Death & Decay (Book 2): Divided

by R. L. Blalock

  “We went for a walk before all this”—Colin gestured around to the bodies—“happened.”

  “That was stupid of you guys to go out alone.” Samuel frowned.

  “Nonsense,” Ervin cut in. “We were damn lucky they were.”

  This only made Samuel frown more. “They could have been killed.”

  “There’s a million and one things that can kill ya,” Ervin said, brushing off the comment. “But they’re alive. They probably saved all our asses. Those bandits had us pinned down. If they hadn’t flanked ’em, we would’ve been screwed.”

  Day 10

  While they had fended off the bandits, most of them had not slept through the rest of the night. They waited for others to come searching for their buddies. Having endured almost a full twenty-four hours with no rest—and a week and a half of short, fitful sleep at best—Colin was more exhausted than he had ever been. His eyelids hurt simply from trying to keep them open.

  “We’re dealing with a whole other beast here.” Samuel was addressing the group, or most of it at least. “We were prepared for the freaks. We’ve fortified the store. Stocked up food and other necessities in case we had to hold out while a horde passed. However, as we discovered last night, we are entirely underprepared to face other humans on our own turf.”

  “Is it even safe here anymore?” a man cut in. His brow creased his dirty face with worry.

  “We can make it safe,” Samuel repeated. The question had come up after the attack last night and before the talk had actually started. To be fair, it was a valid concern.

  “But what if those people come back?” the man persisted.

  “Fair enough.” Samuel nodded. “They might. They know where we are.” He stopped to think about what he would say next. “We know they call themselves the Sovereigns. We don’t know how many of them there are. We don’t know where they are and because of that we are at a disadvantage. What we do know is that we’ve taken them out. Not just once but twice, when they’ve threatened us. Both times, we were caught unaware and both times we were able to come out on top. That tells me that we are stronger than they are. That we can stand against them.”

  “Not all of us are fighters,” a woman chimed in timidly as she looked to the others gathered for support. “With all that has happened, we just want to live in peace.” Murmurs of agreement rose around her.

  “That is not an option,” Ervin said bluntly. “There is no room in this world anymore for those who aren’t fighters. Every day is a fight. If we weren’t fightin’ other people, we’d be fightin’ the freaks. To fight is to survive. The moment you stop fightin’, you die.”

  “We didn’t have to fight them!” another woman called out. “Haven’t enough people died?”

  “They didn’t give us the option,” Colin finally interjected with a growl. “They didn’t want to talk. They didn’t want to work together. They didn’t want to just live in peace. They wanted us to drop everything we had worked for and leave it to them. What should we have done? Just leave everything to them and hope for better luck next time?” Colin knew he was getting defensive. He knew he should be patient, but he was tired of explaining himself. Tired of explaining why he chose to live and live well, rather than die.

  “We can’t just give up what we’ve worked for,” Rotna jumped in, moving to Colin’s side. “We deserve the right to live, but we have to fight for it. We have to earn it.”

  “I agree,” a man called out angrily. “Why should we just roll over for these assholes? What gives them more of a right to the stuff than us?” The room erupted into a cacophony of voices as they all began to shout their opinions over each other.

  Colin looked at Samuel. His head was bent and he pinched the bridge of his nose. He leaned heavily on one of the displays that were built into the floor.

  They weren’t prepared for this. Any of it. They were all woefully underprepared for this kind of crisis. None of them, save maybe Ervin, had the skills needed to live life without technology. Now they were all learning on the fly. And the learning curve was steep and unforgiving.

  None of them had wanted to have a leadership position. None of them wanted to have the others looking to them, depending on them for survival. None of them wanted to make the decisions that meant life or death for the others.

  Colin could see Samuel’s lips moving, but he couldn’t hear what he was saying over the numerous other voices.

  “People!” Samuel’s voice boomed across the room. The others fell silent as all eyes turned back to him. “This is not working.” His gaze wandered over the crowd. Some held his gaze while others looked away.

  “Now, listen for just a minute.” He suddenly sounded very tired. “I am not your master. You are free to do as you please. If you wish to leave and seek sanctuary elsewhere, then by all means go. I will not keep you here. However, I believe that if we are to weather this storm, if we are to survive, we must do it together. We need each other. We need to work together. We need the strength we hold as a group, but we also need each other’s companionship. Now more than ever we need friends. If we are going to stay together and work together to have a future, we need to compromise. We need to find a solution that we can all agree upon. So who has some ideas?”

  Now the crowd was utterly silent. With so much riding on what decisions they made next, no one wanted to speak up.

  “What if we do both?” Colin spoke up.

  All eyes in the room snapped to him. Colin shifted uneasily. He didn’t like to be the center of attention. As he looked around at all the expectant faces, he caught Eric’s eye. Eric smiled and gave him a small, encouraging nod.

  “I honestly think staying here is our best option,” Colin continued. “We have plenty of food and shelter. If we were to move, we’d have to find a new location, make sure it’s safe, make sure there aren’t too many freaks, and clear out the ones that are there. Not to mention we don’t know what these people consider to be their area. Even if we find a new place, we may still have problems with them. But”—Colin swallowed around the lump in his throat—“there is nothing stopping us from looking for someplace new. Someplace better. We could fortify this place. Dig in and make sure we’re safe while we search for somewhere else to go. If we can’t find someplace better, then we’ll be safe here. If we do find someplace better, we can figure out how to get everyone and everything there safely.”

  The room was silent for a moment.

  “I’ll agree to that,” Eric said.

  “Me too.” Rotna nodded. “It can’t hurt to keep all our options open.”

  Murmurs rose once again. This time, though, instead of being loud and angry, they were quiet and considering as people discussed the options among their neighbors.

  Thank you, Samuel mouthed to Colin as people continued to talk among themselves. Colin nodded back. He let out a long sigh. There was so much they still had to do.

  Day 12

  From a distance, the highway looked almost normal. Almost. It could be any other day. The cars were lined up along the road waiting their turn to cross the Veterans Memorial Bridge. People would have been anxious to get home from a long day at work. Ready for dinner and a relaxing at night in front of the television.

  But none of those things would ever happen. The people wandering between cars broke the normality of it. No one got out of their car on the highway. The cars themselves would remain there forever. Maybe not forever, but they would never be driven again.

  Colin chided himself for thinking of them as people. It was easier at Thies to remember what they were: freaks. He had never lived on a farm before the outbreak. It wasn’t normal for him, but a product of necessity and survival. Looking at such a normal scene changed things, though. It blurred the lines and that was dangerous.

  As part of the greater plan for Thies and its people, Colin had volunteered to go out with some others and scout the bridge. If they were going to move to escape the bandits, Colin thought their best chances of getting away cl
ean and without further issue was to cross the river. They had no idea what Sovereign had claimed as theirs to the East, but he was willing to stake his life on the fact that their territory didn’t stretch west of the Missouri River.

  They crouched in the tall grass that bordered the highway. At two hundred yards away, they could see the stretch of highway well.

  “Man,” Eric sighed. “We have our work cut out for us.” That was an understatement if Colin had ever heard one.

  “Where would we even start?” Rotna murmured.

  “We’d have to get rid of the freaks first.” The task wasn’t just that simple. Several hundred freaks milled between the cars, just from what they could see. Undoubtedly others were out of sight or trapped in the cars still, and they would have to be dealt with if they wanted to open up the bridge.

  “We could lead them away from the bridge. Take them…” Rotna’s eyes darted back and forth as she thought. “I don’t know, somewhere else. Lead them off until they’re far enough away and then just cut and run.”

  Eric shook his head. “I don’t know if we have enough people to wrangle this many. It would take dozens of cars to keep them from wandering off in all directions. At least two people to a car…”

  “Why two?” Rotna frowned.

  “One to drive and one to shoot if any get too close to the car.”

  “At least two in each car,” Colin agreed. “One or two more would be better to make sure things don’t get out of hand.” The idea of wrangling freaks and herding them was terrifying. There were so many things that could go wrong. If they lost control of the herd, there was no telling what direction they would go in.

  “Maybe we could do it in chunks. Try to move them in more manageable groups. Then we wouldn’t have a big horde wandering around, just a few smaller ones.” Rotna shifted in the grass, brushing a rock out from under her knee.

  Colin mulled the thought over. “I think trying to separate them into groups is too risky. If we get the attention of some of them, we will most likely get the attention of the rest. Even if we can separate out some, what if the others start to spread out afterward?”

  “They could start spreading out at any time,” Eric noted.

  “Fair enough,” Colin conceded.

  “Have you guys noticed something new about the freaks?” Rotna said suddenly. While they had been discussing different possibilities, her eyes had remained locked on the highway.

  Colin frowned and looked back at the freaks between the cars. They didn’t look notably different from others he had seen.

  “I don’t see anything.” He finally shook his head.

  “It took me a while to figure out what it was.” Rotna chewed on her lip. “I don’t know if it means anything, but they aren’t moving as much. They aren’t as frantic as they were at first.”

  Colin frowned and studied the road again.

  “If you remember, back in the first few days…like a week ago.” It didn’t seem possible that it had only been a little more than a week since the world had ended. So much had changed. “When they didn’t have someone to eat, they would move around a lot. Like they were looking for people who weren’t infected. They would whip around at the slightest sound and run over to investigate it. They were hunting. Now, they’re just sort of standing there and wandering around a little. They’re slower. They’re roaming.”

  Colin’s eyes roved over the stretch of highway. It was true. None of the freaks looked like they were actively searching for their next victim. They weren’t really doing much of anything. Just existing. Waiting.

  “Do you think they’re slowing down for good?” Eric asked. “Like they’re running out of juice or something.”

  “I don’t think so.” Colin shook his head as he thought over what they were seeing. “Maybe they’re dormant. I would bet not one of them has seen a live human since the day everything went to shit. Maybe when they see something like prey”—the word made him cringe, but it was what they had become: prey—“they go into a frenzy. Overdrive. When there isn’t any around, they go into like a rest mode. I’d bet, though, if they saw us they would get all riled up just like on the first few days.”

  Eric and Rotna nodded.

  “So.” Rotna started finally pulling her eyes away from the freaks and the dead cars. “Where does that leave us?”

  “It means we’re cut off.” Eric sighed. “We’ve got the river to the west and the Sovereigns to the east, and we’re sandwiched right in the middle. We don’t know what’s on the other side of the river. Hell, we don’t even know what’s outside of our own neighborhood. Maybe the rest of the world is carrying on with their lives. Business as usual.”

  “Maybe they’re all dead,” Colin said flatly.

  “They can’t all be dead.” Eric shook his head, but he didn’t sound entirely sure. “There are…hundreds of millions of people in the US alone. Not to mention the rest of the world. We can’t be the only ones left. There have to be other groups out there.”

  “Groups like Sovereign.”

  “Groups like us,” Eric shot back, holding Colin’s gaze defiantly.

  “Well,” Rotna cut in, “we can worry about those other groups, if they even exist, later. There isn’t anything we can do about them now. What we need to do is focus on what we’re going to do about the bridge.”

  Eric held Colin’s gaze for another moment before turning his attention back to the snarled mess of the bridge.

  “What if we don’t use the bridge?” Eric offered. “Maybe we could get our hands on a boat and cross the bridge with that.”

  Colin didn’t like leaving the freaks on the bridge. They were a disease. A plague on the planet that could not be allowed to exist. They had to kill every last one.

  “We could find a quiet place along the river to cross and not even have to deal with the freaks.”

  “We’d need some kind of transport on the other side,” Colin added. “We have too many people to walk. If we had to fight, we wouldn’t be able to protect everyone.”

  “With someplace quiet, we could send some people across to find cars. Once we have the cars, we could bring the supplies across and load up the cars. Get everything ready to move out. Then take the people one load at a time. If the spot is quiet and secluded, we could take our time.” Eric nodded.

  Colin chewed on the inside of his cheeks. He didn’t want to give up the fight. The world would never get better unless they took it back. “Let’s get back and see what the others have found.”

  They turned, moving through the grass at a crouch. Colin pushed through the tall stalks, barely able to see over the grass as he moved.

  A low growl reached his ears just before a hand shot out from the grass and grabbed ahold of his arm. Colin tried to yank his arm back, but with it came the gnashing teeth of a freak that had been hiding in the tall grass. As the creature clung to his arm, Colin toppled over backwards, the freak landing on top of him.

  The woman was missing a large chunk of her scalp and forehead. Her fingers, which grasped at his clothes with a viselike grip, were dirty and worn down to the bone. Bite marks riddled her arms, leaving behind large dirty scabs and missing chunks of flesh.

  The freak used her arms to pull herself closer to Colin’s face. Her bony fingers dug into his skin as she tugged her way up his clothes. Colin grabbed ahold of her neck, holding her snapping teeth away from his face. Though her arms were strong, the woman was amazingly light as Colin pushed against her.

  Without warning, her eyeball popped out, leaking clear viscous fluid down her cheek. The point of an arrow sprouted from her eye socket. The woman’s jaw suddenly went slack, her entire body going limp. Eric yanked the arrow back out as Colin’s shoved the woman’s lifeless body off himself.

  Eric extended his hand to help Colin up and Colin took it gratefully.

  “What the fuck?” Eric whispered, kneeling near the corpse.

  Colin looked down at the woman and realized why she had been so light. The
woman’s shirt ended in bloody tatters. Dirty, ropey intestines spilled out from the end of her shirt, where her waist should have been. But her waist and legs were gone, leaving the woman to drag herself by her fingers while her innards trailed after her.

  “We’ll have to be more careful and watch out for crawlers, I guess.” Colin wrinkled his nose and stepped away from the corpse.

  “Man, I hope you had better luck than we did!” Laura called as Colin and the others strode up to Thies. He had gone out with the other party to scout locations to the east. Oliver, Samuel, Ervin, and a few others.

  “So it was a bust?” Rotna asked.

  Oliver rubbed his hair in frustration before he spoke. “Not a total bust. There are a couple of good places that aren’t too far away. The problem is that they may not be far enough away to get out from underneath the Sovereigns.”

  “It’s hard to go further out,” Samuel joined them. “There’s too many highways. Between 270, 141, 364, and 70, we’re boxed in good.” Samuel pushed a rock around with the toe of his shoe. “That’s just what’s closest. If we were to go out further, we’d have to deal with major roadways.”

  “The highways are so cluster-fucked that getting through them with as many people as we have is a goddamn death wish.” Ervin joined their little powwow. “Tell me you have some better news.”

  “The bridge is pretty much impassible,” Colin said. He could see everyone’s shoulders slump at the news. “Hundreds of the freaks are milling around it. That’s a big enough problem, but then we’d have to deal with all the cars, and some of them are wrecked pretty good. They wouldn’t be easy to move.”

  “Colin’s right. The bridge is pretty much a no go. It’s just too risky,” Eric agreed. “We don’t necessarily need to use the bridge, though, to go west.”

  Samuel looked up at Eric curiously. “Go on.”

  “Colin suggested we find a boat.” The others immediately perked up at the suggestion.