by T. W. Brown
Since I didn’t really know what a satchel charge was, much less a homemade one, I gave a smile, a shrug, and a wave. Groans from behind me forced me to turn back around and view the carnage spread out before me.
A few of the bodies on the ground were twitching or crawling, and I began making short work of them. I noticed BP and a few others join in, but Katrina was standing with her arms across her chest in obvious disapproval. I paused beside her and saw a very clear look of condemnation etched on her face.
“You have a problem with this?” I asked after stabbing the body at my feet in the back of the head.
“So we are murderers now?” she shot back.
“We are ending their misery,” I replied. “I realize that it seems cruel, but letting them suffer would be far worse. And before you even say it, do you know how difficult it is to treat burn victims? Even back before this nightmare began, burns were harsh. We have neither the facilities nor the supplies to do anything for these people. The best we can offer is a quick death.”
“Sounds like things have settled down!” Darla called from above, breaking the uncomfortable stare down between me and Katrina.
I gave a wave of acknowledgement and returned to the gruesome task at hand. Once it was finished, everybody gathered together out in the parking lot. I sent in a couple of our group to remain with the people in the makeshift hospital until proper help arrived. I instructed Darla to remain up on the roof.
“What do we do now?” somebody asked.
“We hold this location and wait.” As far as I was concerned, we had done our share of the work when it came to repelling the attack. We even had a prisoner to show for it.
That got me to thinking. Once Graham or whoever was still in charge after this ordeal was sorted out arrived, I might never see this guy again. He had some information that I wanted, and this could very well be my only opportunity to question him.
“Everybody take defensive positions just in case,” I said, turning back to the entrance of the Walmart. “Give me a holler if somebody shows up…no matter what side they are on.”
Returning to the manager’s office where I had left our prisoner, I entered and asked the person who had remained as a guard to please excuse us. He left and I took a seat, nodding that my prisoner should do the same.
“So…what’s your name?” I asked.
“Gable…Gable Matczak,” he answered as he slumped down into the chair on the other side of the desk from me.
“Okay, Gable, let’s start from the beginning. You say that your group arrived at a military base, and that a Marine named Jon Saunders was with you. You arrived to find things in a bad way, and Jon did what exactly?”
“He asked to talk to the officer in charge,” Gable replied. “When this man came out, Jon asked him what in the hell was going on here. He demanded to know why civilians were being abused. The officer and Jon started arguing and it turned into a fight. Pretty soon, people were shooting at each other. All of a sudden, one guy comes out of a building, I was underneath our truck, but I saw that he was carrying a freaking flamethrower. I figured that Jon was a goner, but the guy spun on his own people and lit them up good.”
That had to be Jesus Sanchez, I thought, remembering his arrival to our compound with Jon and Jake. I had really liked that guy. Hell, I’d looked up to and liked them all at one point.
“The battle went on for quite a while, and when things died down, I was too scared to move. I had no idea which side had won. Eventually, I saw one of the men who had ridden with us when we escaped our old command post. I assumed that Jon managed to find some support in this new post besides the guy with the flamethrower and somehow managed to take down the bad guys.”
Gable stopped, and I saw tears well up in his eyes. It did not take a genius or a mind reader to know that he had been incorrect in that assumption. I decided that I did not need to force the story from him, Gable would speak on his own time and I could perhaps free my conscience of some of the guilt it was holding on to for the way that I treated him just a few brief moments ago.
“Two of the men that rode in my truck had turned and decided to join that gang of animals. I was stuck with no choice but to go along.”
I leaned back in my chair and raised my eyebrows at him. I think he just realized what he’d said, because his face flushed and he fumbled over his words trying to explain himself.
“No….wait…I didn’t…what I meant was—”
“You meant that you had to travel with these guys because you had no other choice,” I offered his explanation and he nodded vigorously.
“I kept hoping that we would find my dad,” Gable said glumly. “I knew that if we found him, I could get away from those bastards. But I also knew that going out on my own would be a good way to get myself killed.
“They just threw all the bodies in a pile and torched it. Didn’t matter if they were soldier or civilian, they treated ‘em all no better than you would one of those walking corpses. I fell in and just did what I was told. When there were raids on nearby camps, I went if they made me, but I swear…I never laid a hand on anybody in that way. I felt like garbage for not doing anything to stop it, but I was all by myself and knew they would either kill me or make me a part of their sick and twisted entertainment.”
I heard an awful lot in that last sentence. I had seen my share of sick and twisted, but I was pretty sure that there was plenty I had missed. It sounded like poor Gable had seen far more…and far worse.
“One day, our camp got hit by one of those herds. I knew it was just a matter of time. The way they carried on and didn’t seem to give a damn about how much noise they made, I knew that the zombies would find us sooner than later. We lost probably two dozen of our numbers that night. We were too drunk to run after just finding an almost perfectly intact liquor store. There had been serious drinking and most of the people they’d been keeping as prisoners were fortunate since they ended up dying before the herd arrived. Still, we became more of a roaming terror squad after that.
“Then we met this other group of soldiers. One of them was this guy named Winters. If the folks I’d been with were scary and mean, they had nothing on Winters. That guy was a walking nightmare.”
I felt my blood run cold. Something told me that a lot of things were about to fall into place. The bad part was that I was not sure if that was something I wanted or not. Gable saw my expression change and he swallowed hard.
“You knew Winters, too?” he asked incredulously. I nodded, and he continued his tale. “He killed our leader and took charge, establishing a chain of command. It was really crazy those first few days. Winters had quite a few females with him, but they weren’t prisoners. And if I had thought that the men I’d been travelling with were a nasty bunch…” He shook his head and looked at me with a haunted expression. “Those women were some of the most vicious, terrible…” He shuddered and rubbed at his arms as if to try and ward off the cold. “God, I don’t even want to call them humans. They were horrible.”
“So I still don’t know how you guys ended up out here,” I said.
What I wasn’t saying was that I also did not know how the group that Gable travelled with had gotten separated from Winters. I had thought we eliminated all of his evil minions a while ago when Jon, Jake and I had been in their compound and employed the New World Era version of a bio-weapon. That was also when both men had contaminated Winters’ compound’s water supply with their infected blood.
“Winters got word from one of our patrols of a well-organized group of survivors up in the mountains.”
Ah, I thought, that would have been us.
“But they also discovered another military outpost via radio. These guys were only a few in number, but they were protecting a massive cache of supplies. Winters convinced them that we could help. He knew all the right codes and so they had no reason to suspect that he was some sort of monster worse than the damn zombies.
“I was sent with that group. We showed
up to this massive underground bunker. It was loaded with everything. I still don’t know why we didn’t all just decide that it was good enough to call home. It was in some sort of mountainous region with no nearby towns. There was nothing for miles and practically zero threat from zombies. And even if a herd came by, we could simply slip below ground and wait them out.
“I think they had just become too addicted to the power they could wield over people unfortunate enough to cross their path. We actually had started talking about making the place a permanent home and saying to hell with Winters and the rest, but it wasn’t even a month before the fighting began. They all acted like smokers who had been forced to quit. Basically mean, nasty, and foul-tempered to the point where the simplest things would set somebody off. Hell, at least ten people ended up dead from one fight or another.
“We loaded up everything we could transport with the various contraptions that were concocted and set out to return to La Grande where Winters had told us all to meet. He had mentioned that there was another settlement supposedly in town that had gone a good way towards establishing a sustainable living area complete with farmland and even a possible National Guard armory close by.
“We got bogged down when the snow came and decided to hold up in a small town.” Gable shuddered and I had a feeling that there had been survivors in whatever small town his group had chosen to call home until the passes were clear. He looked up at me, and I could see something in his eyes that told me more than his words ever could or would.
“We actually found that compound that Winters spoke of as we came through the mountain pass a few weeks ago, but it was empty. Whoever had been there, they sure busted their asses to get it in proper order. I felt bad that those poor people fell to somebody like Winters and his evil band of degenerates. They had a freakin’ moat around a massive log cabin that sat up on a hill. There was a healthy stream nearby and plenty of open land that could have been farmed. Not to mention they were back from the road far enough that nobody would ever find them unless they were looking for them.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I was one of those people. I also was not ready to share how Winters had met his end. While I was almost a hundred percent certain that this guy was being straight up with me, I had learned to always conserve at least a kernel of mistrust when dealing with strangers. Hell, Jake had taught me that I should keep it once I believed that I knew somebody.
“The only reason that Winters knew about the place was because he had a guy who had apparently hooked up with Jon and had information about just where he was supposedly heading. One of his men that got separated on some mission or another had run into Jon while he was out leading a team on a foraging mission. I’d heard the name a few times and knew him from our compound. Part of me believes that it was Winters who engineered the attack on our original compound where I got separated from my dad. Having seen how they work to establish communication and then take a place down, it would not be too far-fetched. That same guy had been in my truck.”
I felt the hairs on my arms and the back of my neck stand up. This was way too much. I was almost afraid to ask, but my mouth apparently felt no such restraint.
“Was the guy named Jake Beebe?”
Gable looked at me with wide eyes and his mouth hung open. I was about to start an entirely new line of questioning when he blurted.
“Jake Beebe was my dad!”
Now it was my turn to stare wide-eyed and slack-jawed. How in the hell was that possible? I tried to reconcile all of the bits and pieces that I knew to make the answer add up.
Jake had arrived back at our place with Jon Saunders and Jesus Sanchez a little before winter. They had talked about escaping from someplace, but there had never been much detail given.
“But your name is Matczak,” I stammered.
“Yeah, my folks split when I was young,” Gable explained. “My mom remarried and her husband adopted me. I hadn’t seen or heard from my dad in a long time. In fact, the first time I ever heard from him was when this stuff all started. Jake called in the middle of the night. He told me where he was and that I needed to get my mom and haul ass to him as fast as I could.”
“What about your…” I paused, not sure where to go with this. “What about your dad. I mean…you know…the guy whose last name you have?”
“Oh,” Gable waved a dismissive hand, “he and my mom split up when I was like twelve or so. I hadn’t seen that dick in almost a decade.”
I decided to just leave alone the fact that obviously Jake was aware that his mom and her second husband had split based on the fact that he gave what sounded to me like a pretty specific invite. Still, I was not seeing something here, and it nagged at me. I brushed it aside, hoping that it would reveal itself sooner or later. For now, I had the hard question still to ask.
“So, where is your mom?”
Gable’s face fell just a bit more. I didn’t need the answer. I probably should have left the obvious alone. I absolutely was not ready for his response.
“Last I knew…she was back at the camp where our militia is staying.”
“Wait…what?” By his expression, I had assumed her to be dead; after all, it isn’t much of a stretch these days.
“A dozen or so were left behind. We came here thinking that we would secure this settlement after taking down the people running the place. We really did not anticipate this level of resistance,” Gable explained.
“How could you not? Seriously…you roll in and start shooting up the place! You were blowing up people’s homes and taking the folks in the medical center as hostages. On what world does that not merit a response?”
“We were told that the people in charge here were evil. We were told that they were keeping the citizens hostages and that they were executing any who did not do as they were told by some secret council.”
That was all news to me. So far, the only trouble I’d actually run across, with the exception of our first couple of meetings, was when Jessie and Joshua had tried to kill me. Sure, I’d had some words with Graham, but I had not picked up on any sort of evil vibe coming from him.
However…my mind began to sift through a few things about our first encounters. There was that whole incident with sending me what were supposedly Carol’s fingers. Then there was the fact that we’d each been drugged before being allowed in. They had shot us up with something, and the next thing we knew, we woke up in our new “house”. Maybe there was something dark going on.
I shook those thoughts away and returned my attention back to Gable. He was looking at me with some sort of expectance. I weighed my choices and decided that, if it were me, I would want to know.
“Jake Beebe is dead.” The words hung in the air for a second before they connected with a solid punch to Gable’s gut. I saw his face crack, but he quickly pulled it back in and under control.
“How do you know?” Gable’s voice was barely above a whisper, but it pounded in my ears.
“Because I put the blade of this knife,” I pulled the weapon free and placed it on the desk, “in his head when he got up. I made sure that he stayed down for good.”
Okay, I was leaving out a lot of the story. But I was not ready to tell this guy that his dad had turned into a bit of a freak towards the end. He had led a suicide charge on this place for no reason that I could discern.
Jake had been a big mystery. He had pretended to be just some country boy with not much going on upstairs. That proved to be a lie. In fact, Jake was possibly the most cunning person that I’d ever known. That was one of the reasons that his final decision left me so confused. He had to know that he was going to fail. He had to know that he was leading any who followed to their death. He had certainly seemed too smart for such a thing.
A notion struck me and I leaned back in my chair to try and get a clear idea of what the hell was going on; steepling my fingers and tapping them against my lips for a moment. It was all in front of me, but it was like a million-piece puzzle
of a solid black image. I could put the edges together, but after that, I was lost.
“How did you know that your dad was in this area?” I asked.
“I was told by one of the guys who worked in the comms tent that there was rumor he had been seen in La Grande. Only, shortly after he told me, we got the word that Winters had been attacked. This small group arrived at our camp and met with Colonel Brevin. When they left, the colonel called a meeting. That was when we got the rundown on La Grande, how there were a few smaller factions, but that one group in particular was making a play to seize control. We were told that they had launched a full scale assault on Winters and knocked him out.”
Somebody was pushing a lie, I thought. I knew how Winters had been knocked out. I was now pretty sure that Jessie was part of the group that had found these guys and spun whatever story had led to this attack. I knew that Jessie had tried to kill me. Unfortunately, the list of things that I did not know or have any answers for was far greater. My head was starting to hurt.
The door to the office opened and BP entered. “Graham and some of his people just arrived.”
I looked at Gable. If I turned him over to Graham, I might never see him again. I did not know who to trust, but I needed to make a decision right now.
“BP, I need you to do me a favor.”
***
“We are doing a house-to-house sweep, but if any of those raiders survived, I don’t think they stuck around.” Graham was standing in the center of the massive parking lot in front of the Walmart. A sea of people were sitting on the asphalt in a huge circle with Graham in the center.
The word had been sent out for everybody in the community to attend this little gathering. It was the first time that I had seen so many living people standing in one place. A few wore the signs of last night’s battle, and I noticed that everybody was carrying a weapon. That had been one of the first things I’d noticed about this settlement—the lack of personal weapons on the residents.
“There were a few prisoners taken, but so far we have learned nothing,” Graham was continuing. “As far as the rumors that some of our people may have been involved or acted to assist these people…” I felt Graham’s eyes boring into me. I refused to look away. “Unfortunately that seems to be the case.” A murmur rose from the crowd.