by Bryan James
Kate dodged the activity, finding the tent she was searching for and dropping to a knee, just as a single innocent face popped into view.
“Kate?” Annie’s voice was worried and scared, her eyes darting behind Kate as women ran and shouted, and shots rang out in higher frequency.
“Where’s Donna?” Kate asked, scanning the tent. The worthless shit had left the girls, Kate realized, cursing loudly as she unzipped the tent.
“Momma said we shouldn’t say that word,” Annie said absently as Kate grabbed the girls’ bags and spoke to Stacy.
“Come with me, quickly. It’s not safe here. I’m going to take you somewhere you’ll be okay. But we have to go now.”
Someone was firing on full automatic now, and Kate heard the heavy rumble of the two humvees breaking formation and moving to the front lines near the trees.
Countering the threat and leaving the front gate unprotected, as she had suspected they would.
Stacy heard the chaos outside and didn’t argue, simply nodding once before pulling her small boots onto her feet and moving after Kate, who had scooped Annie into her arms and was making a beeline for the parked Rhino, which sat undisturbed and forgotten on the far side of the camp.
A single small explosion—likely a grenade—shook the ground briefly in the trees, as Kate saw the first line of the invading creatures come shambling from the darkness of the forest.
Had they come at the group from a field, they would never have survived the rain of bullets that they were facing now. But the trees were blocking the shots of all but the soldiers, the untrained women in the group making poor nighttime snipers. Several had already gotten close enough to the line to cause the defenders to grapple with them. That was never good.
Kate put Annie in the first row of the Rhino and turned to Stacy.
“You two stay here, you understand? This is armored and safe. I am going to close this door behind me. You don’t open it until there are no zombies out here, you understand?”
Stacy blinked as a single tear escaped her eye then nodded. Suddenly, she grabbed Kate’s arm.
“Can’t you stay?”
Her face upturned, the lights too bright by far in the crowded terminal; the noise of others, moving quickly through their normal days, with no idea of the hearts being ripped open in the middle of this public space.
Kate’s hand, rising once to push the hair away from her ear with a shaking finger; to try to wipe away the tears. The voice of the intercom system, announcing the arrivals and departures of flights to and from nowhere even vaguely important. The rending, tearing pain of having to give up her daughter. Again.
As if she were removing a piece of her soul.
Swallowing hard against the tears, she shook her head, allowing a small choking sound to escape. How could she leave these girls here? At the mercy of these women? These girls whose mother had been taken from them—who had nothing left—needed someone. Someone more competent than Donna, someone who could take care of them. Shelter them from harm. From this new and dangerous world.
But she had her own daughter, whom she loved. And she needed to find her. She couldn’t hope to do that, against all odds, with two more dependents in tow. The balance of equities was impossible.
But it was also clear.
They could survive here with the group, however horrible the group was. Her daughter was alone, and she needed her mother.
Now.
“I have to go. I have to find my daughter. She’s … out there somewhere. You’ll be safe, I promise.” She bit back a short sob and nodded confidently.
The small girl’s hand released its grip and Kate backed down the steps, closing the door with a firm tug and feeling its massive lock engage.
Blinking back tears, she turned, jogging away as the two girls stared after her, faces wooden and confused.
***
Ky was nearly vibrating when Kate arrived at the tent, and the storm of gunfire continued unabated. Only fifty yards away, zombies were still pouring from the trees, and at least two of the convoy women were down, with several other engaged in hand to hand battle. A body squirmed on the pavement, its entrails pulled across the dirt, screams of pain eliciting only quick glances from those struggling to hold the line.
Kate’s quick assessment was that they would survive, but they would be bloodied. Hopefully too bloodied to tear off immediately after a couple of fugitives.
“We could help,” said Ky doubtfully, watching as one creature took down an older woman anchoring the right side of the line, a line of bloody tendons and muscle streaming from the woman’s neck as it pulled back on its prey. The zombie’s head jerked back once as a soldier put a bullet in its head.
Kate watched Starr walking the lines, directing fire and putting her own lead down range.
“No. We are leaving. They’ve got this.”
Ky nodded and they set off, bent at the waist, making for the cover of the admin building. Several more screams split the air as two more women went down in a flurry of blood and chaos. The gunfire intensified, with fifty cal rounds tearing into the trees from the tops of the humvees, sending splinters of jagged wood into the approaching creatures as the fight was becoming desperate.
They skirted the buildings until they reached the main fence and gate, slipping quietly through the entrance, past the main sign, and off the road into the waiting darkness of the forest.
Kate looked back once, listening to the sounds of gunfire and terror.
Then, she remembered her daughter’s face, and Starr’s loathsome touch. Spitting once on the ground, she turned and disappeared into the woods, turning north and away from the campsites.
***
As we rounded the bend in the pathway, I recognized the jagged shoulder of the road I had followed to the dam only hours before. The rough-hewn vertical wall rising behind the road and the thin line of trees between the road and the rocky bluff were both familiar to me. We were only a hundred yards from the entrance I had used.
Which meant we were possibly very danger-close. The creatures that had made their way through to chase Rosy and Eli inside had come from this entrance, and we had to assume that there were more clustered there. I didn’t have much faith in my sneaking abilities, and I no longer wanted to risk gunfire unless absolutely necessary. So if there were more up here, I’d have to do it old-school. By hand.
Our feet crunched on a strip of gravel as we made our way to the main road. Grimacing at the sound, I motioned to Eli to slow his walk as I peered carefully out of the covering brush and toward the dam. In the shadow of the thick night, I could discern no movement. But I knew that could be misleading. They could be clustered around the entrance but unmoving. We would need to be closer to be sure.
Taking Eli’s hand, I pulled my machete free from its sheath with my other hand and began to walk slowly along the edge of the trees, hoping to mask our profiles with the shadows of the large wooded area. The hillside dropped off precipitously to our right, as we followed the same direction from which we had just come, only elevated by roughly thirty feet. The pathway we had followed was a narrow ribbon below us, on the other side of the thin copse of trees and brush. Luckily, the newly-risen moon hovered low behind us, backlighting the profiles of the woods and making our forms indistinct.
Whoever had designed these things had done the human race a huge service in making their vision crappy. Of course, they could have also left off the cannibalism and the aggressiveness.
But I digress. It’s the little things that mattered.
The doorway soon materialized, and as luck would have it, there were only three zombies clustered around the pile of rubble in the doorway. Two leaned in, clawing slowly and unenthusiastically at the rigid barrier. A third simply stood, hovering and looking off into the distance, as if in a trance. None were looking in our direction.
I held up one finger to Eli then motioned to him to stay put.
Carefully putting one foot in front of the other, my
blade held in a firm overhand grip and behind my back to reduce the possibility of glare from the moonlight, I crept forward until nearly face to face with the hovering lurker. The head turned as my blade flashed forward for the spine, and in a fit of planning, I reached out, wincing as I grabbed a shock of filthy, matted hair, feeling the crusted accumulation of blood and dirt crunch beneath my fingers as the body crumpled against me.
The head, only half severed, flopped against me, eyes dead and vacant, mouth agape, as I lowered the mangled corpse to the ground slowly and silently. The other two creatures never turned.
Their ends were more violent.
In two forceful sweeps of the machete, two heads were on the ground, bodies falling to the earth as if deflated. They had barely had a chance to turn around.
I motioned for Eli to follow me as we rounded the elevated corner to the left, back onto the broken road, splintered with cracks and crevasses in the concrete. Large chunks of rock, dislodged from the cliffs above, were strewn about the road and the grounds, as if tossed by a giant’s hand.
The roadway across the bridge was narrow—designed for only one vehicle at a time—given its location next to a park.
The gray path stretched off ominously into the growing darkness of the night, and as we reached the slight change in pavement type that marked the transition from road to dam, I paused, noticing that Eli was having to double-time it to keep up with me.
Now was a good time to chat.
“So did you really follow me up here for the explosives work, or do you have some sort of death wish?”
I didn’t want to lay Rosy’s death on him, but I was pretty sure a smart kid like this could make the ‘if not for this, then that’ connections. If he hadn’t followed me, she’d likely be alive, still castigating him in Spanish.
He walked quickly beside me, eyes still wide and searching, curious but also scared. Dodging a particularly wide crack, through which we could see wiring and piping below, he shrugged. His tone was still a neutral, uncaring tenor.
“You might be a survivor, and super strong and all that. But that doesn’t mean you know what you need to know. The explosives they are using at that site are probably Blastex. Do you know how to turn raw explosives into an explosion? You don’t just light them on fire. And to bring down a dam like this, you need more than a few sticks—even after a few big quakes. At least a few crates. Do you know how to detonate that much high-powered explosive?”
I stared ahead, noting a single creature far ahead, shambling slowly forward, honing in on our voices. I wasn’t concerned—by all accounts, there was a fence on the other side of this roadway, keeping nearly forty of those things confined inside. One wasn’t a problem.
“I probably could have figured it out,” I said, unconvincingly. “But these are points you could have made while I was still there. I assume that you have answers to these questions in your book—or already in your head—and could have helped me out without coming with. Why take off like that?”
As we approached the center of the dam, I spared a glance for the large lake pent up to our left, the calm waters spitting out a chill wind that pushed at us gently. To our right, the ravine cut into the rocky walls to either side, a consistent torrent of water rushing through to the canyon below. I could tell that the water flow was higher than normal, even in the darkness. Rocks and trees that would normally be above the water line were now half submerged as the dam leaked slowly but surely into the waiting valley.
Eli didn’t answer, but just kept walking, his gait sulking and hands buried deep in his pockets.
“Listen, if we’re going to work together…” I began. But he interrupted.
“I just wanted out, okay? I hate it down there. I hate hiding in the dark. I hate feeling like I can’t do anything to help … people.” His voice trailed off.
In in his voice, I heard a desire to avenge his parents. To make a difference.
I had a quick flash of missing Kate fiercely. I felt unprepared to help this child navigate his pain. But here I was. And she was far away—separated from me by miles and days. I maintained my hope that we would find each other. In all the craziness of this new world, we had made more impossible things happen. But when you find someone that completes you, operating as one half of a whole can really be a difficult chore.
I thought I understood Eli’s motivation, though. In that moment, I felt like he and I were on the same page. In all the pain we had seen, among all the loved ones we had lost, we hoped to simply make a difference.
I tried to affect an amazed and incredulous tone now, hoping to disarm him and let him know it was all okay. That we were good.
“So you took off into a series of dark tunnels, infested by zombies, to dive into a flooded room, also infested by Satan’s crabs, just to get away from it all? Man, you’re hard core. What do you do for summer vacation?”
Humor.
I could always go there.
I thought I detected a small smile.
Then, suddenly, I was flat on my face, pavement kissing my forehead as I hung on to the ground for dear life.
***
Far beneath the surface of the earth, the enormous tectonic plates continued to grind and wear against one another, fighting an epic battle for position and dominance, out of which would emerge only one winner. As the Juan de Fuca plate slid slowly underneath the North American plate, causing damage and geographic changes unseen for thousands upon thousands of years, the earth itself was in turmoil. Magma, long repressed and held beneath the surface of the planet by incredible forces of nature, found seams and cracks in the mantle, pushing forward and upward, as its space beneath the rock was constricted by the outstanding pressures being exerted. Up it shot, through tunnels and porous rock, through dirt and sediment, until it arrived at the surface, boiling over the tops of volcanoes that had been masquerading as ski resorts and picturesque national parks.
The earth shook again, sending torrents of fire into the sky. Sending rocks and earth shattering to the ground. Continuing its mission to render man’s world unto nature. Buildings fell, roads buckled and washed away in streams of loose earth and rock. The sound of exploding gas mains and crumbling civilization was everywhere.
Even on the top of the dam.
***
You would think it would be impossible for a million ton work of concrete and steel to shake like you had just put fifty cents into a cheap bed in a sleezy motel.
You would think that with such considerable girth and size and impressive craftsmanship, it would stay solid and dependable under the onslaught of nature’s wrath.
You would, however, be wrong.
It felt as if the earth had tilted from its axis, had acquired a mind of its own, and was trying to buck off those paltry few who had managed to survive the plague that mankind had so recently wrought. I scrabbled for some purchase on the slick concrete, finding widening cracks and the barest of handholds as I caught Eli’s arm, arresting his slide toward the precipitous drop into the valley below.
Around us, the walls on either edge of the roadway were crumbling away, calving from the top of the structure like icebergs from a melting glacier. I ground my teeth to keep from screaming, as cracks formed loudly around us, in some cases sending jets of water into the air as pipes burst from below. The structure creaked and groaned under the stresses beneath us as it undulated in the wretched anger of nature’s fury.
And then it ended. Abruptly and quietly. Presided over by a renewed glow in the eastern sky as lava burst into the air, and ash littered the clouds anew, the earth stopped its dance, taking a rest as we wearily raised our heads, shocked to be alive.
The dam stood. The roadway, though cracked and badly beaten, remained. Chancing it, I crawled to the edge of the structure that looked out to the south, into the ravine, and ogled the increased flow of water coming from the large cracks below, hoping that the quake had done our work for us.
Cursing, I realized it wasn’t enough. We still
had to blow it.
“Mike…” Eli’s voice was shaky and warbled slightly. I cleared my throat before responding, wary of sounding exactly the same.
I had long since figured out that being an adult didn’t mean you weren’t afraid—just that you were better about hiding your fear.
“Yeah, kid, what’s up?” I muttered, trying to find my feet.
“What’s that?”
His hand rose and pointed across the dam toward the construction site and the fence that blocked the access into the yard.
Except that the fence wasn’t there.
And forty zombies had just passed by where it had stood, pouring onto the dam.
Son of a bitch.
Damn earthquake, can’t do anything right!
You shake the shit out of the dam, but don’t bust it open.
But you knock the ever-loving fence down, so we have to fight the zeds on the top of the broken dam?
Piece of shit nature.
This is why we can’t have nice things.
Mind reeling, I looked around, casting about for an idea or a way to narrow their approach. Other than a single abandoned car and the remains of a small viewing station amidst broken concrete, there was nothing.
On our left, twisted remnants of the metal railing led off into nothingness, and a forty foot drop to the deceptively calm lake below.
To our right, a similar railing but with a much more impressive drop off—nearly three hundred feet straight down.
Taking my rifle in one hand, I set Eli behind the car and took aim at the first creature.
I hated to have to fire, knowing that it risked drawing more up from the town below. But I couldn’t see an option. I didn’t have the ability to funnel them in or take them one at a time. Even with my superior strength and speed, there was no way to take forty at a time.
My eyes drifted to a broken length of wire above my head as I thought, then it came to me.
I didn’t have to kill them. They would kill themselves. I just need to play the role of bait.