“You say that now,” John laughed, “but you just wait. If you thought Tank was a surprise, your mind’s just gonna explode when you see what's next.”
“What's with the zombie army, John?” I asked, ignoring his jovial taunt. He looked like I'd sucker punched him for a minute.
“You noticed that, huh?” John winked at me. “I'll tell you what – that was no easy task getting them all rounded up and placed like that. You have no idea how difficult it was. Plus, we lost three guys in the process of turning them. You gotta really pay attention when you're making zombies. One small distraction and the zom's got your fingers for a tasty snack, just chomping away. Then all that's left to do is wait to turn. God, can you imagine? I guess you can. From what I hear through the grapevine you weren't much different than Tank at one point after we parted ways, except for maybe you didn't get bit all to hell and have your eye eaten out of your skull while you were still alive. He's still pretty pissed off about it too, in case you didn't notice.”
“How could you do that to all these innocent people?”
“Innocent?” He cried out indignantly. “You know they kept zombie pits up in the hills where they made human sacrifices during the full moon, right? Besides, most of them were already walking around like zombies anyway, spouting all this religious mumbo jumbo and praising their great leader, a first class con artist with a sweet tooth for underage girls. You ask me, did I do these people a favor putting them out of their misery?”
“How are they out of their misery? You chained them to the damn trees!”
“I'm not gonna let you ruin it for me,” he said, shaking his head. “Not this time!”
We pulled up the dirt drive toward the Great Hall. There were armed men in every direction I looked. They'd cleared a section near the outdoor dining tables and set up a base camp of tents, like a military installation or an open-air prison. John pulled up and parked right in front of the main entrance to the building.
“Let's try this one more time. Xander, you are my guest,” John began. “I expect you to behave like a guest. If you get hostile with me or my men, if you try to interfere or escape, then I'm going to lose my temper and start cutting pieces off your pretty friend back there and feeding 'em to the royal zoms. Are we clear?”
“Yes,” I said without hesitation.
“Good,” John said, looking slightly relieved. “Sorry to be so short with you, but it had to be done. Now, on to your next round of reintroductions.”
“Who are the royal zoms?” I asked, almost not wanting to know the answer. “Can you tell me that at least?”
“I'll do you one better,” John grinned. “I'll let you see them in the rotting flesh.”
I got out of the Jeep and waited for Felicity to make her way out from between her terrifying escorts. She scurried across the flattened seat and into my arms. I held her tight, and she squeezed so hard the air in my lungs rushed out.
“What are we going to do, Xander?” she whispered in my ear. “They'll kill us both.”
“I don't know,” I admitted. “For now we've got to go along with whatever this is. What other choice do we have?”
“You coming or what?”
John stood holding the front door open.
“Yeah,” I said, pulling away from Felicity and taking her hand. “We're right behind you.”
“Ladies first,” John sweet-talked as he showed the way. Tank smiled.
When we walked in I expected to find something terrible, like a guy with a chainsaw waiting to cut us in half – or a full on torture chamber. What I didn't expect was that so little would have changed. The walls were still painted with depictions from the Bible. There was a man chained onto the throne wearing a plastic crown, like something a child would wear at a birthday party. By his side, chained to the wall, was a small woman with glossy black, matted hair. As we approached, he lifted his head and let loose a hungry roar that filled the room with a rotten stench. His consort lunged out at us, her arms outstretched with her twisted, bloody fingers scratched down to the bone in places. She stopped just short of us, the chain around her waist going taut as she snapped her gray, splintered teeth mere inches from our shocked faces. From behind us, I heard John laughing like someone had just told the funniest joke of all time. My heart beat in my chest so hard it hurt. I could taste my sudden fear, like I'd been sucking on a handful of warm, freshly washed pennies.
“Careful now,” John cooed. “You don't wanna get on the wrong side of the Lord. You do recognize him, don't you?”
“It's Bryan Crowe,” Felicity said in a small voice, “and his Alpha wife, Rowena.”
“We didn't think it was right that he had so many wives,” John interrupted, walking forward and using the muzzle of his handgun to push her snapping head back. “She was the most devoted of all his child brides, the one most willing to sacrifice herself for him. We thought it would be a shame to separate them. After all, we're not animals.”
Tank roared with laughter as Felicity turned and shot John a dirty look. I just shook my head. Bryan Crowe had finally gotten what he deserved, so why didn't I feel better about it?
“My new friends helped us broker a peace deal with the Unity Gang. After that, overrunning the barricades down past Santa Barbara was a piece of cake. Let's just say those Golden Dawn dudes never saw it coming. It was a slaughter! And just like that we rolled into the Promised Land, hallelujah!”
“Praise the Lord!” Tank said, looking up and shaking his hands high in mock faith.
“Me and the King here didn't quite see eye to eye,” John said. “No offense, Tank.”
“None taken, your majesty.”
“So you turned him and all his people into zombies?” I asked.
“That is an abbreviated version of events,” John sighed. “But I suppose it's factually correct. I tried bribing him at first. I thought he'd see how hopeless fighting us would be and that the instinct to save his own skin would override his devotion to his cult.”
“What did you offer him?” Felicity asked.
“Protection,” John explained. “For him and all his wives. He'd be relocated of course, so he wouldn't have to stick around and watch us go to work, but he'd be given blocks of his own prime real estate up north of Lompoc. It was a pretty sweet deal by anyone's standards, especially considering the alternative.”
“You tried to bribe him into letting you kill all his followers? You honestly thought that would work?” I couldn't help myself. It just seemed so ludicrous.
“Pretty much,” John agreed. “I figured a guy as egotistical and power hungry as Bryan would be willing to sell out his own mother to save his own backside. Why wouldn't he sell out a few loyal followers in the process and get set up for the rest of his life by the most powerful warlord on the West Coast? I honestly thought he'd appreciate my direct approach.”
“I can't believe he turned you down,” Felicity stated in disgust.
“That makes two of us, honey,” John said. I flashed him a glare that he ignored.
“It just doesn't make sense,” she continued. “Bryan was a very dangerous man, delusional and drunk with power, sure, but he wasn't stupid and he wasn't loyal. If anything, his little sacrifices proved that. I wonder what made him decide to stand behind his followers?”
“Oh see, that's where you've got it wrong,” John guffawed. “Yeah. I can see your confusion on that one. Bryan started out negotiations by giving us most of the zoms held in his pits. After that, he offered to give us nearly a third of his devotees to stay here, so he could stay in power.”
“That sounds like the Bryan Crowe I met,” I chimed in.
“He couldn't see the big picture,” John went on. “I kept trying to tell him that everything was gonna change, that it was out with the old and in with the new, but he just didn't want to hear it. In the end, he declared a holy war on my men and me. Didn't cost us a single soldier. These religious nuts were used to looking scary, flashing their steel for the intimidation factor
. Gunning down living people, well that's a different story.”
“You'd know all about it,” I mumbled.
“We put down a few of them and they fled like scared kids,” John bragged, looking more than a little pleased with himself. “It was sad really.”
“That's when you turned him and Rowena?”
“We had a little fun with him first, as you can see,” John winked at her. “I couldn't help myself. I'd tried to be generous and I even appealed to his greedy nature, but Bryan just kept throwing it in my face.
Just like I had, I thought as I turned to look at Bryan Crowe again. That could just as easily be Felicity and me. For all I know it's just a matter of time before it is.
I felt a cold chill race down my spine as I realized that at any moment the sweet tone could drain from John’s speech, and he could start torturing us to death.
“I'm surprised he didn't try to offer you some of his brides,” I said, trying to keep my teeth from chattering.
“He went the other way, started saying God would avenge him and that he was the second coming of Christ, whole lot of other rubbish too. We brought his wives in one at a time, and turned them while he watched. It wasn't until we got to this one that he seemed to come unglued. He said he'd never leave no matter what I offered him. I figured if he liked it here so much, the least I could do was honor his dying wish to never leave the Promised Land.”
The door opened, and one of the armed men walked in with another teen zombie and a small, nervous-looking child.
“Thanks, Haki,” John said. “How's the plan to get back our hygienically challenged, two-wheeled brethren coming along?”
“Already working on it, boss,” Haki said.
“Good. Hold up a minute. I might need you.”
The kid looked up at me with eyes full of tears. Immediately I recognized him. It was the face that had haunted all my worst nightmares for over a year now.
“Xander? Is that really you?”
“Sam,” I said, kneeling down to hug him as he darted into my open arms. “How is this possible?”
“Oh, I found him,” John said, taking the teen zombie by the chain and walking him over like a subdued pet pit bull. “Well, with a little help of course.”
“Is that Joel Parker?” I pointed to the teenage zom.
“What's left of him,” John clarified. “You're getting good at this. I guess after Tank, these two are pretty easy.”
“I don't understand.”
“No,” John understood. “How could you? Let me give you the short version so you'll be all caught up to speed.”
“He came up to Vandenberg and found me,” Sam sputtered.
“You wanna let me tell it, kid?”
“Sorry,” Sam said, looking timidly at his feet.
“How did you turn them all back?” I asked, growing impatient with the whole charade.
“Let's just say I've got connections on the inside,” John said. “After you left Tank for dead, I went back and found him. Took me five guys to get him back to New Lompoc. We kept him locked up in a tool shed for a while. I didn't know what I was going to do with him, to be honest. I just knew I couldn't leave him out with the rest of the monsters.”
“How noble of you,” Felicity sneered. He ignored her taunt.
“Some of my brothers from Special Forces had fought their way through the nightmare of war, only to get back Stateside and find that the whole world had gone to hell in a hand basket. These aren't the kind of guys used to being told what to do. Most of them have more kills under their belts than you've got hairs on your head. Let's just say they didn't plan on sitting back and letting a patchwork of weekend soldiers, and old guys too fat to fight their own battles, just boss them around. They're like me. They're not content to just reclaim the ruins of the world. They're more interested in what comes next.”
“Why don't I like the sound of that?” Felicity asked.
“So what does that have to do with how you brought these people back?” I demanded, still staring at the youngster, unable to believe it was really Sam.
“Let's just say I got friends in high places now,” John claimed. “These friends of mine have access to all sorts of things, including classified military documents on secret biological weapons-grade viruses and their antidotes. Turns out someone was just sitting on a whole load of anti-zombie juice, keeping it all to themselves. Now that's just selfish, if you ask me.”
“They have a good reason for not letting people know about it yet,” I insisted, but somewhere in the back of my mind my nagging doubts were beginning to return.
“You keep telling yourself that,” John chided. “You see, you think you're so different from me, but you're not...and neither is your brother. When push comes to shove, you manage to get what you need to survive no matter what the cost to other people around you. I can respect that. But then you walk around like you're better than everyone else, like your moral code somehow puts you above the rest of us. That's just hypocritical.”
“My brother is nothing like you!”
“You're right,” John laughed. “He used the antidote to save himself and his kid brother, then actively worked to hide the truth of its existence from the rest of us. Me, on the other hand, I'm more of what you'd call a man of the people. The first thing I did when I saw that the antidote worked on Tank was to track down that Parker kid. The other twin got his eggs scrambled, but this one here did okay.”
“But I saw them both go down in a hail of bullets,” I protested. “If you brought him back, he'd have bled to death.”
“His twin brother took most of the heavy fire. Joel here had a shattered femur and a bunch of bites. His right leg never did come all the way back, but other than that I had him looking like a shiny new penny for about a week. He told me a lot about you in that time, about how you'd all met up and what happened along the trek to New Lompoc, even how he blamed you for the death of his brother. He was even the one to find your little friend.”
“I went back to the house where you found me,” Sam explained. I stayed crouched down by his side and listened to him tell his sad tale. “I made it, Xander! I got all the way there and locked all the doors, but by then I was really sick. The last thing I remember was passing out on the sofa and having this horrible dream. I was so angry, but also terribly hungry. Joel was in my dream. But I didn't know it was Joel. I didn't recognize him until after I bit him.”
“Oh God,” Felicity moaned, putting her hand on my shoulder. “He turned him back again.”
“I didn't mean to hurt him,” Sam cried, looking guilty. “I didn't know what was happening. I…”
“He got a hold of him good, too,” John laughed. “Blood was spurting everywhere. It was disgusting. I blame the bum leg for him getting changed back to a flesh eater. Since then, Joel's been more like a mascot than anything.”
“It's okay,” I cooed at Sam. “It's not your fault.”
“I tried to apologize when I saw him later in the blue world,” Sam sputtered, his little eyes spilling tears out like a leaky faucet. “But by then, I was just a floating cloud and he was an angry wasp made out of bleeding lemons. He was too heavy to follow me up toward the light.”
“I don't recall seeing a light in my trip,” I said.
“It was so beautiful,” Sam insisted. “All I wanted was to live inside of it where there was no more pain or suffering.”
“Yeah,” John said, jumping in. “Truth is, we almost lost him. I think maybe giving him the whole dose was a little too much for a guy his size, but he made it through like a champ.”
“John said he was going to bring us all back together again,” Sam said, wiping his tears away. “He said he was part of a group of people who were going to fix the world and end the infection. Isn't that wonderful?”
“I'm glad we get to be together again, buddy,” I began, “but I'm not sure John and I want the same thing.”
“Why not? Don't you want things to be okay again?”
&
nbsp; “It's a little more complicated than that, Sam,” I sympathized, shaking my head. John had filled the kid’s head full of fantasies that justified him hurting innocent people. Had Sam not seen John's handiwork nailed to the trees around town?
“Actually,” John interrupted, “it doesn't have to be complicated. Trust me, I know how hard it can be to work with your sworn enemies. I never thought I'd see a truce between us and Unity Gang, but in the end it's worked out better than I ever could have imagined.”
“You're both murderers and thieves,” I spat. “You both enjoy killing and hurting other people. What's to argue about?”
“Look,” John said, growing impatient again. “There is an easy way to do this, and a hard way. I'd like to give the easy way a try first, despite your usual ungrateful attitude.”
“I will never work with you,” I said flatly.
“Haki, take young Sam back to his room,” John ordered.
“Yes sir,” Haki said, moving forward swiftly and pulling Sam back by his waist.
“Wait,” I cried out. “Where are you taking him?”
“Come to think of it, take Xander’s pretty friend along with the little mister to keep him company,” John instructed. I drew my sword.
“Not a chance,” I said, stepping between them.
“Now Xander,” John laughed, “I thought we talked about this.”
“She's not leaving my side,” I growled.
“No one will lay a finger on her while we're gone,” John promised. “I give you my word on that. You said you trusted my word, right? Isn't that how you got to keep your shiny toy there?”
“Xander,” Felicity said, gently touching my arm. “It's okay. I'll be okay.”
“I'm not leaving you,” I said, turning and staring into her pleading eyes.
“What other choice do we have right now?” Felicity asked.
I put my sword away. Tank chuckled. John gave him a smug look of satisfaction.
“Well now that we've got that settled,” John sang out, back to his usual cheery self. “Let's take a walk. I'll fill you in on the way.”
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