Kyler caught a couple of moldy elbows to the nose from the excited Zombie while he was trying to get the knife loose. Once he had it out, he sat up straight putting all of his weight into driving the knife as deep as he could into the Zombie’s back. The Zombie was screaming in frustration at having an uninfected human so close and not being able to get its teeth into him. Kyler ripped the serrated knife out of the Zombies back and stabbed down again. The tone and pitch of the screeching didn’t change a bit. The Zombie was completely impervious to the pain of being stabbed in the back. All it cared about was getting at the meal it so desperately craved. The meal that was currently squatting on its back carving on it like it was a Thanksgiving turkey.
Kyler rolled off the blood-soaked flannel covered back of the beast and started to run again. The Zombie reached out and grabbed him by the leg. The damned thing was still alive. Kyler fell to the ground struggling to rip his ankle out of its grip. He could see the Zombie was already trying to bite him through his combat boot, so he kicked hard with the heel of his boot straight into the Zombies jaw. The Zombie lost a few teeth but continued to try and gum its way through the tough leather until an ax crashed down into its face. Having its face smashed in did the trick. The Zombie finally slipped off into oblivion.
Rodriguez reached down and helped Kyler to his feet. With neither saying a word they started running through the woods again. Kyler ran cautiously for the first few feet before noticing how loud the screeches around them had gotten. At that point he threw caution to the wind and went full throttle. Rodriguez was following right behind him. He was the more seasoned of the two of them. He knew that when running like crazy through the woods it was nice to have someone taller than you are breaking through the undergrowth ahead of you. Rodriguez got a nice clear trail broken by Kyler for him. In return Rodriguez kept looking behind them to make sure they weren’t being followed.
Screams and gunfire broke out behind them. In this kind of situation none of them were ever supposed to pull a gun. It just attracted more Zombies and made everything worse. If you’re a wounded guy on the forest floor and a Zombie is gnawing on your leg though you pretty much have the perfect reason to throw the rule book out the window. If they did survive then they typically weren’t even chewed out at as deep down everyone knew they’d do the same exact thing in that situation.
That was the other main difference between them and the units that came before the Zombies. They weren’t fighting for a mission or for god or for country. They were fighting for survival. Other than the men in the Brotherhood the rest of them were part of the people because they had no choice. There was no deep allegiance. There was no esprit de corps. These men would fight together for as long as they felt that it benefitted them. As soon as it no longer benefitted them, they were out. The people were held together in a giant web made up of intimidation, addiction, and fear with the Senator and his top leaders sitting in the middle of the web growing fat off all the flies.
His pack was heavy. His breathing was hard. He was coated in sweat. On hearing the gunshot, he reached down deep and found that reserve of energy he needed. He took the adrenaline that was still trickling into his system and used that to push him to run even faster. The sound of a few more shots drifted to them over the steady roar of the Zombie screeches from behind. That didn’t bode well for the bulk of the team actually making it to the rendezvous point. Determined he wasn’t going to be one of the ones left behind Kyler ran until his legs wouldn’t move anymore. He ran until he was seeing black dots floating in the air in front of him. He ran until he couldn’t get the air into his lungs fast enough to keep him going. When he couldn’t go another step, he forced himself to keep going.
A dried-up stream running through the woods tripped him up. He fell forward rolling down to the mud and pine straw covered bottom the stream had created. Rodriguez followed him down into the gully a few seconds later. He collapsed in the mud beside Kyler and worked on getting his breathing under control.
“Anybody else?” Kyler asked in a low whisper once they’d spent a few minutes getting their breathing back under control. Rodriguez shook his head and held up his finger in a shushing gesture. He turned and crawled back up the side of the gully. He was up there for a minute looking around before crawling back down.
“I think we’re good. Let’s get to the rendezvous point and see if anybody else made it, you good to go?”
Kyler nodded and they began moving as quietly as possible along the bottom of the gully towards the interstate.
Chapter 3: What We Do for Our Children
“This would be way be way easier if we could just kill them.” Miller said. “I don’t see what’s so special about them. They’re murdering traitors.”
“Traitors or not we have orders. We have to keep them alive until we get them up to Georgia or get them handed over to someone to get them up to Georgia. Besides, I’m not really up for murdering a woman and her kids in cold blood. No big deal on the man. He’s the one who’s probably been doing most of the actual killing anyway.” A tall, muscled man dressed in camouflage with a big bushy beard answered.
“Except the woman’s the one we actually saw kill Green. She kicked him right out of the damned truck. They’re both murderers. I’m with Miller. We should be able to just hang the two of them from a telephone pole then turn the kids over to bride school.” A third man said.
They were sitting around a table in a secluded section of the Red Lobster they’d picked to hide out in until the massive herd of Zombies from the city settled down. The three of them had been together since the beginning. They’d all been reservists who’d been doing their mandatory two weeks up in Pensacola. They’d stayed together since then as they were all rednecks with similar military backgrounds. Similar in that none of them had been in combat roles. They were two ground mechanics and one who’d been in personnel his whole career.
The people’s army didn’t much care what branch you’d been in. Especially in the early days. All that mattered was that you’d worn a uniform and knew how to take orders. Being able to shoot straight was a definite bonus. The three of them had seen everyone around them die. Their families had disappeared in the tsunami of death that’d come along in the early days of the Zombies.
They may not have started out bloodied and experienced but they’d more than made up for it by this point. All three of them had long ago lost track of how many Zombies they’d put down. The normal humans they’d been ordered to kill weighed heavier on their minds. They’d been sent to round up deserters before. They’d been dispatched to secure towns held by militia or other groups that weren’t willing to bend to the power of the new people’s army. They’d rounded up groups of survivors and forced them into the camps for the leaders to do with what they will. Along the way they’d done things that made it hard to look each other in the eye.
The man who led them now was a gunnery sergeant. Gunnery sergeant Gonzalez had been a scout sniper in the marines before all this went down. He’d been sent to provide intel on securing the port in Tampa on his last official mission. His command structure had evaporated while he was on the mission leaving him rudderless in a state where he had no ties. He’d used his considerable skills to build himself a place in the middle of nowhere Florida before hearing about the Brotherhood. Tired of being alone he’d sought them out and been whole heartedly accepted by them. Men with his background were suddenly way more valuable than people with an MBA or Computer Science Majors.
Placed in charge of a ten-man team he led missions in the different regions controlled by the Brotherhood. The Senator didn’t want any particular regional commander to grow too powerful, so he made sure to send in units like the one Gonzalez commanded to ensure everyone was staying loyal. Gonzalez would be the one to get the order to take out a commander if he got onto the Senator’s kill list. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d put his sniper skills to use for the Brotherhood against their own strayed commanders.
Gonzal
ez was sitting on the floor behind the bar nursing a bottle of warm tequila. One of the worse things to his mind about the apocalypse was that most of the beer and liquor had to be drank warm. Anytime he ended up in a place with actual ice cubes he made sure to take full advantage of the situation. A man with his particular skillset was kept out in the field most of the time though. He’d been handed the current crew he was commanding about six months prior and was still working on forming them into an effective fighting unit.
He took another sip of the top shelf tequila and looked around to see if there were any bar snacks still edible. The way everything had been jammed full of preservatives you were pretty safe eating anything still in a wrapper or jar. He found a jar of pickles, but the lid came off without that little pop you’d get from something that’d been sealed properly. He sighed and sat back down on the carpet. He tried to keep his mind off the fact that he had little girls handcuffed and shoved into a dark closet. He’d have been ok with doing it to the parents, but the kids were getting to him.
He took another long pull on the warm tequila. He pulled his wide brimmed hat down over his eyes and leaned back against the bar. He had his men setup on guard detail. He’d instilled the fear of god in them to not let him down when they were on guard duty. They knew he wouldn’t hesitate to slit their throats if he caught them sleeping when they were supposed to be watching over the team. He was a hard man made even more so by the brutality of the world they now lived in.
Knowing how bad the world had become made his current mission all the more distasteful. It was bad enough he had little girls tied up in the closet. It was even worse that he knew he was going to be responsible for transporting them to men who’d be taking them to be sold into slavery. The little ones would almost certainly go to bride school to be brain washed into true believers in the cult the Senator was building up. They’d probably both have opium habits before they hit puberty.
The two older girls had almost certainly bore arms against the Brotherhood. They may or may not be killed in front of their parents. That’d be at the whim of the Senator. By the time the prisoners actually made it to the camp the Senator was in, his temper may have cooled to the point where he’d let them go back to bride school. He’d still have them watch their parents executed in some grisly fashion first to show them what would happen if they didn’t change their ways. The mom and dad were doomed. It was just a question of how savage and prolonged their deaths would be.
His men were mostly bachelors now. Their families killed in the early days of the spread of the disease. Gonzalez still had a wife and two daughters. They were living in a camp up in Georgia reserved for the families of field officers. He hadn’t seen them in over a year but was able to do radio conversations with them whenever they were near a base. Assuming that the base was setup to allow for that. The families of the field officers were kept safe and secure, but they weren’t allowed to leave. This was supposed to be for their safety but in reality, it was to keep the field officers on an invisible leash. If his kids weren’t under the control of the Brotherhood Gonzalez would have had no problem killing any of his men who disagreed with him and letting this family of seven get back on the road to freedom.
Legs creaking, he stood up and walked towards the closet they were keeping the family in. They were stuck here until the Zombie threat outside had died down. He would’ve risked movement at night with just his men. Carting along a family complete with a toddler through a Zombie infested night just didn’t seem like a good time. Especially when the loss of that family would result in him and his men being demoted down to Zombie clearing.
Gonzalez motioned to the man standing watch over the locked door. The man nodded and moved back into the shadows. Gonzalez unlocked the door and looked into the dim room. The occupants were all blinking at the late afternoon light that’d seeped in when he opened the door. He worked to keep the pity out of his eyes at the sight of the little girls curled up around their mom and dad. The mom looked back at him with eyes full of fire. She’d already killed one of his men. Green had been a sloppy moron though, so Gonzalez wasn’t going to lose any sleep over that one. He met the mom’s intense glare with an air of indifference before looking over at the man of the house.
“Get up.” Gonzalez said simply. He watched Randy move with exaggerated care to get to his feet. He winced in pain every time he moved. Once he was up Gonzalez stepped out of the closet and waved for Randy to follow him. Randy shuffled behind him with his head down. Gonzalez led him down the hallway a few feet.
“You can stop the act. I know you’re not hurt that much. I know if you didn’t have those handcuffs on that you’d have already made a move. I brought you out here to have an honest discussion with you where your girls didn’t have to hear.”
“You like keeping little girls locked in a closet?” Randy asked him. He’d been telling himself to control his temper and try to befriend this guy. Once again, his mouth seemed to have come up with a different plan.
“Not my call on who gets locked in a closet. Since your family likes murdering men like me, I feel much safer with all of you locked up. Eventually we’ll get you somewhere you can be separated and guarded better. At that point the cuffs can come off and you can be made more comfortable. You’ve already shown how dangerous you are. Your wife killed one of my men on the way over here.”
“We’ll try and be more polite to the assholes taking us to be slaughtered. Maybe you could just let us go? Or, do you just really like killing families? Makes you happy to see little girls get ripped apart?” Randy saw a switch flip behind Gonzalez’s eyes and thought he may have crossed some line.
He knew he’d crossed some line when Gonzalez stepped forward and slammed a fist into his stomach. Randy curled over in pain from the blow.
“I pulled you out of that room to try and explain reality to you. You and your wife are going to be executed. Your kids may still be able to live though. They’ll be separated and married off when they come of age, but they’ll live. If you cooperate, I’ll make sure that happens. I don’t want to see your girls die any more than you do. If you don’t cooperate then we’ll use them to make sure you do. Make sure your wife understands too. The Senator doesn’t really care if those little kids make it back whole or not. I’ve got no problem cutting off their toes and making a necklace out of them for your wife to wear if you can’t do what you’re told.”
Randy charged Gonzalez. Hands cuffed behind his back, tired and hungry, still reeling from the punch to his stomach he got his shoulder into the grizzled Gunny and rammed him back against the wall. Ignoring the punches raining down on the back of his head he put everything he had into trying to hurt the man who was threatening his children. Gonzalez grabbed the back of Randy’s neck and fell to the ground smashing Randy’s face into the cold tiled floor. That took the fight out of him. The guard had run over when he heard the fighting going on. Gonzalez had him grab Randy and drag him back to the closet.
Gonzalez walked back over to the bar. He was breathing hard from the intense confrontation with Randy. Between that quick fight and the mom glaring at him like a mama bear watching out for her cubs he was beginning to see how these otherwise normal looking people had been able to keep their family alive and together this long. His respect for them was off the charts. He wasn’t going to allow that to get in the way of his duty to his employer though. As much as Randy and Kelly were willing to do whatever it took to save their daughters Gonzalez was also ready to do to ensure the safety of his family. He took another drink wondering how he was going to be able to look his wife and kids in the eyes when he finally did see them again.
Chapter 4: The Chattahoochee
“We’re actually not too far from the rendezvous point.” Kyler whispered. They’d taken the concept of operational silence to a whole new level now with the fear of certain Zombies being able to hear them over greater distances. It would’ve been better for humanity if the Zombies had developed the ability to breathe fire
or shoot lasers out of their eyes. If the extra sensitive hearing was a widespread phenomenon then no one was going to be safe. Especially no one in any type of semi-permanent settlement.
“If there’s anybody left to meet up with. I guess I made the right decision running with you. You must’ve swallowed a rabbits foot or something.” Rodriguez finished tying his combat boot and they continued walking through the woods towards the river.
The much easier path would’ve been to go up towards the interstate and catch one of the side roads that inevitably run parallel to most major interstates. In Kyler’s and Rodriguez’s experience the easier path was the one that normally ended up being a death trap. The more miserable path normally got you where you were going. Albeit in a much more roundabout and inconvenient manner.
“We’ve got plenty of time. They’ll hold until at least midnight to see who all might show up. I bet Krantz made it out. He’s too mean to die.” Kyler said. Rodriguez just grunted.
Zombies! (Book 5): Greater Love Hath No Man Page 2