by Mark Tufo
“Use the usual escape and evade frequency if you get into trouble. If we have air assets, or can help in any way, we will. God speed, soldier.” The men exchanged crisp textbook salutes.
Duncan approached Cade and handed him two metal canisters and a small red plastic gun. It was purple signal smoke and a Starlight flare gun. Duncan’s usual gruff Southern drawl had a softer edge to it. “In case you get into trouble, mi amigo. Pop the purple haze and I’ll know it’s you. That is if I can get my hands on a bird.” Before they parted ways, he tossed the young operator a set of the newest generation NVGs he had lifted from the Black Hawk.
The Kawasaki started right up and softly idled between Cade’s legs. With the M4 stowed in a special compartment near his left leg and his trusty Glock holstered on his thigh, he engaged the clutch and then nudged the shifter into first gear.
The last few days had been a blur. Now when he tried to conjure the images of Raven and Brook from his memory the only faces that materialized were of the dead kids. Ike, Leo and the twins would not soon be forgotten. The world that they were supposed to inherit changed into one that snuffed the life from them. The former Delta Operator had all of the motivation he needed; he would see his f amily again. Fully aware of the ramifications and dangers he faced going it alone, Cade made the easy decision to trudge ahead. The bike’s engine growled as he engaged the clutch. Without a backward glance he raced out of the gates and turned east on the gravel forest service road. Duncan watched until he disappeared into the woods and then listened to the bike’s soft exhaust note until there was only silence.
Please join Cade’s further adventures. The second installment of the Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse series, Soldier On: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse, is now available. Thanks for reading! Shawn Chesser
About the Author
Shawn Chesser resides in the Pacific Northwest with his wife and two children. He studied writing at Harvard on the hill(PCC Sylvania) many years ago. Shawn is a big fan of the apocalyptic horror genre. Stephen King, Cormac McCarthy and George Romero are strong influences. When not writing, Shawn spends the rest of his time doting on his two children and doing whatever his wife says. :)
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Black Virus by Bobby Adair
“I didn’t say he was degenerating, Mrs. Black. I said he was atypical.”
“What does…” my mom blubbered and buried her face in her hands, “What does that mean?”
“Please, Mrs. Black,” Dr. Rajan leaned close. His computer’s camera lens distorted the proportions of his head, making him look like an alien.
Mom sniffled and wiped her eyes before looking back up at her monitor.
“It’s not the spongiform encephalopathy. Your son never tested positive for the mutation that generates the prions. His behavior has nothing to do with the H5N1 virus.” Dr. Rajan looked away from the screen for a moment as he searched for the most delicate words. I’d seen the habit dozens of times when I’d been in therapy with him in person. I’d seen it plenty more after we transitioned to online sessions. “He’s different.”
The words weren’t delicate enough. Mom’s sobs came back. Eighteen months since contracting the disease and her emotions grew more volatile by the day. The prion affected everyone differently.
“Stop spying.” It was Levi, my older brother.
Without looking away from the gap in the door I was watching through, I silently shooed Levi to go somewhere else. I was keeping tabs on Mom, my way of getting a progress report on her well-being, while Dr. Rajan was trying to give her mine.
She typically met with Dr. Rajan just once a month but had pushed him into an impromptu meeting after my session because she was concerned. Our golden retriever, Lucy, had been mauled a few nights before. We’d found her remains behind the garage. She’d probably heard something in the backyard and had dutifully gone out through an open window to protect us while we slept.
My dad was the one who discovered her lifeless body and his wails brought the rest of us out to see what had happened. He used to love Lucy so much that Levi and I joked that she was his favorite kid. Until I saw him on his knees in the bloody grass stroking her matted fur, I’d thought the prions in his brain had eaten away every connection to Lucy. He hadn’t even acknowledged the dog’s existence since last winter.
My mom cried loudly and dramatically like a woman being beaten. Levi’s tears were silent and shamed. He hid them by hanging his head forward, letting his long hair drape around his face.
I looked at the smears of blood, mangled organs, and mashed grass, and understood that Lucy had not gone quickly. She’d fought, lost, and suffered as she tried to escape. I knew Lucy must have howled, in her way begging help from her pack—the rest of us. Somehow, we’d all slept while her killers tore at her body.
Levi’s shoulders shuddered, and he covered his eyes. He was drawing the same conclusions I was, and guilt was piling on top of his loss. We were all to blame.
That’s when I noticed Mom. She’d stopped looking at Lucy and was staring at me as floods of tears rained down from her cheeks. “What’s wrong with you?”
I’d loved Lucy, but I wasn’t crying. I wanted to kill the prion-twisted bastards who’d murdered the dog that had been a companion my whole life, but grief wasn’t an emotion that often visited in my heart. As far gone as mom was, she saw that in me, and it frightened her. I was different in a way that didn’t fit within the bounds of a mother’s generous concept of normal, in a way that horrified her.
I wasn’t a big kid. In fact, I was average in size. Maybe I was a little stronger than most, but not remarkably so. I was faster. I was pretty sure of that. Young boys are always devising games to measure themselves against one another. In some of those games, I excelled.
Mostly, I was decisive, and I was ruthless.
Those two were the biggest differences I saw when comparing myself to the other kids.
Many of them were cruel, as young boys often are, but none of them understood ruthlessness the way I did.
They’d grown up in a school system that jumped through every hoop to stifle violent outbursts of young boys coming to an age where they felt the mean kick of testosterone for the first time. Most kids readily respond to conditioning of their behavior, whether through the dreaded lecture, boring timeouts, useless suspensions from school, the wooden paddle, a leather belt, or a knuckly fist. I probably would have responded too, except that I understood from an early age the connection between behavior and punishment wasn’t always direct, it was chosen. I also understood that it was chosen for a reason. That made me question the reason. That made me understand that the adult authority figures in my life were attempting to manipulate my behavior in the same way they might manipulate the behavior of a leaky puppy, by connecting inappropriate actions to painful punishments.
I realized punishment wasn’t a consequence, but a price. I liked doing some things that were outside what they called the rules of normative behavior, and I understood the retributive cost of each.
There were times when punching another boy in the face once, twice, or a dozen times was what I wanted to do—it’s just the kind of thing that comes up when you’re a boy. I knew the price every time I swung a fist.
There were some boys in school whose newly coursing hormones spurred them to dominate all those around.
And I felt an equally powerful need to rebel.
One of them might say something. I might punch him, but not one of those movie punches where you poke someone in the nose to create a bloody fountain in his face. I wasn’t that kind of fighter. When a boy pressed his bullshit too far with me, especially if he was a bigger boy, I solved the problem with damage and pain.
A knee to the nuts was a favorite tactic. Throat punch, absolutely. Smashing a jaw shut on a wagging tongue, certainly. An elbow to the temple to daze him, without a doubt. Any of those would get me started and then it
was all about bruises and blood. Not all of my would-be tormentors remembered what happened after that first elbow to the head, but they all saw the bruises in the mirror for the next few weeks, feared the next deep breath that would stretch their aching ribs, felt their scabbed lips crack open and bleed when they ate their lunch, and gasped at their swollen balls whenever their pants cinched up just the right way in their crotches.
That was important to me. It was how I used a cruder version of the corporal methods utilized by the school officials to teach the bullies to leave me and my two little brothers alone.
Because my dad couldn’t hold a job, we moved around a lot. Every year, sometimes midyear, I found myself in a new district. Levi was four years older than me so he and I never attended the same school. The twins, who were small for their age, were a year behind me, and we often found ourselves on the same campus with the same bullies.
It didn’t usually take more than two or three fights followed by some paddlings and suspensions to earn a peaceful school year for all three of us.
It was a good system until I wound up in the same school as that Ledoux cretin. He was a big kid, rangy, a full head taller than me, a genetic freak or a boy too stupid to get through school on the twelve-year plan.
Unfortunately, the breadth of his stupidity was eclipsed by his cruelty. Maybe he was born that way, maybe it was his upbringing, maybe he was the product of bullying by other kids all those years ago when he was small. He had the kind of face that makes a kid a target for that sort of thing. It wasn’t symmetrical. His ragged front teeth overlapped his bottom lip in a way that inserted misplaced F-sounds when he talked. His eyes bulged, and his wiry hair was never groomed.
Whatever hell the older kids had put him through when he was small, he seemed determined to parse it back out tenfold to students unlucky enough to be stuck in school with him.
Ledoux found me on my first day of eighth grade.
A last-minute move to a seedy neighborhood on the north side of Houston caused me and my brothers to miss the first two weeks of school. What seemed like a piece of luck for me was that the neighbors had a kid my age named Oscar—Oscar Camacho. He and I became instant friends, and since he’d lived in the neighborhood his whole life, he promised to introduce me around when we got to school the following Monday.
To me, it looked like a shortcut past outsider status that might also allow me to sidestep the seemingly inevitable fights.
As it turned out, my first class after homeroom was gym. All the kids were loitering on the basketball court before the bell rang. I was with Oscar, as we were on the same class schedule—a piece of luck or something my mom arranged, I didn’t know. As soon as Oscar and I walked onto the basketball court, he pointed out Ledoux and led me over, calling my name to Ledoux as we came near.
Ledoux looked at me and smirked in a way I’d seen once on a kid’s face right before he mashed a frog’s head flat with the end of a baseball bat.
It wasn’t a good sign.
When I stepped within range of Ledoux’s long arms, he swung one of his big-knuckled fists around in a ridiculous John Wayne punch to pound me in my sternum. He had a plan, a well-rehearsed agenda for meeting new kids in school, every one of which was smaller than him.
His face telegraphed his hostility. His body leaned into the punch. I understood exactly what was happening. Ledoux’s punch wasn’t going to be a fun poke among new friends, he was going to knock the wind out of me and laugh when I fell on my ass trying to catch my breath. Ledoux wanted to establish the pecking order from the first moment between us. That was his game, and he thought he was the only one who knew the rules.
Oops for him.
When somebody is pouring all their weight into driving their fist through the center of your chest, redirecting them is easier than you might think. I swung my right hand up to push his forearm to the side. His fist didn’t hit my chest, it slipped past my right shoulder and the rest of Ledoux’s momentum followed, throwing him off balance. Had I been more like other boys, I might have stepped back at that point and let Ledoux fall to the floor to be embarrassed in front of all those kids in that basketball gym. But Ledoux stood a head taller than me, and he was mean enough that he’d rather punch me than greet me, so I had no choice but to teach him a lesson in Christian Black’s brand of savagery.
As Ledoux’s big fist sailed past my right shoulder, I pushed his forearm in that direction. As I spun to follow it, I put every ounce of my momentum into my left fist and smashed it into his temple as he fell.
When he hit the floor face-first, he may have been dazed, he may have been unconscious. I didn’t wait to find out. I jumped and came down, planting a knee just below one of his shoulder blades, hoping to crack a rib. A gasp of his breath burst out under my weight. I grabbed two handfuls of his wiry hair down close to the scalp and used his hair like a couple of handles to smash his face into the gym floor as hard as I could. Three times.
I jumped up, raised my fists, and looked around, ready for another fight.
The kids who saw the whole thing were stunned.
The ones who had been looking in another direction but had turned toward the ruckus had seen none of the fight, or only the end of it. It hadn’t lasted more than ten seconds. The gym teacher was in his office when it all went down and wouldn’t have known anything except for the sudden silence in the gymnasium. He rushed out to see an unconscious thug laying face down, blowing bloody snot bubbles on the floor.
It was a no-paddle school, so I got a week’s suspension not even a full hour into my first day. No big deal to me. I figured I’d saved myself a lot of hassle.
It took Ledoux a week longer to recover from his injuries than it did for me to work through my suspension. When he returned to school after those two weeks, I spotted him in the hall, and I saw a flame of hate burning so brightly in his eyes I knew things weren’t over between us.
That day in the cafeteria, I was eating lunch with Oscar and a few of his friends who were talking about my fight with Ledoux, reveling in the details as if they’d witnessed it themselves. The adulation felt kind of good until I saw Ledoux come into the cafeteria with a couple of guys I’d come to know as his toadies. The three didn’t get in line for a tray but instead made a beeline for my twin brothers who’d just come out of the serving line and were making their way toward a table.
Ledoux confronted my two brothers in the cafeteria’s center aisle. They stopped. Words were exchanged. I wasn’t able to make out what Ledoux said through the sound of a few hundred kids’ voices. His back was to me. But I heard his tone and so did everyone else. A hush spread through the students outward from Ledoux, moving in a slow wave toward the cafeteria walls.
I was on my feet before the hush reached my table, running, and thinking that if he’d been a smart boy, he’d have come into the cafeteria looking for me, or at least he’d have made sure I wasn’t there before he started tormenting my brothers.
In the hush, I saw a cafeteria lady at the cash register turn around to see what was happening in the dining room behind her.
Two teachers who were chatting each other up as they leaned in a doorway stopped talking to see what was happening.
Ledoux was spewing vile insults and telling my brothers what kinds of prison sex he had in store for each of them, but his plans were a waste of his pitifully sparse brainpower. I was already running near full-speed toward him and his two thug buddies.
I hit the toady on Ledoux’s right with an elbow to the middle of his back, letting his kidneys bring my momentum to a stop. He crumpled like he’d been deflated.
Ledoux turned to look at me and his falling buddy, just as I realized I’d made a mistake. I got my feet beneath me as I berated myself for not hitting Ledoux first.
I needed a quick method to deal with Ledoux in a way that would sink in even through his stupid, thick-boned head. I chose to escalate my assault beyond the range of known consequences.
While Ledoux was still queui
ng up a string of curse words to spit at me to gin up his courage for our second fight, I punched him in the balls, and pulled a pencil out of my back pocket. As he was doubling over from the pain in his groin, I jammed the sharp end of the pencil at his face.
It was luck, I think, that saved me from killing him right there in the cafeteria. Or maybe he reacted to the oncoming pencil and turned his head. As it happened, the sharp wood-and-graphite skewer didn’t go straight through his eye and into his brain as I thought it would, it went into his eye at an angle and came out through his temple.
He collapsed, hands to his face, screaming.
The students and monitoring teachers were aghast.
The toady still on his feet was petrified. His jeans turned a darker shade of blue around the zipper, and piss dribbled over one of his shoes.
That’s when I got expelled from school, found myself in front of a judge, and avoided a juvenile detention center only through a program of mandated visits with Dr. Rajan, a child psychologist.