“God bless us, everyone.”
TWO
Amanda and her group arrived two days after my argument with Jericho and the bikers arrived three days after that. It seemed that Amanda’s group had done an amazing job laying traps and making life in general a living hell for our two wheeled adversaries. They had built these contraptions out of soda cans that made whistling or moaning noises when the air blew through them. This brought the zombies to the area quickly and if the wind kept blowing it kept them there. This led to zombies clogging every side road that the bikers could have taken to get to Johnson City. By her actions Amanda forced them onto the interstate where the bulk of our traps and roadblocks were. This ate up more and more of the clock for our biker friends. The plan was to have them hungry, stressed out, and completely on edge by the time they reached us. We wanted them not thinking clearly. A man who can’t think clearly is unable to use tactics against you. He blunders forward reacting to your advances instead of marshaling advancements of his own.
Don’t think this was our plan because we deduced all of this ourselves. Everything that was our plan was text book material. I don’t say this because it’s common sense, but because we had a book that told us almost step by step what we needed to do. I’ve told you about it before. Jane and Amanda, but mostly Jack believes that this book is hands down the best study of strategic discipline that has ever been written. By now I’m sure you know who wrote it.
We heard the engines for almost thirty minutes before we saw the first bike weaving its way down the interstate. By the time they were pulling into the parking lot I could see just how well we had done our job of harassing these men as they made their way to our stronghold. They were ragged. They looked like all they wanted to do was lay down for a few days. I looked to Jack, who stood beside me. Amanda and Jane were tucked away in a spot that gave them good vantage points of the parking lot. Sass and Shawn had taken most everybody else down into the store. Jericho had instructed two of his followers to stay up top and, as he put it, bear witness to the destruction I would bring upon us. As far as I knew the only people at risk up on the roof were people who voluntarily put themselves there.
“Hardly seems fair.” I said.
Jack touched me on the back of my shoulder. “War is never fair Charlie. Victory goes to the strong and the bold. We happen to hold both of those cards this time around.”
“This time?” I asked.
“Up here, on this hill, we will always be a target. This is just the first of many groups who will want what we have and who will try to take it by force.”
I watched the bikers filing into our killbox. “This world breeds bullies by necessity doesn’t it?” I asked.
“All of man’s baser instincts are primal. The sense of self is hard to ignore. Self-preservation is going to drive people to do things that they never thought they would do. It is going to turn the best of us into monsters.”
I took my eyes off the bikers long enough to take another look at Jack’s face. His gaze was calm, his features set as if he had been carved from stone. He watched the enemy pour into our lands and he showed not one emotion on his face. I looked down to his hand where he held the detonator. The instrument that would end two hundred lives. Didn’t the thought of killing all these people weigh heavy on Jack’s mind? How could he stand there so calmly?
“It’s the military training.” He said.
“What?”
“You were looking at me wondering how I could be so calm when I’m about to blow up two hundred people. The answer is my training. I have been trained my whole life to protect my people and take absolutely zero shit off the bad guys.”
“Is that what these guys are? The bad guys?”
Jack gave me a appraising look. “Don’t let guilt blind you to what these people are. You saw what they did to that man on the bridge. You heard what the first group to come here said. These men came here for one reason only, they want to kill us and take what we have. Do not lose focus on what is happening here. We are fighting for our lives.”
He was right. I was getting stupid and sentimental. I had to lock all of that down. I had over fifty people in danger. It was my job to protect them. I had to do my job.
“Heads up. They’re all here. Do whatever you have to do to draw them as close to the building as you can.”
On this point I had some help. We had gathered up all the bikes from the first group and had laid them on top of our metal moat. The sight should cause sufficient curiosity to make at least a few of the bikers step closer to see if they really were the bikes of their missing brothers. As each wave of bikers step forward it would be human nature for the one behind to step forward as well. By the time you got to the back few rows of bikers nobody would have a clue what they were stepping up for, but they would do it. Mob mentality is a hard thing to break. The leader of the biker gang took off his helmet and took a few steps forward, looking first at the bikes, then up to me.
“Let me guess,” I said, “You just dropped by for a cup of sugar.”
The leader did not smile. He regarded me with quite a bit of open hatred.
“Jokes. After everything you have done to us, you greet me with jokes?”
Everything we had done to them? Wow, you turn a bunch of hungry zombies loose in the world and everybody who survives magically gains the ability to become the world’s best spin doctor.
“Well, I was going to turn the hose on you, but I figured maybe I should open with a joke instead. You know, lighten the mood a bit.” I smiled at our leather clad emissary from the land of brewed hops. He did not smile back.
“I will make this very clear. I came here to kill you and everyone I find cowering inside your building.”
I held up my hands in a “I’m innocent” gesture. “Now why would you want to do a thing like that?” It was hard not to laugh at the man’s response. He almost did a double take to my words. Anger had begun to radiate off his body like light rays flaring out from the sun.
“Why? Did you just ask why would I want to do that?”
“Yes?” I said doing my level best not to smile.
“Your people came to our house and vandalized our property. They steal from us. They set traps for us. They torment us and kill our friends. Is that enough reason for you?”
I made a show of thinking about it. “That does sound bad. What friends of yours did we kill?”
The leader took a breath and then pointed at the bikes laying in front of our building. “You are going to deny that you killed the men these bikes belonged to?”
“Oh no, we killed them. Killed em dead we did.”
“Like I said…”
“But let’s be real here. Those men were far from innocent little angels. They came here to test our defenses. They tried to kill us and take our supplies. They did so under your orders. Or do you deny this?”
“I do. You will not make us the bad guys here!” The leader shouted this last line which made me want to thank him. All the commotion was helping pull the men in the back closer as they tried to hear what was being said.
“But you are the bad guys. We saw what your men did to that guy on the bridge. You wouldn’t happen to know what he did that merited being tied up and fed to zombies before being dismembered, would you?”
The leader pulled out his gun. “I have had enough of your lies. They were good men. They would never have hurt anybody. I didn’t send them here after you. I didn’t even know that you people existed until your group flattened all of our tires and stole two of our bikes.”
“Really?” I asked.
The leader glared at me.
“Then I just have one question for you mister leather. If you didn’t send those men, like you said, then how did you know where we were?”
I heard a muffled laugh escape Jack’s throat. The leader of the biker gang looked down at the ground. He seemed like he was trying to work out an answer that would put me in my place, but he was falling short on finding one
. He looked back up to me and pointed his gun at where we stood.
“Enough of this. I demand blood!”
There was a second of silence between his exclamation and his eventual pulling of his trigger. I filled that silence with a loud exclamation of my own.
“SWEET!” I yelled. The leader of the biker gang was taken unprepared by this reaction. I can only imagine he had expected Jack and myself to duck behind the outside wall of Wal-Mart and for him and his buddies to riddle the building with gun fire. Things not going down this way left him at a loss on how to continue. He looked up at me questioningly.
“Look Jack! He has a gun! He has a big gun!”
Jack looked over the edge of the roof line and commented in a very bored voice. “It looks to be a desert eagle.”
“Wow!” I said. “I heard those things were powerful.”
“Um…yeah, it’s not bad.” The leader of the biker gang said still trying to get his bearings on the situation.
“I’ve got a gun too. You want to see my gun?”
The leader’s eyes narrowed as he thought about it.
“It’s a really nice one. I think you’ll like it.” I said.
I could hear a few of the guys behind him laughing and telling him to let me show them my gun. The leader was starting to laugh along with his men now.
“Sure, show us what you got little boy.”
I made a gun out of my finger and thumb and pointed it at the leader’s head. He took a step back and began laughing in earnest now.
“That’s it?” He asked.
“Hey, don’t judge. This sucker packs one heck of a punch.”
I heard one of the biker’s say, “Boss, he’s crazy.” Others were saying something similar. Most all of them were laughing.
In a low voice I said to Jack, “How’re they looking?” The answer was quick and as quiet as my question had been. “Couldn’t ask for more. I’m ready when you are.” I was ready for this to be over with. All of my interaction had been to draw as many of the bikers as I could into the area of the parking lot that had the bulk of the explosives in it. It had been deemed to have a lethality rating of nearly one hundred percent. Jane had called it the blender because, as he put it, anything standing in that portion of the parking lot was going to get spun around and ripped apart. It wasn’t just explosives that the military peeps had placed in the parking lot. They had built something far worse than that. It was something they had called a “nail bomb”. It was something Jane and Jack had known the IRA to use. The destructive power of it was “astounding”. Jack’s words, not mine. It seems that what you needed to do was place an explosive charge in a container and then fill the container with nails or bits of glass, or anything sharp that could act as shrapnel when the whole explodey thing happens. The shockwave from the explosion has its own kill factor but where the bomb really ranks up the body count is with its shrapnel. With all these bodies packed in this tight, the shrapnel damage should be epic in scale. At least that is what Jack told me. There were bombs planted all over the parking lot. They were all set to explode when they received a specific signal from Jack’s detonator trigger. I would love to explain how it all works, but Jane and Jack built them while I was helping move cars on the interstate. I looked back down at the leader of the biker gang. He was still laughing at me, oblivious about just how close to death he was standing. The motorcycles that had been placed up on our moat had a few bombs hidden in them as well. The leader was about to have his entire upper body removed from his lower half.
“I’m telling you, if I pull the trigger on this thing, I could kill you all.”
The bikers laughed at me some more.
“I’m warning you.” I said. The leader smiled and made a motion for the rest of his gang to quiet down.
“I’ll tell you what I’ll do little man. I’ll give you the first shot. Point your big ol gun at my pretty face and pull the trigger. If I’m still standing after you’re done I am going to climb up that tower of yours and beat you to death with my bare hands.”
“Really? You’re just going to let me shoot you with this thing? You won’t survive.”
The leader started laughing again. He held his arms out as if he wanted to hug me.
“Hit me with your best shot!” He yelled.
I dropped my thumb down onto my finger and said softly, “bang.” Jack pressed the button on the detonator. The world, as far as I could tell, ended at that moment.
THREE
The building shook under the shockwaves unleashed from the explosions. The roar was deafening. Visually I have no clue what happened because Jack had pulled me backwards onto the roof as he tripped the trigger. The only thing I can remember thinking is that there was no way any of the bikers had lived through that. However, as I got to my feet and looked over the side of the building I could see that there were quite a few survivors and they were currently in a gun battle with Amanda and Jane. They were trying to use the cars as shelter, but our snipers were each set to one side of the parking lot leaving nowhere safe for the leather mafia to hide. A handful of the men made it back onto their bikes and made one last dash for the safety of the open road. Only four of them made it out of the parking lot. Jane and Amanda both insisted that we hunt them down and finish the job. I just didn’t have the stomach for it though. I had looked down into the parking lot and had seen what the bombs had done to those men. I knew that Jim would be having some company in my head from that night on. What we had done was extreme. It was beyond barbaric. It was, in truth, too horrible to even describe.
“My god…” I said looking down into the parking lot.
“Don’t look Charlie. One of the hardest parts about war is living with what you had to do to survive it.” Jack said. “Don’t look anymore. Don’t give yourself the nightmares.”
“I have to look Jack. I did this to these men. I am responsible. I have to look because I have to know what I’m capable of when push comes to shove.”
“Then don’t judge to harshly. These men got what they made us give them. There were no other options.”
I still don’t know if I totally believe that or not. The entire fight lasted less than ten minutes. Out of the over two hundred men, four escaped to fight another day. The fight had cost us all of our explosives. It had cost the people involved another sliver of our morality and some even said it had cost us our soul.
Jane appeared on the ground and he and Amanda began to pour gasoline over all of the bodies. Once they thought that everything was covered well enough they lit a match and set fire to the world’s largest pyre. This had been my idea. I didn’t want the rest of the community to see what had been done to protect them. Before I would give the all clear to bring the rest of the group up top I wanted all of the bodies burnt and the bones collected and hauled away. I knew we wouldn’t be able to get rid of all the motorcycle pieces, but we could make the bodies disappear. It only took about four hours to finish that chore. It took nearly two weeks to clear the parking lot of the motorcycle remains and to dismantle the killbox. For some reason Jack wanted the whole parking lot as clear as we could make it. Something about leaving scouts and zombies nothing to hide under. By that point I just agreed and moved on to the next topic on the agenda. The war with the bikers had numbed me to my core and took nearly a month for me to start feeling myself coming back to life. During that time Jericho preached more and more about no killing and loving thy neighbor. Amanda preached more and more about killing Jericho and Jack preached more to Amanda about the dangers of creating a martyr. That’s how things went day after day until one night, around three in the morning, I heard a man screaming his little girl's name.
Now Sass was asking me if I thought Tabitha could be more dangerous than the bikers were. My answer was that she could be much, much harder to deal with. The bikers were formidable, but only if we had fought them straight on, which we didn’t do. We used tactics to wear down our opponent and then we used superior fire power to finish him off. That
superior fire power was gone. We had blown it all in that one fight. Jane had searched on several occasions and had yet to find any more. Also, the bikers were not that smart. This woman was very smart and very capable. She not only saw the angles, but she saw how to manipulate those angles. She scared me a good deal. However, she was not unbeatable. Her one weakness was her pride. She was sure that she was smarter than everyone else. I know she thought she was smarter than me. And while I will concede that in book smarts she could take me, this wasn’t a book. We were playing our chess match in the real world. The move I planned to make tonight was risky, but if it worked, we won. It was as simple as that. I was betting the house, the dog, and the kid’s college fund that when the river card fell I would catch my flush and win big. Amanda trusted me enough to come along. She had to know what I had in mind. She had to see where this was going, but she came along anyway. That’s something I will never forget.
“This is going to be tricky.” I said.
“If you are endeavoring to do what I think you are then I would say ‘tricky’ is an understatement.”
A Good Distance From Dying (Book 2): Samantha's Song Page 31