’re all ok and accounted for. Everyone except Hector. Addie is beside herself. Do you guys know anything?”

  Hector Martinez, the Nelson’s foreman on the farm, is married to Adelaida Montero, or Addie, one of Cris’ younger sisters.

  “We do have news, Cris. It’s not good though,” DJ says.

  “We were afraid of that,” Cris says. “We knew if he were still alive Hector would have fought his way back here. Tell me – did he at least go quickly? I hope he didn’t suffer at the hands of these things. Please tell me you didn’t let him turn into one of them!”

  DJ thumbs the button on the mic for a second and releases it. He sighs and presses it in again. He pauses before speaking into it.

  “He was murdered, Cris. Some people came through here, through our land, and they shot him and killed him.”

  There’s a lengthy pause with no response. DJ presses the button on the mic again.

  “Cris, are you there? Do you copy?” he asks. He looks at Bill, who is shaking his head and scowling at DJ.

  * * *

  Forty miles to the south, Crisoforo Montero is listening to DJ Nelson from the main office of Montero Automotive. In many ways, the Monteros are similar to the Nelsons. They run a successful small business conglomerate with which the large family is heavily involved. The Montero Automotive Group consists of several auto-centric businesses: Montero Auto Salvage and Towing, Montero Auto Body, Montero Auto Sales, and Montero Auto Finance.

  The patriarch of the family, Adolfo Montero, was a first-generation Mexican immigrant, as was his wife, Orietta. The two of them came to Colorado from California where they had worked picking fruit. After a troubled start to life in America, they got a second chance in the arid high plains desert of southern Colorado. They prospered, having seven children and seven grandchildren, owning their land and the houses the families all lived in, and the myriad businesses provided them all a good living.

  They made the move to southern Colorado in 1975, shortly before Cris was born. Adolfo found work at an auto repair shop in Pueblo. He had a gift for understanding machinery and how things fit together and worked. In rural Mexico, he had kept his father’s and uncle’s cars running under less than ideal conditions with less than ideal tools. Here, he could work miracles. He took his truck and tools to the race tracks in Pueblo and La Junta on weekends and helped racers fix cars that got damaged on the track, getting them running against all the odds so the owners could finish the weekend’s events. He saved the money he made from this sideline work and began looking for a place to open his own auto shop.

  He found a small junkyard three hours to the north, a few miles south of Longview, for sale. The owner had recently died, and the widow was looking to sell everything and get out of Colorado for the warmer year-round climate of Arizona. She’d only sell the plot of land if the buyer took the ENTIRE plot of 150 acres. Adolfo didn’t have enough for the whole parcel, and he couldn’t get approved for a loan for the full amount the widow was asking. She wanted to get out of town more than she needed the money, however, and she liked the earnest young man and his attractive wife. She agreed to sell him 100 acres at a price he could secure a loan for, as long as he signed a contract agreeing to buy the remaining fifty acres once he could get the additional funding. The contract gave him five years to get the loan settled. He did it in three.

  The junkyard expanded into the auto repair business. Adolfo continued to work with racers, only now at Colorado National Speedway, several miles to the east of his offices. He eventually opened a satellite garage next to his repair shop where people could come and work on their vehicles, and the racers loved it. He supplied the tools and equipment – especially the ones that most people didn’t have access to, like engine hoists and hydraulic lifts, and he even provided places to store the cars while the guys were working on them. When his family grew and his oldest boy, Cris, took an interest in how the business ran, Adolfo let him do some of the bookkeeping.

  Before long, Cris was better at keeping the books than Adolfo. When he was awarded the football scholarship at the University of Colorado, he followed his passion and earned his bachelor’s degree in business finance in 1997. He stayed an extra 18 months and earned his MBA. He had met Antonia Winchester before he started his master’s program, married her three months later, and their daughter, Josefina was born in 1998. His son Marcus followed just over a year later.

  Younger by two years, his brother Lisias lacked Cris’ athleticism but had his father’s knack for mechanical work. In the summer of 1992, when he was fourteen years old, he took parts from the junkyard and rebuilt a wrecked 1987 Ford Tempo. He put an ad in the paper and sold it for $1500. After that, he always had cars in various states of repair. After graduating from high school in 1996, he attended Denver Automotive and Diesel College and began doing auto repair out of his father’s shop. With Cris’ help, he expanded the building to include a paint booth and equipment to straighten frames and do more complex repairs. Lisias managed a crew of mechanics doing anything from simple mechanical fixes to collision repair. He still found time to rebuild cars from the junk yard. His prized car was a 1967 Camaro RS which he finished restoring in 1999. That same year he married a woman named Yolanda Cockrell, on her eighteenth birthday, and their daughter Julianne was born in 2000, nine months to the day after the wedding. Another daughter, Michaela, arrived in 2003.

  Cris started the Auto Sales business with some of Lisias’ rebuilt cars, then started going to auto auctions. He eventually built a relationship with several of the local corporate dealers, and when they got good used cars in trade for their new cars, they’d call Cris to see if he wanted them before sending them to auction. He hired his friend Matthew Alvarez, who he met during his MBA program at CU, to manage the auto sales business. Matt made Montero Auto Sales the place to go in Northern Colorado if you were looking for a fair price on a good used car. Matt married the third Montero child, Cris’ sister Joaquina, who was the best salesperson they had at the car lot.

  Adelaida Montero, or Addie, the fourth Montero child, was unlike her older siblings. She was wild, always getting in trouble in school before finally dropping out and getting her GED through an alternative school. She ran through a series of boyfriends Adolfo did NOT approve of, many of whom were rumored to run with gangs in Longview, Boulder, and Denver. One summer night she met a handsome immigrant in a bar out by the interstate. His name was Hector, and she fell head over heels for him. She was a different person after they met. He was a gainfully employed agricultural expert, and Adolfo could not have been
happier that the two found each other. With his blessing, they married in 2005 when she was twenty-two years old.

  It’s Addie that Cris dwells on now in his mind as DJ Nelson waits for a response at the other end of the static-filled CB transmission. Hector was Addie’s world, the rock that pulled her out of a downward spiral in life. His death is going to destroy her.

  The CB crackles.

  “Cris, are you there? Do you copy?” DJ asks.

  Before he can respond, his brother Max speaks from the doorway, startling him.

  “Ask him who it was,” Max says. He’s ten years younger than Cris, and though he looks like a younger version of Cris, he’s unlike him in nearly every way other than his appearance. Max, short for Maximino, fell in with the wrong crowd at a young age, running with gang members and getting in trouble with the law often. Adolfo was beside himself, and try as he did, he just could not get through to him. When Max got himself and the youngest Montero brother, Wilmer, arrested for attempting to steal a car, Adolfo felt that he had no choice but to throw Max out. He could not let him be a bad influence on the rest of the family. In 2005, at the age of twenty, Max enlisted in the army, a step ahead of another, separate, criminal investigation. He fought and was wounded in Iraq, suffering a traumatic brain injury. While he maintains control most of the time, he suffers periods where he can’t recall events from the time of his injury to the present. The confusion sends him into fits of rage where he lashes out, and at times has had to be restrained for his safety and that of people around him. He wound up getting a medical discharge and returned home in 2007, shortly after Adolfo’s death.

  That was a hard year for the Monteros. The youngest Montero child, Elina, alleged that she had been stopped for a bogus traffic infraction on one of the dark and empty country roads that led to the Montero compound. The policeman and two of his corrupt partners raped her. She pressed charges, but they ended up getting acquitted. When the jury foreman read the verdict, Adolfo was so upset he had a heart attack, collapsed, and never regained consciousness. Elina felt responsible for her father’s death, and if that weren’t enough, people bullied her on social media, calling her horrible names, and texting her at all hours of the night. She committed suicide a month after her father died.

  Max took Elina’s death particularly hard. He swore he’d get revenge, and from outward appearances, he did. The policeman she accused, and the two others who had been named as accomplices were either killed or disappeared in the months following the trial. The police investigated the entire family, even putting a twenty-four-hour surveillance detail on Max, tapping their phones, monitoring text messages and emails, but they couldn’t find any evidence that the family had anything to do with it.

  With Adolfo gone, Max came back to work in the family business. The familiar environment helped with his condition since he recognizes where he is when one of his spells flares up. Thankfully, as time goes by, his spells are less frequent. He manages the crew of drivers that handle the half dozen tow trucks the salvage yard uses. Many of them are associates from his gang days, and Cris suspects they’re still involved in gang activity, but hasn’t been able to prove it.

  “Ask him,” Max says again, breaking Cris’ train of thought.

  “Why? What does that matter, Max? I know you, I know what you’re thinking. We’re in the middle of an apocalypse here, and we have bigger things to worry about than revenge,” Cris says.

  Max takes three long strides into the office and sticks his hand out, gesturing for the mic. “Give it here,” he says. Cris hesitates, then hands it to him. He presses the button. “DJ, this is Max. Tell me what happened.”

  “We were attacked, Max. A group came through the property. They were armed, and we got into a firefight. Hector came out with us. These fuckers killed him, Max. Killed him, my dad, my brother Roger, and my brother-in-law William. Shot them all.”

  “How many were in their group? Did you kill any of them, get any information from them? Do you know where they are now?” Max asks.

  “They were in two trucks. We think there were at least six of them, maybe more. We shot the tires on one of their trucks, which they abandoned. There was a lot of blood in that one, so we think we killed at least one of them. We can’t confirm that, though. They took the body. The registration was to a Ben Puckett, lives in Ft. Collins, but they were going to Longview for something. That’s all we know,” DJ says. “But I’ll say this too. When things settle down a bit with these damn zombies, I’m going to find these fuckers and make them pay for this.”

  “Listen, DJ? I have some people in town. I’ve been in touch with them a couple of times since this started. They’re working out of the Pawn King. I’ll get a hold of them and start the search as soon as possible. If these assholes are holed up in town, we’ll find them. When we do, I’ll let you know,” Max says.

  “Thanks, Max. Everyone up here is more concerned with survival than making this right. I mean, I’m about surviving too, but I want it to be on our terms, you know? We can’t afford to sit and wait for things to happen to us anymore. We have to take the fight to them,” DJ says.

  Max stares straight at Cris as he says “I know exactly what you mean, DJ. It’s the same story down here. Thanks for the info. Anything else?”

  “Tell Addie we’re all sorry, will you? Hector was like family to us too. He was a good man and better friend. He was always there when I needed him. I wish we were bringing you different news,” DJ says.

  “I’ll pass that on, DJ, and we appreciate it. Our condolences to your people, too. It’s a shame. I liked your dad a lot. Take care; we’ll be in touch soon,” Max says, placing the mic on the clip on the side of the CB unit.

  “I’ll tell Addie,” Max says. “You can tell the rest of the family. And if they ask if we’re going to try to make it right, you tell them yes.”

  “Max, we have a compound full of women and children. We have hundreds of acres of land to patrol and keep secure. We can’t afford to be playing around with vendettas,” Cris counters.

  “Right, big brother, and who’s been doing all the patrolling and securing? It’s been my guys and me, and Wilmer, and Addie,” he says, referring to his younger brother and older sister by name. “We’re all expendable, remember?”

  “That’s not what I meant, and you know it, Max,” Cris says. He knew Max would never let go of their recent conversation, one that went sideways. If Max could find a way to fight with him, he would. “I didn’t say that, and you know it, so stop trying to twist things around.”

  “Not in those words, but you made it clear that the ones without kids were going to do the grunt work while the rest of you play house. Well, here’s the deal - if we want to get revenge, that’s what we’re going to do. You can be a pussy all you want, but according to you I was made for this world.”

  “You’re taking everything out of context, Max. You’re trying to play the martyr. I’m just saying that we have people here we need to take care of. We have no idea who these Pucketts are, or if they’re even still in the city. Or ever were, for that matter. We don’t even know if it went down the way DJ says it did. He’s not right in the head.” Cris immediately regrets saying that.

  “Neither am I, remember?” Max says and smacks himself in the side of the head. “My melon got cracked, and now I can’t be trusted either, is that it? College boy Cris and his perfect brain get to pass judgment on the rest of us,” Max says.

  “Jesus, Max, again, you know that’s not what I meant.”

  “Isn’t it? How do I know that? I don’t know anything because I’m not right in the head.”

  “Oh, Jesus Christ. I said HE wasn’t right in the head, not you! He hears voices, Max, and he has horrible impulse control. The point is that we have other, bigger problems than hunting down these people, who for all we know are long gone and we’d just be chasing ghosts. Time is precious right now, and I don’t want to waste any more of it arguing with you,” Cris says.

  “So, do
n’t argue. There’s an easy solution for you. You’re right – we may not find them. But I’m having my guys look anyway, and if we DO find them, I’m doing something about it. You’re my oldest brother, Cris. I respect you. You may be the CEO of the family business, but you ain’t in charge of everything and everyone. You’re not well suited for this new world we live in, brother. This world is cold and merciless, and you’re not. You’d better get used to sharing control because I’m doing some things my way whether you like it or not.”

  Cris watches as Max leaves the office, not knowing if he should be glad his brother is there to do what Max refers to as ‘the dirty work’ or if he should be terrified that his brother is getting bolder. Max’s war with the police after Elina’s rape trial nearly bankrupted the family and put them all in physical danger. Cris doesn’t know how to handle the situation if Max puts them at risk now when there’s no law to hold him in check. He sighs and hopes he never has to find out the answer.

  * * *

  “What the fuck, DJ?”

  DJ looks at Bill, not getting why he’s so angry. “What?” he says. “What’s your problem?”

  “You just told the Montero’s that we were attacked. You made it sound like those people came here looking for blood,” Bill says.

  “Didn’t they? They were armed, ready for battle. They were coordinated. Right? They cleaned our clocks easy enough. They WERE looking for blood,” DJ says.

  Damn straight they were. They’ll think twice before ever coming back here; you can bet on that. DJ doesn’t respond to The Voice but stands firmly with its support.

  “I don’t understand you, dude. They were passing through, escaping the dead. If we hadn’t gone out there, they would have gone right past us with no quarrel. The registration said the guy who owns that Toyota lives in Fort Collins. We saw on the news that Fort Collins is overrun by the dead,” Bill says, then he goes for a nerve he knows is always raw. “That’s what they were ready to fight, DJ, not the ex-jock with the chip on his shoulder.”