Badlands Trilogy (Book 3): Out of the Badlands

by Brian J. Jarrett

  The hammer clicked against an empty chamber. He grabbed the second rifle and glanced down at the soggy box of ammunition. He’d never make it that far. Seemed a shame to waste good ammo.

  Terry lifted the second rifle and felt the world swim around him, like a room being turned on its side. His vision went dark and then slowly returned. He lifted the rifle again, pointing it toward movement. He pulled the trigger again and again, bringing down the approaching carriers.

  The magazine emptied quickly and Terry tossed the spent rifle onto the rooftop. Lightning illuminated the scene before him, revealing two dozen bodies lying on the rooftop, dark blood pooling around them as the rain pelted their corpses.

  “Got ya, fuckers.”

  He opened one of the boxes of ammo to reload the rifle, but the rifle had become too heavy to lift. He dropped it and his arms fell to the side, also too heavy to lift. He wished he’d lasted longer, but he’d bought his friends a good head start. Hopefully enough time.

  Carriers growled from the shadows as more figures stalked along the rooftop, but Terry couldn’t move. He was tired. Very, very tired. Sleep called to him and he wanted it. All he needed to do was to close his eyes.

  The world swam around him again, growing dark. He didn’t fight it. He closed his eyes, succumbing to the siren call of sleep, the Big Sleep this time. The Dirt Nap. He was just fine with that. It’d been a hard life anyway. He deserved a break.

  Terry drifted away into darkness as the rain came down hard, washing away the blood that pooled around his lifeless body.

  Chapter Ninety-Three

  The fire escape steps led to a platform on each floor, large enough for most of the group to stand upon. They descended the floors as quickly as they could, listening to the crackling of gunfire erupting from the rooftop. Floor by floor they went until they arrived at the first floor platform. There the final section of steps leading to the ground had been removed.

  “Where are the rest of the steps?” Trish yelled over a thunderclap.

  “Probably removed years ago,” Ed said. “To keep kids from climbing on the rooftop.”

  Ed sized up the drop to the ground. Ten feet remained between them and the ground. “I’ll go first, then Jasper.”

  Emily handed Ed one of the rifles she and Terry had found inside the building. He slung it over his shoulder, wincing at the pain. He took a deep breath and jumped to the ground below, tucking into a roll when he landed. His ankles hurt, but nothing broke.

  That didn’t compare to the fire in his shoulder from the bullet Alice Sappington had placed there.

  He screamed, biting down hard and pushing through the blinding pain.

  “You okay?” Jasper called.

  “Come on!” Ed yelled.

  Jasper followed, arriving onto the ground unscathed. Four stories above them, carriers howled into the night.

  Ed scanned the grounds and saw no carriers. That wouldn’t last for long once the creatures figured out their meal was outside the building and not inside it. He motioned toward the rest of the group.

  Emily came next, landing hard and letting out a sharp cry. Jasper ran to her and lifted her to her feet. She winced as she put weight on her ankle. “It’s okay,” she said, hobbling along.

  “Are you sure?” Jasper asked. “Oh, yeah,” he added. “EMT. I forgot.”

  Trish came next, landing like a gymnast. She stood quickly, drenched from the rain and muddy from the ground. “Hand me that rifle,” she said to Ed. “Your shoulder’s busted and you won’t be able to shoot.”

  Ed handed her the rifle without an argument. The remaining members of the group jumped, one by one. Ed winced as the pregnant women hit the ground, wishing they had some other way, but knowing they didn’t. Jasper helped break their fall as much as possible, but they still hit hard.

  Black smoke belched out of the main building as flames licked through the windows. Carriers shrieked from inside and Ed hoped the fire was having its way with them. “Over there,” he said, pointing to the second, smaller building sitting behind the main sanitarium. A hundred yards of open ground lay between them.

  They ran toward the second building. Jasper supported Emily as they walked, relieving her aching ankle. They closed the distance as quickly as they could, putting a dozen then two dozen yards behind them and the burning sanitarium.

  Four figures approached out of the darkness in front of them, standing between them and the safety of the second building.

  “I see them,” Trish said. She knelt, sighting in the rifle on the approaching figures. They broke into a run. Trish took a moment and then pulled the trigger six times. The figures fell at different intervals mid-run, collapsing onto the wet ground. “Go!” she yelled.

  They ran, the enormous sanitarium burning behind them. Thunderclaps roared in the night sky above them as the storm continued to rage. A few moments later they stood before the main entrance to the smaller building. Ed pulled on the door handle and was not completely surprised to find it locked.

  “Shit,” Jasper said. “What the hell do we do now?”

  “Look for a window,” Ed said. “Or any other way we can get inside.”

  Jasper had just begun to search when the door opened.

  Standing in the doorway Ed saw Zach and Jeremy. He hugged them both hard, so relieved and happy that he no longer felt the gunshot wound in his shoulder.

  Chapter Ninety-Four

  They spent the night in the second building. Using the candles they’d found, they located an old painter’s tarp bunched up in the corner of another room. Though dirty and old, it served well as a blanket for the group while they hung their soaking wet clothes to dry. The storm continued to rage for another hour or so while the acrid smell of smoke from the fire next door filled the air.

  Emily stemmed the blood flow from Ed’s shoulder wound, but there was little she could do until she had some respectable supplies.

  They waited out the night in the room under the tarp, sleeping in shifts. They saw no one else with guns that night inside the second building. They kept the rifles and Trish’s knife ready, just in case.

  Outside, the carriers screeched, their violent calls piercing the night as Ed held his sons and Trish tightly, the four of them reunited against the considerable odds. They didn’t talk; there would be plenty of time for sharing stories the following day, when the shadows weren’t so dangerous and the world didn’t belong to monsters.

  Tomorrow, decisions would have to be made. Tomorrow, they would have to deal with Terry’s death. Ed would have to figure out what to do with more than a dozen new people now sleeping in the same room with them that night. Although the remaining journey and the choices he would have to make loomed over him, Ed could only think of how lucky they were to still have each other. All other things came second.

  He drifted off to dreamless sleep alongside his family.

  * * *

  The following morning they awoke to a day of cloudless blue skies. The sun burned bright in the sky, chasing away the shadows. They built a fire outside the building, hanging their clothes on a makeshift line while they watched smoke drift out of the sanitarium’s windows. The massive torrent of water provided by the storm had slowed the fire’s progress, extinguishing the worst of it. Only a few isolated fires still burned as the charred mass smoldered. Much of the building remained intact, a testament to the old world of construction, before fiberglass and wood replaced concrete and steel.

  The bodies of dead carriers lay strewn about on the grounds surrounding the building. Many had jumped to their death from the burning building, others died from bullet wounds inflicted by Ed and the group. Either way, dead was dead, and Ed like them that way.

  When their clothes had dried, Ed and Jasper took two of the rifles with them and walked around to the front of the building to retrieve the vehicles and their precious supplies.

  “We should stay here for a while,” Ed said. “We need a new plan and I’ll be honest, I don’t have one yet
.”

  “Things have changed,” Jasper replied. “All those kids Chloe and Sam found. And the women? What the hell are we going to do with two pregnant women?”

  “I’m hoping your girlfriend can help us with that.”

  Jasper smiled. “She’s pretty good, isn’t she?”

  “I like her,” Ed replied, smiling. “I’ll like her even more once she gets my shoulder fixed up.”

  “She will.”

  “She might just be good enough for you,” Ed said.

  “She’s not exactly a damsel in distress, but maybe that’s not what I was really looking for anyway,” Jasper said. He paused, his face becoming serious. “She’s upset about Terry.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I told her not to beat herself up over it. She did what she could.”

  “We all did.”

  “It was a mess, for sure. Who the hell were those people running this place?”

  “Monsters,” Ed said. “No other explanation for it.”

  “I’m glad they’re dead.”

  They rounded the corner of the main building and Jasper stopped. He shielded his eyes as he stared into the distance. “What the hell?”

  Ed looked past the vehicles and stared, open-mouthed and at a loss for the proper words to describe what he saw.

  Hundreds of carrier bodies littered the parking lot in front of the building, lying in the hot sun.

  “Ed, what is this?”

  Ed shook his head. He loaded a round into the chamber of the rifle, wincing at the dull pain in his shoulder. “Let’s have a look.”

  They walked out into the parking lot, past the vehicles, rifles ready, but pointed at the ground. Around them the white, muscled bodies lay in contorted positions on the ground.

  “Are they dead?” Jasper asked.

  “They look it.”

  “But they weren’t shot,” Jasper said. “No wounds or even any blood that I can see.”

  Movement caught Ed’s eye and he swung around, raising the rifle. A carrier twitched on the ground beside him, its mouth opening and closing, revealing grotesque fangs. Its chest rose and fell as it struggled to breathe.

  “That damn thing is still alive,” Jasper said.

  “Just barely.” Ed looked around the parking lot and saw a few other carriers moving slightly. But only a few.

  “What the hell could cause this?” Jasper asked. “They couldn’t have just up and died, could they?”

  “I don’t know anything for sure anymore.”

  “There are so damn many of them.”

  “Let’s get these cars and get back to the others,” Ed said. “We need a meeting.”

  * * *

  They gathered in front of the smaller building after some formal introductions. Ed couldn’t remember all the names of the people they’d found; nearly a dozen children and three women, all held captive by the human monsters who’d almost killed him and his sons. Surely there’d be time to share stories and get to know each other, but for now they needed a plan.

  Ed suggested his idea to stay put until they figured out just what was going on with the carriers and until everyone had time to recuperate.

  “I’m with Ed,” Emily said to the group.

  “There are some supplies in the smaller building,” Jim said, his manner of speech more indicative of an adult than an eleven year old boy. “Stuff they stole from people they killed. Stuff they collected from other places too.”

  “Are we still going to California?” Sam asked. “I mean, ultimately.”

  “I’m not even thinking that far out,” Ed said. He motioned toward the destruction and carnage around them. “All this has changed everything.”

  * * *

  The women and the children talked and a story began to form. The men with the guns had been a small family; Red (a.k.a. “Daddy”), his three sons and a few other men who Red considered to be surrogate sons. They’d been living in the sanitarium for a number of years, ambushing unsuspecting people on the road, killing the men and taking the younger women and children. They killed women not of child-bearing age.

  Red had attempted to breed the women with himself and his sons, but his attempts hadn’t been entirely successful. Two still births and two active pregnancies. Janet and Kathy—the two pregnant women—remained distant and mostly non-verbal. Lisa, who was not pregnant, offered up more information. Ed treaded gently with the women, considering the loss of their friend Denise on top of the trauma they’d endured at the hands of Red and the others.

  They set to work unloading the vehicles and setting up a room inside the second building. As it turned out, Building Two had been used for administrative purposes during its heyday, housing offices for the doctors as well as the clerical staff to support them. Most of the contents of the building had been long since removed and the entire operation appeared to have been abandoned for at least twenty years before the first case of the virus showed itself.

  After canvassing the entire building, Jasper and Emily ran across a room full of collected supplies. Sleeping bags, clothes, canned and dried foods, matches, kerosene, toilet paper and more. They also found rooms containing beds, dressers and other items. Even posters on the walls. By all appearances Red and his boys had used the second building for their base of operations, living there while they kept the women and the children in the sanitarium as slaves.

  The children directed Ed and the others to the back of the second building where they showed off the garden they maintained. There the children had been forced to farm potatoes, corn, tomatoes, carrots, peas and a handful of other vegetables. More searching turned up seeds, hundreds of them, collected from prior harvests and kept for later use.

  After a full day of inventory and exploration, the group turned in for the night, distributing their numbers into multiple rooms inside the administrative building. Smoke from the sanitarium still tinged the air, but the bulk of the flames appeared to have died out. Carriers called out in the night, as had become the norm, but on this night they sounded different to Ed. Desperate; pained, even.

  Exhausted, he drifted off to sleep, alongside Trish and the boys.

  That night he dreamed of Sarah.

  In the dream she was smiling.

  Chapter Ninety-Five

  The days accumulated as Ed and the others inventoried the rest of the compound. They found a basement below the administrative building containing Red’s true arsenal: more than two dozen rifles, ten pistols, four shotguns along with bows, knives and more. Even a sword. Hundreds of rounds of ammunition accompanied the find. Red and his boys had been busy, for sure.

  They ventured back into the main sanitarium after a few days, finding the secondary cache of weapons completely destroyed by the fire. Most of the building had been gutted by the flames, leaving behind only charcoal and the blackened remains of carriers.

  A week passed. The children instructed the adults on how to harvest the garden, having had a strict regimen beaten into them by Red. This time, however, they worked willingly and freely. They played together outside during the day and slept in the same room at night. Ed had begun to get to know most of them, but a few remained shy. He didn’t force it.

  Lisa, the only woman held prisoner who was not pregnant, began opening up. She and Trish became quick friends, both having survived similar ordeals. Kathy and Janet began to come around, but Ed figured it would be some time before they opened up, if they ever did.

  Each night the carriers came out, howling and screeching their tortured calls to one another and every morning Ed and the others found more bodies. Dozens more died each night, the fresh bodies lying alongside those who’d expired earlier. After three days the bodies began to rot, filling the air outside with the stench of death.

  Ed thought it was the most wonderful smell he’d ever known.

  Night after night the sounds of the carriers lessened until by the seventh day the night grew silent. The bodies stopped accumulating and the rotting began in earnest, filling the
air outside with a putrid stench that clung to their clothes. They retrieved as much gasoline as they could from the idle cars nearby and while the fuel wasn’t fit to burn in an engine it turned out to be tremendously effective for burning bodies. The charred flesh provided its own terrible smell, but once the task had been completed the air around them became breathable once more.

  On the seventh day, with the bodies now charred piles of ash and chunks of bone, Ed sat on the front steps of the administrative building, surrounded by Trish, Jasper, Emily, Sam and Chloe. Lisa joined them while Janet and Kathy supervised the children. Zach and Jeremy played with the other children, smiles on their faces as they remembered what it was like to be kids again. Ed smiled as he watched them play.

  “The carriers are all dead, aren’t they?” Trish said.

  “I don’t know,” Ed replied. “But the nights sure are quiet now.”

  “They’re gone,” Jasper said.

  “We don’t know that for sure,” Chloe said.

  “Maybe not, but when I went out for that gas to burn the bodies I saw hundreds more, all dead. None of them even twitch anymore.”

  “What could be killing them?” Lisa asked. “Another virus?”

  “That would be ironic,” Emily said, eliciting a chuckle from the group.

  “They didn’t look sick though,” Sam said. “It’s like they just dropped dead from out of nowhere.”

  “What if…” Jasper trailed off.

  “Go ahead,” Ed said.

  “No, it’s dumb.”

  “We won’t know that until you say it. Go on.”

  Jasper looked down at the floor, as if gathering the courage to continue. “I know it’s crazy,” he began, “but what if this is all part of a plan?”

  “What do you mean?” Trish asked.

  “I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. You do that when you spend a lot of time alone. Anyway, I always thought it was weird that the virus could spread so fast. I mean, it took no time for it to go worldwide. Do you remember when it first broke and it was all anybody on TV was talking about?”