by Kirk Withrow
The gray-bearded biker stood transfixed by the blur of movement that left three of his comrades dead in a matter of seconds. His mouth was filling up with blood from his partially severed tongue that had been bitten off by the woman. The pathetic biker began to cry as he choked and muttered incomprehensible, gurgling sounds. No longer feeling the urgency of his former assaults and tired from his exertion, Ethan walked menacingly toward the biker as the man back-peddled away from him. Without a word, he launched a fierce front kick that landed square on his bare chest, and sent him flying back into the embers of the eagerly awaiting bonfire.
A loud crack suddenly rang out from behind him as a high-pitched whizz tore past his head. Instinctively, Ethan dove for cover as the bonfire flared brightly, refueled by the addition of the organic matter. He was not entirely sure of where the shot originated, though he reasoned it most likely came from the other house. Hedging his bets, he scrambled around the rejuvenated fire effectively concealing himself to anyone in the second house. Immediately, he flipped onto his back so he could face the first house, still uncertain if all threats were eliminated from within. Seconds later a few more shots punched through the flames, confirming his suspicion about the location of the shooter.
After a few moments, Ethan saw no activity in the first house, and decided it was most likely devoid of life. He could see no cover in the immediate vicinity, and the path to the house offered little protection. Knowing the concealment provided by the bonfire would be fading at any moment, he decided to simply make a break for the front door of the house. Ethan was halfway to the door when the first shot broke from the semi-automatic rifle; the slow reaction made him wonder if the shooter simply failed to anticipate his action or if he was drunk as well. The first bullet struck wide, as the ensuing barrage stitched an ever-tightening line poised to intercept his path. Sensing the shooter was on track to cut him off before he reached the safety of the house, Ethan zigzagged in an attempt to throw off his attacker’s aim as the report of more shots erupted behind him. Even running at full speed and less than two yards from the door, Ethan knew he did not have much time before the bead of the rifle finally found its mark.
In a wild attempt to minimize the profile he presented to the shooter and to clear the threshold of the house, he dove headlong into the doorway. With a painful crunch, his shoulder contacted the heavy wooden door as he barreled into the house’s foyer. He rolled to the side the instant he hit the floor, just as a line of bullet holes bisected the spot where he had landed.
Groaning in pain and gasping for air, Ethan pushed himself against the inside wall of the foyer. He cradled his throbbing arm as he tested its movement. Although it hurt like hell, he was relieved to find that it was not broken. He sat perfectly still and listened intently to everything around him. He heard no more shots fired from outside and no movement from within the house. Interesting, maybe someone over there has a sense of fire control. Perhaps they aren’t complete amateurs after all.
He moved in a low crawl across the foyer, being careful not to pass through any beams of light shining in from the receding bonfire. When he made it into the next room, he cautioned a glance out the front window toward the other house. It appeared completely devoid of all activity. He thought he saw at least one light in the house prior to his attack but now there were none. While he saw no sign of the shooter, Ethan knew he was still out there.
As his position provided adequate concealment and afforded him a fair view of the other house, he remained there motionless. He was surprised that the people in the other house possessed the discipline to wait patiently for him to slip up. These guys are just full of surprises.
After several long minutes he saw the subtle movement of a curtain in a second story window as a brief, almost imperceptible, glint of moonlight reflected off a vanishing, shiny surface. Got you. Ethan kept an eye on the house for any further signs of movement as he scanned his surroundings for anything of use. Against the far wall of the adjacent room, highlighted by the light filtering in through the window, he saw the outline of a hunting rifle propped up as if its owner just went for a quick bathroom break. As he formulated a plan to acquire the weapon and neutralize the men in the other house, his attention was drawn to the small band of slow shambling forms trudging across the lawns of the two houses. Ethan watched in amazement as a bleach blonde, stringy-haired rev wearing a waitress uniform from Joe’s BBQ Pit staggered right through the bonfire heedless of its destructive power. The greedy flames instantly consumed her desiccated form. While there were relatively fewer infected inside the walls of Hermitage Estates, Ethan was fairly certain that every rev in the neighborhood was either in the front yard, or on the way to the party.
Immediately, Ethan realized the danger in his situation. One rev was not of much concern, but a group of them posed an entirely different problem. While one of them could certainly scare the hell out of you and perhaps get a lucky bite in, it was generally an easy foe to avoid, outmaneuver, and if necessary—neutralize. A group of them, on the other hand, morphed into a much stronger and formidable enemy in much the same way that raging floodwaters can turn a quiet stream into a fierce killer. Unfortunately, the majority of the noise and movement had been on his side of the street, drawing more than his fair share of the horde to his location. “Won’t the neighbors be so jealous,” he whispered sarcastically.
The pinned, crippled biker he left for the newly infected woman was not helping his cause with his anguished screams, as the woman relentlessly gnawed on his shattered right arm. Ethan shuddered as he realized that the woman did not even look as though she had succumbed to the infection yet. That guy is like a damn dinner bell for the infected. I’ve got to shut him up quietly and figure out how to divert their attention to the other house.
As if all the actors in the beastly play were reading his mind, several things occurred almost synchronously. First, the screams of the crippled biker were staunched when the woman ferociously tore into his throat, rendering him aphonic, if not dead. Ethan could not help wonder if the woman did this intentionally to help his cause, as she seemed so sentient only moments before. Loud cries for help erupted from within the other house. Again, they originated from a distinctly feminine voice, and Ethan vowed not to let her suffer the same fate as the woman in the front yard. With a relative lack of stimulation coming from his side of the street, the revs shifted their attention toward the other house and the panicked pleas for help. The urgent cries soon shifted to muffled sobs before falling silent all together. He stared horrorstruck, as the possible meanings behind the change hit his brain with the force of an oncoming train.
Suddenly the front door of the house across the street burst open, and a biker cradling something in his arms lurched through the doorway. Seeing the biker gave Ethan a sickening sense of déjà vu, until he began hurling things toward his position. Ethan recoiled as several glass bottles smashed onto the front porch, shattering the silence on his side of the street with a loud crash on each impact. From somewhere in the front yard, another small explosion erupted, and judging from the fine blue mist hanging in the air above the fire, Ethan thought the biker must have thrown a can of spray paint into the bonfire. He knew he must stop the biker’s barrage, and in order to do so, he was going to have to make some noise would draw more attention to him.
Ethan deftly raised the hunting rifle to his shoulder and prayed that the scope was at least somewhat accurate. As it was a civilian hunting rifle, he assumed it was zeroed at fifty or one hundred yards and, as his target was less than thirty yards away, he held the reticle slightly low on the biker’s center of mass. With practiced patience and control, he carefully squeezed the trigger. On the heels of the deafening blast, the projectile hurtled through the air before striking the biker in the neck, dropping him instantly. Spinal cord.
By now the horde of infected amassed between the houses numbered over twenty, and the entirety of their attention was directed toward Ethan. If any of their festering mind
s had been wandering, the sound of the gunshot took care of that. How strange that the sound of a gunshot, a sound almost as universally menacing as the racking of a shotgun, would actually attract these things when every other living thing would flee. Maybe that’s the difference with this enemy?
Ethan’s eyes began to sting from the thick, black smoke wafting in through the shattered window, just as his nose registered the unmistakable organic, petrochemical odor of volatile fuel. Molotov! Damn it! While he was uncertain of whether the woman he heard in the house was still alive, one thing was clear—the odds of winning this battle had shifted dramatically against him. With all of his enemies concentrated at the front of the house, he crawled to the back of the house under cover of smoke and flame.
Stumbling over a rotting corpse just outside the back door, an idea came to him. Quickly, he dragged the lifeless body into the middle of the house near the flames, still satisfied that he was concealed by the blossoming inferno. To complete his ruse, Ethan feigned screams of agony as though he was being burned alive. They’ll be that much less prepared if they think they already killed me. Moving surreptitiously to the back door, he escaped into the woods behind the house just as the first timid rays of the rising sun began to poke holes in the darkness of night.
Chapter 28
October 18, 2015
Though he had planned to do so, Ethan never asked John or Reams to accompany him back to Hermitage Estates. Instead, after hearing his story, both men insisted on going back to help the woman.
As each of them contemplated the new mission and what it might mean to them, the three men quietly readied their gear for the hike to Hermitage, and whatever was going to happen once they got there. John studied Ethan as he loaded his pack and checked his kit. They had only known him for a day, yet they were about to follow him into battle against a group of unknown men based entirely on his account of what these men were like, and what they were capable of perpetrating. For a moment John wondered why they should trust him, why they should believe his version of the story.
Ethan, unaware of John’s scrutinizing gaze, organized and stowed a miniscule amount of food, a nearly full hydration bladder, several yards of paracord, binoculars, a flashlight, and a few other items John could not see clearly. He then propped up a signal mirror as if he was going to freshen up a bit. He began to clean the skin around the crevice in his midface with a small alcohol wipe. With practiced skill that came from years of daily use, he applied a coating of medical-grade adhesive before fitting his facial prosthesis.
John was wondering whether he himself would be so casual and nonchalant about such a prominent, deforming injury when Ethan became aware of the eyes upon him.
Glancing in John’s direction, Ethan looked so unbelievably different, and he immediately saw the complete lack of recognition plastered across John’s visage. Such looks were not new to Ethan, of course, and he was curious if John was shocked by the transformation, or if he was simply curious as to the reason he was taking the time to get all fixed up for the fight. “Face paint doesn’t stick to sinus mucosa worth a shit,” said Ethan in a matter-of-fact tone, as he turned back to the small mirror and began applying the camouflage paint to his skin as well as the prosthesis.
Feeling somewhat embarrassed for his shameless gawking, John refocused his attention to his own preparations. The men paused momentarily as the sound of several gunshots far off in the distance broke the silence.
“John, are you sure about this? I mean this ‘mission,’ or whatever you want to call it, is an ‘assault.’ We aren’t soldiers, and those men aren’t revs. They are real, uninfected people,” said Reams. He was clearly struggling with the same issues John himself had when he thought about what they planned to do. Killing a rev was one thing, but killing an uninfected human, even ones as evil as the bikers, was an entirely different matter. John had deliberated on that from the moment he heard Ethan tell the story.
The idea of actually killing another living person made John feel physically ill initially, but the sensation proved fleeting. The more he thought about it, the less distinction he found between the revs and the men in that house. Both were clearly sick, albeit in very different ways, and both would waste no time in harming or killing them if given a chance. Much to his surprise, John actually began to hold the revs in higher esteem than the men in the house. At some point in their lives, he reasoned, both were ‘normal’ human beings, and at some point both transitioned to something much more nefarious. The difference, John surmised, was the bikers chose or, at the very least, accepted their truculent ways, while the revs truly had no say in the matter. Free will and the knowing disregard for everyone else—that’s what makes the bikers worse than the revs. As far as I can tell the revs don’t have any awareness of who they were before or what they are doing now. In that sense, they really aren’t much different than wild animals searching for food. That is why I have to go back to Hermitage to stop those men.
If there was a shred of doubt in his mind, the thought of his late wife, Rebecca, or his beautiful little girl, Ava, in the house with those miscreants completely eradicated it, leaving only a deadly resolve in its place.
Having discussed the matter with John, Reams’ concerns seemed appeased, and he returned to the business of readying his gear with an all-too-familiar murderous rage gleaming in his determined eyes.
Several hours later, the three men crouched in the forested area outside the walls of Hermitage Estates, farthest away from the house the bikers occupied. They were relieved they did not see any infected in the immediate vicinity, but they knew, based on Ethan’s account, that many revs were likely lying in wait. Much the same as John several days earlier, Ethan climbed the broad, flat branches of the tall red oak in order to attain a good vantage from which to observe the house. The ponderous tree towered high above the walls of Hermitage Estate, providing a bird’s eye view of the entire area to anyone who explored its upper branches. Lying prone, concealed by the diminishing canopy of the tree, Ethan eased out onto a branch and raised his binoculars. What he saw through the glass caused a conflicting mix of feelings to arise within him.
In the distance, he saw the charred remnants of the house he escaped from, as well as the house that the remaining members of the biker group occupied across the street. Drawn to the house like flies to shit, a large group of over fifty revs encircled the house, effectively laying siege to whomever or whatever was inside. This gave Ethan hope that someone inside the house was alive, though he had no way of knowing who it was. On the contrary, the sheer number of revs he was able to see from his vantage posed a significant logistical problem if they wished to use the element of surprise. His mind drifted to the horde he snuck through on the bridge, but he quickly pushed the thought of trying such a stunt again out of his mind. He was not sure it would work again, and this time, there would be the threat of gunfire from within the house.
Looking down to John and Reams’ position, he saw the two suppressed rifles they carried. While not silent, they were certainly much quieter than the hunting rifle he scavenged from the burning house. He estimated the distance to the house to be about two hundred and fifty yards, close enough for him to make consistent headshots with either rifle. Ethan went through the possible outcomes of this option as he continued to watch for signs of life through the binoculars. It was possible that he could thin the horde dramatically without alerting the people inside the house, particularly if he used the Tavor. The 5.56mm cartridge would be much quieter than the more powerful 7.62mm cartridge used by Reams’ rifle and would still be effective at that range. Even if they did not hear the report of the shots they were sure to notice the thinning of the crowd, as rev after rev fell dead with a gaping hole in the head. That might give the bikers the room they needed to escape. He thought it would be ideal to have a team on the ground ready to storm the house as a sniper provided overwatch. Unfortunately, he felt that he was the only one capable of providing effective sniper overwatch, and it w
as unacceptable to send only John and Reams into the house. Ethan dismissed the idea all together as he envisioned a new horde of revs congregating around the base of the tree, attracted by the muffled sound of the stationary suppressed gunfire.
After observing for about twenty minutes, Ethan finally caught sight of movement within the house. From his position, he saw light shining through the house where two windows on opposite sides of the house lined up. A shadow broke the beam of light before disappearing behind the walls of the home, leaving only the faint movement of a curtain hanging around the window. As it was bright outside, and there was no light within the house, it was difficult to tell who or what it was as the lighting conditions effectively masked any detail inside the house. The movement seemed far too quick and coordinated to be a rev, but if it was an uninfected person, he could not tell if it was the woman or one of the bikers. He gazed intently for several more minutes, and after seeing no further movement, descended from the tree to join the others.
As Ethan approached, John read the forlorn look on his face, and asked, “How’s it look?”
Ethan proceeded to tell the two men about the large group of revs amassed around the house, as well as the trace of movement he saw in the second story window. “I’m not going to lie, it looks pretty bad. I think someone is alive in the house based on the movement I saw and the fact that the revs haven’t dispersed, but I can’t tell who is alive in there. If we do this, it may become a seek-and-destroy mission rather than a rescue mission. I’ve thought about how best to approach the house, and the plans that seem best to deal with the revs pose significant issues as it relates to any hostiles in the house and vice versa,” said Ethan thoughtfully, pausing to gaze in the direction of the house before continuing. “I thought about picking the revs off from a distance with the suppressed rifles, but that would likely alert the occupants or give them the opportunity to escape. We could infiltrate the neighborhood and set up distractions such as the balloons, but who knows if something like that would be enough to draw their attention away.”