by mike Evans
Ellie shook her head. “No, sorry, that’s what I call them; well, that is what my group calls them. I left on my own, which as you can see, has ended up being a wonderful idea. Anyways, I left, and the area looked clear, but after a few minutes, I realized how horribly wrong I was.”
“Turned, huh? We didn’t give them names. Dad did, but he called everything assholes before the zombies came,” Tony said.
The man with the badge slapped him on the arm. “Watch your mouth, Tony. You can call me Al, or sir. We aren’t real formal around here. Be respectful, don’t steal, and throw in your share of the work; other than that we don’t ask for much.”
The other man held out a hand that came with a welcoming, genuine smile. “My name is Frank.”
Ellie shook his hand and then looked sick to the stomach. Frank said, “Did I squeeze to hard?”
“No, it isn’t you, sorry. It’s just that I knew someone named Frank; we were really close. He was a great man. It’s nice to meet you Frank, Al, Tony, and Allen, right?”
They all nodded. Al skipped any further pleasantries and asked flat out, “So, let’s get down to it, you got anyone looking for you, or are you going to need help to get back to where you belong? I assume you aren’t out on your own, given the state you are in and the fact you aren’t carrying much more than a day pack. You staying close to here?”
“I’ve been in the water for a while, and I'm cold as hell. You don’t have a blanket or a fire going that I could sit by for a bit, do you? Not too many doctors around nowadays. But I'm smart enough to know I need to warm up.”
Tony laughed. “Hey, we got a doctor, couple nurses to.”
Al put a hand on his son’s neck, giving it the lightest squeeze. “You want to show the perfect stranger any of the other wonderful amenities that we have here, Tony? You are lucky some days that you resemble your mother.”
“Look, I swear this was an accident. I don’t go about trying to find strangers on my own. It doesn’t always end up the greatest.”
“Whoa, hey, I don’t want you thinking of us as a threat in any way. Al give those guns back,” Frank said, holding out a hand that didn’t leave it open for any debate.
Al shook his head, not liking it in the least. He looked at the side of the rifle, finding the magazine release, and pulled back the charging handle. He put the gun around his shoulder, reloading the single bullet back in the magazine, and repeated the process with the pistol. He tucked the magazines in his rear pocket and handed both guns back to Ellie. “We can stay nice and friendly, right? You keep them empty until we figure out what you are doing.”
Ellie winced when she took the rifle with her bad hand. Al sighed; he looked like the gesture he was about to offer was something that personally put him through pain. “Did you want to see our doctor, sweetheart?”
“My name isn’t-” Ellie started.
Al cut her off. “If it ain’t ‘sweetheart’, then what the hell is it? I don’t think that it physically hurts you, now, does it?”
“I’m sorry, but respect is about the only thing that people still have left, and I hope that if I pass it off to others that I might see it come back my way. My name is Ellie. Like I said, I’m sixteen. I do have a group, I wasn’t thinking all that great, and I ran off without putting a lot of thought into it. I had a lot more gear about an hour ago, but things don’t always go according to plan.”
“So, Ellie, did you want to see our doctor or not? Mike is damn good at what he does. There’s been more than once where someone has been sick or snapped something, and he’s put it back right. Tony there can still walk because of him; fell off a second story ledge in the city. He’d been down for two days, and I was losing my mind. We found Mike, and that son of a bitch is worth his weight in gold. Or bullets maybe, those are probably worth more—not that we fire anything,” Al said.
“You have weapons here besides the pistol?”
“No concern to you. You want to have him take a look at it? I can have him come here if you don’t want to come into the camp,” Al said.
Frank stepped in, pointing. “Why don’t you just come with? There is a good chance we have a pair of shoes that’ll fit you up there. If you want to go it alone to get back to your people, we understand, but doesn’t make a lot of sense to not have someone perfectly capable look at your wrist and put something on those feet. You aren’t going to be comfortable for long, going around in socks. It’d be better than going back hurt to wherever you stay.”
Ellie looked down at her feet, wiggling her toes underneath muddy socks that had once been white, and nodded. She could call on her radio, she thought, had she not dropped the stupid thing. Everything about the day except for kissing Shaun goodbye had been shit so far. Ellie fought back a tear when the thought that that might have been the last kiss she’d ever get to share with him.
Frank said, “Hey, you do what you want, Ellie. We didn’t mean to upset you, I’m sorry.”
“It has been a shit day, excuse my language. I’d like to see this doctor you have, please. We have a nurse where I live, but there’s no reason to turn down legit care and a fresh pair of shoes, and maybe socks. I really would appreciate some new shoes; if I didn’t get rid of the ones I had, I would have been at the bottom of that river with the dead.”
Al rubbed at his eyes, nodding, then walked off. Ellie stood there, looking at the two boys and Frank. She couldn’t help herself. “He’s seems like a really nice guy. You guys have some issues so far?”
Frank said, “Ellie, I doubt there are many people you’ll ask that question to that aren’t going to say yes, unless they are lying or are the ones causing the trouble for others. We all tried making a go of it in the city when it first started. When food got low, we had to go for supplies or starve. We had to learn very quickly how to deal with these things. We had a few guns and were able to clear out one Wal-Mart. We’ve been outside of the city ever since.”
“You stayed outside in the winter, too?” she asked.
“We took everything we could from a Wal-Mart; especially food that wouldn’t spoil. It was a damn shame, leaving so much meat, but we didn’t have a way to keep it cold. We’ve been living off canned goods. We took two of their trucks and cut a hole up into the top of it, and it’s been our house through the winter.”
“You cut a hole in it?”
“We converted it to have a wood burning stove in it, sending the smoke out the hole. We learned layers and body heat pretty quickly. Lucky for us, there is plenty of wood in the forest to keep warm—not that the trucks did that great of a job keeping the heat in.”
“It sucked,” Allen said. “I still don’t know why we have stayed in Iowa this long. I keep telling them we need to hit Florida, or like, California, or anywhere that doesn’t have freezing temps three plus months a year.”
Ellie smiled, unsure how to answer that. Frank stepped back in front of the two boys. “Come on, if we don’t take you to Mike, then you’re going to lose your opportunity to see him. We can talk all you want while he takes a look at you.”
Ellie walked up a beaten path through trees that had been there longer than anyone in the camp had been alive. She saw very few groups of people. Most of the people resembled one another and appeared to be related. She thought of everyone at her own base and immediately felt guilty for asking whether something bad had happened.
Of course something bad had happened. There were dead everywhere in the city, and if that is where they started, obviously they suffered casualties. No one looked mean from what she could tell; they looked more curious than anything else. Ellie smiled politely to those who made eye contact with her. A man smoking a cigarette was holding a Red Cross medical box and smiling. He took the last few hits off the smoke, dropping it in the dirt and snuffing it out with his foot. “Good afternoon. I'm Mike. I hear you are a pistol. Let’s see if Al’s assessment is a little overboard; can’t say that it would leave me shocked.”
Ellie shrugged, thinking about
it. “He’s probably not all that far off. I’ve been called a smartass on more than one occasion, but I haven’t met many teenagers who aren’t.”
Frank pointed to the side of the truck. “You can put your gear down over there, if you want. Might do good to leave your charging handle open and let some air in that rifle; it’s probably a lot more wet on the inside than you know. You’re going to need to get it cleaned so you don’t have to worry about it rusting. You just make sure if you do, that we don’t do any test shots. And by we, I mean you.”
“So, you guys don’t do guns at all; why’s Al have one then?”
She didn’t think he was listening, and Al said, “Pretty simple deal, really. I can’t shoot a bow and arrow to save my life. Never have been able to, and I don’t trust them. When we borrowed what we needed from the Wal-Mart, we took all the bullets they had. I thank God that I just happen to shoot about the most boring caliber pistols in the world, so finding ammunition for it has gone pretty well. I’ve got a couple service pieces that I took with me from my station. The shit had officially hit the fan when I finally gave in and sought to find a safe place for me and the boy there.”
Tony nodded, thinking about his mom and how he had watched her being ripped from the truck as he tried to speed off to meet his dad, who had radioed them, telling the two of them to get out of Urbandale and to do it now. He’d made it through one intersection before one of the dead had leapt onto the hood of his mother’s truck and removed the safety glass with one pull. It’d gone free because it had a grip on his mother’s face and pulled her out of the truck. With the force it had yanked on her, it ripped the skin from her face, leaving nothing but jagged strips of flesh behind her. Allen had thought it would be the worst thing Tony would ever witness in his young life.
Mike interrupted, breaking Tony out of his trance. “You boys found her in the river, huh? So, what am I looking at, Ellie? You can call me Mike, or doc, I don’t really get too worked up over nicknames.”
Ellie held out her hand, and it had already begun to swell. He winced a little when seeing it and said, “I don’t have any x-ray equipment out here obviously, but we can do some real simple tricks to see how bad it might be.”
Mike squeezed lightly on her thin wrist. She responded by pushing him backwards with her good hand, yelling, “Shit, that hurts!”
Mike nodded and held up his hands, walking back towards her again in a non-threatening manner. “Okay, we can say that you probably are hurt, not a surprise. Now, I want you to try rotating your wrist like this for me, could you do that?”
Ellie tried but her wrist screamed in protest. “I'm sorry it hurts, I'm not going to do it.”
Mike pulled out a machete, weighing it in his hand. “I'm going to have to cut it off I think. You might want to think of a happy place.”
Ellie’s face fell into a state of shock. The first thing she did was look at her pistol, which she knew was empty, but also was well aware where at least five different magazines were on her body, and where a ridiculous amount more were in her go bag.
Frank saw the look on her face and yelled, “Damn it, Mike, you realize you’re about the only one that thinks that is funny. Did you learn that in Compassion for Patients 101? Damn it. Ellie, he’s kidding. He is weird, probably always has been. That, or he’s an asshole, it’s hard to tell. I’ve been trying to figure it out since we met him, it just never seems to come to me.”
“Real effing funny, Mike. So, what’s really wrong with it?” Ellie mumbled.
“There’s no bone sticking out of your skin, and the swelling isn’t a horrible thing. I'm going to wrap it tight with some ace bandage. I want you to change it out every two or three days for a while. If it isn’t better by then, I want you to come back and see me, and I’ll make you a cast somehow. I’ll find something around here that we have that I’ll be able to wrap it tight with, and you’ll have to make do with it being like that for a month or two, depending on how quick you heal.”
“I won’t be here in a few days. I just need you guys to point me in the right direction, or give me a radio, and I’ll be off. There are people that can come get me, I just need to make the call. I promise, I’ll get out of your hair. I'm sure the nurse where we are will have something he could use to take care of my arm if it escalates to that. I really appreciate you taking a look at it, though. I'm quite happy that I don’t have to worry about it needing to be amputated. Those dead are hard enough to deal with; the last thing I want to do is worry about getting through all of this hell with a disability.”
Mike knelt down in front of her, opening the red cross case and pulling out an oversized roll of ace bandage.
In the meantime, Frank took a better look at the hardware Ellie was carrying, and said, “Can I ask you where in the hell you got something like this rifle at, Ellie? I mean, this is a serious gun for someone your age—for someone any age. We don’t have anything like this in our camp. We took what we could from Wal-Mart, but they didn’t have a ton of weapons that were useful there. There’s a reason why most people make fun of shopping at Wal-Mart; most of their stuff is shit. I mean besides what they sell for long guns. Most all the bows and crossbows are a bit of a joke. I don’t know how long they'll last,” he explained. “We’ve gotten pretty efficient with them, but I worry that, at some point, we are going to need something heavier. I can’t believe that we haven’t had more issues out here than we have.”
“Issues, with people, or the dead?” Ellie asked.
“The dead. We don’t see many people. It was half the reason that we set this spot up so far out here. It is too dangerous in the city. I know there are probably survivors, but we tried the gun route and got nothing but those freaks coming after us. We just kept moving out into the middle of nowhere until we were safe. They are stronger, faster, and maybe the only thing they aren’t is smarter than us. They’ve got almost every advantage,” Frank said.
Al interrupted. “I put two bullets in one's chest on the first day, when those things came from what seemed like nowhere. When they came out, it didn’t matter what I did, you couldn’t stop them. I saw more men and women get taken out on that day than anything I’ve ever seen in a movie. It was a fucking nightmare. I ran over one with my car, ripping its arm off and I probably bounced two feet in the air. When I looked behind my squad car, I saw that it had already gotten up and was running after us with its arm spraying blood everywhere, and with half of its skull crushed in. The only positive thing is that enough of us got out of the city before all shit hit the fan. The only time we went back in, was to try to get whatever we could for supplies. If we hadn’t taken those semi-trucks, then we would have frozen to death. We never would have made it this long without shelter.”
“We have been very thankful to have a roof over our head as well,” Ellie said.
“A roof?” Frank questioned. “Where exactly are you staying at, Ellie?”
Ellie wasn’t sure if she should answer. Frank put her worries at ease. “Look, Ellie, if we were trouble, we would have let you just keep floating by. Or taken you in, stole your shit, and shot you in the head, then let you fall back into the river. However, did we do that? No, we took you in, got a doctor to look at your wrist, and gave you back your guns. If this is what everyone where you are staying carries, then I don’t think that we would be much of a threat to you—especially with our bow and arrows.”
“Sorry, it’s just that the last time we took in a group, one of them turned on us and let in a group of guys that wanted nothing but to kill everyone where we lived. Out of probably a hundred people, we maybe had a dozen or so survive. Some of our best were off base getting supplies to make the home even better. By the time they got back, it was pretty much over. We’d taken out those that came and went, and unleashed hell on them in return.”
“Base?” Al asked.
“I just mean our base of operations, you know where we live.”
Al nodded slowly. “So, you aren’t talking about Camp Dod
ge that’s only ten miles or so from here?”
Ellie shrugged. “Just make sure you’ve got an invitation if you come. We aren’t quite as receptive to company as we once were.”
“We aren’t trying to come anywhere or take anything else that anyone has claimed,” Frank cut in.
“Jesus, when was that?” Tony asked, referring to Ellie’s description of the massacre.
“A little less than a month ago. If you heard what sounded like a war, with tank shells and explosions, that was it. We took care of them though,” Ellie replied.
“Base of operations, huh, Ellie?” Al said.
“Are you kidding me? Yeah, we heard it; you guys shook the ground for miles. I mean, miles. Like, we thought God had finally come down to take care of these things. Of course, that wasn’t the case,” Frank said.
“Be thankful you didn't have to deal with these guys. If you only had the bows, and a couple rifles and shotguns going for you, then there wouldn’t have been much of a fight on your part. No offense, of course. But these guys seemed like Class A rednecks and knew their way around a gun just fine. Anyways, I doubt you guys will have to worry about them. At least, I wouldn’t think you will. But who knows what the rest of society is like now? It’s been a year; a long damn year.”