Anyone already inside and acting strangely at all was immediately ‘put out of the camp’ as it were. Tegan lost two of his men and some of the construction crew to this policy.
In spite of the Sickness, the work on the mansion progressed and at last the project came to successful completion. The Flowers family and company were ready to face whatever was coming. Or so they thought.
They didn’t wait long. Three weeks after the compound was finished, three weeks into the boring routine of waiting, the world exploded into madness. The shock of the undead arriving at their gates was so profoundly terrifying that it immediately broke the weakest minds and severely tested the strongest.
The first few days, two of the men committed suicide. The ladies of the house were unbearable in their fear and Mr. Flowers was outraged beyond reason at some type of betrayal he perceived to have come from whoever had been feeding him information from the beginning.
He called Tegan and a handful of his best men into a meeting were they planned a recon mission into Minneapolis for the next day. They would have gone forward with it too but as luck would have it that was the night Violet did her disappearing act.
Over the next several days Tegan had the privilege of watching Henry Flowers, a man he respected and had come to love, devolve into madness. Flowers got it in his head that Danny Swanson was responsible for Violet’s disappearance. His sole focus was getting into Bill Swanson’s highly secured compound to question the boy. Of course, the Swansons were not interested in allowing any such interrogation of their only son.
Tegan’s world turned into chaos, conducting dangerous and fruitless search missions for Violet, fighting zombies when they got in the way and acting as an ineffective negotiator with the Swansons. Against his will, he became a key player in what was quickly on its way to becoming a bizarre and needless blood feud.
Men were lost to the zombies and new men were found to replace them. These were strangers to Tegan brought in by Flowers on a few of his crazy solo search missions to take up arms in preparation for war with his true mortal enemies, the Swansons.
The new guys were brought in two or three at a time. Tegan imagined Flowers out there desperately searching for Violet who had to be long dead. Instead of finding her, he found and recruited small groups of survivors to take up his cause. Their payment was a place in the compound with all the food and ammunition they would need. It may not seem like much but it’s everything when a person’s sole purpose is just to survive to see another sunrise. Plus Flowers could be persuasive as hell. Before long, several new men came to live in the compound including the man who would become their de facto leader, the man George would come to know as the cowboy hat guy. His God-given name was Lance Smith.
Where Tegan was a creature of rigid discipline and self-control, Lance was laid back and smooth like peanut butter. He was a filthy snake but nobody could see it except for Tegan. It wasn’t long before Lance had the ear of Henry Flowers who had been spending less and less time at the mansion.
Tegan hated Lance from the start and that hatred grew like a living organism as he watched him gradually take control over portions of the mansion and its operations. In time, the compound became a madhouse, working its way toward an epic meltdown. Organization and communication broke down as the house became divided into two camps, Team Tegan and Team Lance.
Tegan wanted to maintain control over the supplies so he moved his men and the Flowers women into the basement and the pole barn at the second site a block away. The women were happy to follow Tegan because Lance’s men were pigs and just scary people in general.
Said pigs were left to occupy the second floor of the house. Of the Flowers family, only Henry maintained his residence up there, staying in his office as though everything in the house was business as usual.
Said house became a nasty place of filth and violence which enraged Tegan but Flowers turned a blind eye to it. He refused to let Tegan take the house back cautioning that when things with the Swansons escalated, they would need every available man to fight.
That’s all the old man could think about, the goddamned Swansons.
The whole ordeal was mind-numbing and pointless to Tegan with such bigger fish to fry as he watched the tides of undead roll in every night and scream at the wall.
His plan was to stick it out until he couldn’t take it anymore. Then he would kill Lance and hit the road in search of sanity somewhere else. Maybe he could volunteer and get himself inside the magical, electrified city of Minneapolis. Though he knew that was a long shot, no one they’d encountered had been in or out since May and the city was shrouded in mystery.
Until then, he boiled his duties down to three, the first was to keep the twins from being hurt or savaged by the lunatics occupying the second floor, the second was to keep the zombies out of the compound and the third was to try to get Henry Flowers to see reason about their quickly eroding situation.
This last one he marked as an abject failure thus far and he wasn’t happy about it.
Chapter 36
“The Stab Felt Around the Neighborhood”
“I killed that boy, Danny,” he told her, his eyes misting slightly. Shit, he thought, a grown man shouldn’t cry.
“How’d you do it?” she asked in a monotone voice.
“I stabbed him in the stomach over and over again.”
“What did he do?”
“He cried and begged me to stop, until he couldn’t make a sound.”
“Did my dad see?” she asked.
“He asked me to do it and watched until it was done.”
“You did the right thing,” she said as she played her fingers across his scruffy jawline.
That was his memory. The one he held onto when the boy’s face wouldn’t leave his mind. Not the conversation but the touch. The memory of those fingers and their soft caress was what got him through night after sleepless night since he’d sold his soul to Henry’s stupid crusade.
After days of ineffective attempts to talk to the boy Danny about what happened with Violet, it had been Tegan’s idea to draw the boy out using Daisy as bait.
She was older than Violet but with the right clothes, the bad lighting and the chaos, she made more than a passable resemblance.
It was genius Henry had told him, of course it would work.
It did work but not according to the agreed upon plan. They were only going to kidnap him. Ask him some questions, see if he knew anything about where Violet had gone. But that’s not what happened.
They scouted for a few days while their men provided distraction around the massive walled condo compound. They watched the boy and his mother retreat to the big house on the bluff three nights in a row. There had to be another way in, they wagered, aside from the main gate that was so fiercely guarded. It had to be up behind the man-made bluff where zombies had little chance of going. An escape route, a secret passage, something.
Henry knew there had to be a secret way inside, he’d consulted on the construction and strongly suggested to Bill that he build an escape hatch of some kind, like Henry’s tunnel.
Sure enough they eventually found it, a door hidden in the wall up on the bluff locked from the inside. Leave it to Bill Swanson to ensure only his immediate family had access.
So they set their trap and waited. Daisy would stand on the hill across the moat where she would be visible from the back of the house. From there she would call out Danny’s name in an eerie imitation of Violet’s voice that Tegan noted always made Henry flinch.
Three nights this went on without result, as men died by gun or zombie on the other side of the compound. Then finally her call was answered by a furtive hesitating voice.
“Violet?” he called out softly from his side of the wall. He could be seen in the yard straining for a closer look at the woman he thought was his soul mate.
“I’m here,” Daisy replied.
“Where’ve you been?” Danny pleaded softly, heartache choking up his words.
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And so the trap was sprung, Danny was done for after the first step he took to answer Daisy’s siren call. They talked a while longer through the door as Daisy drew the noose tighter. Tegan couldn’t breathe he was so stressed out.
But then that door unlocked and the relief was almost physical. They charged in like demons, knocking a petrified Danny to the ground in shock.
“Whe-where’s Violet?” the boy stammered.
Henry grabbed him around the neck and shook him like a rag doll. His face a red rictus of snarling rage.
“SHE’S FUCKING DEAD YOU LITTLE WHORESON!!!”
He started slapping the boy’s face as Danny cried and stammered a guilty apology.
“YOU LEFT HER TO DIE ALONE!!!” he screamed into the night.
That’s when Tegan understood. This had never been about kidnapping or questions. This had been about revenge and bloodlust. A fucked up sort of eye for an eye.
Daisy had shrunk back to the doorway in shock, the other men stood around not knowing what to do. The screaming and shouting had drawn attention. Lights in the big house were turning on, people shouting in confusion and panic.
Danny’s mother appeared on the deck attached to the upper level of the house. She had no weapon but a mother’s fury as she starting running down the steps to help her son.
Henry saw her coming, almost like he planned for it. He tossed Danny to the ground in a heap where he lay moaning and caught Marcy Swanson in a stifling bear hug before she could even try to claw his eyes out.
“Good timing, you fucking bitch,” he snarled into her ear. “Glad you made the show. You get to see what we do to nut-less cowards who let their girlfriends go off and die alone.”
She thrashed in his arms like a wild animal, even managed to bite him once. Henry adjusted his grip and began choking her until she went still. Tegan thought for a moment that he’d killed her but no, he could see tears in her eyes as she looked at her son.
“Tegan, take your knife and gut that boy.”
Marcy Swanson managed another partial scream until Henry choked it off.
Tegan froze and looked at Henry in dazed confusion.
“Shut that fucking hole in your face and do what I said,” Henry hissed.
Tegan took a halting step toward the boy as Mrs. Swanson started mewling in Henry’s arms. Time was running out, the Swanson Calvary would be here soon.
He drew his knife and another from a sheath on his boot. He wouldn’t kill an unarmed man in cold blood. The extra knife he tossed at Danny’s feet. The boy looked at it like it was a scorpion and didn’t move to pick it up.
“This is gonna happen either way,” he said quietly to the boy in a shaky voice. “At least this way you have a chance.”
With a shaky hand Danny grabbed the knife, and rose on unsteady feet, tears streamed down his face but he made no sound. Tegan gave him room to make himself ready, he would give the boy the first move.
When that move came it wasn’t a lunge or a stabbing motion but a two-handed roundhouse like he was swinging a broadsword instead of a three-inch knife.
Tegan stepped under the swing and stabbed Danny in the belly. Then twice and a third time as Danny started crying and begging but Tegan didn’t stop until Danny was a silent wet heap on the ground at Tegan’s feet.
Out of breath and panting Tegan looked from the boy’s sightless eyes to his mother’s grief stricken face. She was no longer struggling, no longer crying, she just hung there limp in Henry’s arms.
Henry was smiling and whispered something into her ear. He gently kissed the top of her head as he let her sink to her knees.
“Time to go,” he said as he sprinted past Tegan for the secret door.
At first he didn’t move. He was empty. Gone was the rage-filled frustration he’d poured into stabbing the almost helpless young man.
As guilt crushed his soul, he watched Marcy Flowers crawl to her son and pull his mangled body into her arms. Her mournful wail would be etched on his heart for eternity. He would never forget it, he would never forgi…
He was being tugged back toward the door. It was Daisy. She was crying but trying her best to move him toward the door. People were coming, guns were firing.
Pausing at the door, Tegan and Daisy looked back for one more glimpse at the tragedy they had caused. Bill Swanson was holding his wife who was begging him to fix Danny, her baby.
But on the bluff, backlit by the moon, stood a wraith in a silken nightgown. Tessa Swanson’s eyes were steely lasers that tracked Tegan and Daisy to the wall. Eyes full of silent promises of murder and vengeance.
Tegan pushed Daisy through the door and they began their hasty retreat. Shame jolted him with every step and he vowed to be done with this foolishness. But that was a vow he’d soon break, for the war between the Flowers and the Swansons had only just begun.
Chapter 37
“The Wages of Sin”
It was Rosie, of all people, who kept Tegan from losing his mind after the killing of Danny Swanson. When she learned what he’d done in the name of her missing sister’s honor she began fawning over him like a crushing school girl.
Within reason that is, her default mode was to be meaner than a sideways turd but that had kind of grown on Tegan as well. She was rapidly becoming the full package in his eyes.
Tegan noticed Daisy wasn’t taking things very well. She had resolutely avoided almost everybody since the night they got back. She had taken to spending most of her time sleeping or reading novels, westerns of all things, on her little cot in corner of the basement. Tegan thought she might have gotten some drugs from Lance or one of his sleazy men. When he did see her, she was loopy, emotional and out of it.
“Whatever gets her by, baby,” Rosie told him one night. “It is the end of the world after all.”
But he noticed Rosie tried to keep her from the brink as well. Dressing her in clothes that matched her own, braiding their hair like they were little girls again. She even insisted on insane fieldtrips with Tegan and her sister to keep them both from brooding. Tegan thought it was a strange way to cope but he had enough on his plate to worry about. Besides, he was happy to be anywhere with Rosie.
It wasn’t long after Danny’s death, that the Swanson camp retaliated. They caught the contingent of guards in the pole barn sleeping and came right in through the tunnel. If Daisy and Rosie hadn’t been out scavenging for clothes with Tegan, all three might have been caught or killed by the righteous fury of the Swanson invaders.
There was a brief but fierce battle in the great room of the Flowers mansion that spilled into the front yard. Lance’s men had been all but useless except when it came to dying and getting in the way. Tegan’s boys had their shit together and were able to repel the Swanson crew back into the house and down the stairs but not before Bill Swanson took Susan Flowers hostage.
She’d been in the kitchen helping Greta, the big maid, prepare dinner. They both hid in the large pantry when the shooting started. Upon hearing her home being destroyed by gunfire and lunacy, thought she could talk some sense into Bill Swanson, she’d always had an easy way with him.
Greta begged her not to leave the pantry but Susan insisted. She had not been present when Danny had been killed and no one had explained how things really went down, therefore she had no idea what kind of familial outrage she was walking into.
Bill and company began making their hasty retreat down the tunnel and back to safety with Susan Flowers in tow. The entire Flower’s camp, save for the twins and Tegan was on their tail.
Henry Flowers, returning from yet another of his mysterious solo Violet searches, surprised the men Bill had left standing guard in the pull burn. He killed all but one and forced that guy to tell him what was happening in his home. He forced his new captive to radio Bill and ask for an update.
He listened as a breathless Bill explained that they were being pursued back through the tunnel and coming out hot. Bill instructed his man to be ready to fly. Henry waited as the s
ounds grew nearer. He brought up his rifle and took aim to shoot the first person he saw.
That person was Susan Flowers, who was being shoved ahead through the tunnel by Bill Swanson. She took a bullet to the head from her dear husband’s old Winchester hunting rifle and died instantly. Seeing what he had done, Henry dropped the rifle and slunk to the ground in shock behind the cover of a truck.
In the chaos that followed, Bill and some of his people escaped on foot and endured a terribly dangerous walk home through zombie territory. The rest of his people were either killed or imprisoned in the old wine cellar where they were starved and beaten for information on a regular basis until George’s jail break.
When Tegan and the girls returned to the mansion, they found it a home in ruins. The men and Greta making a half-assed attempt to restore some sort of order. But order would never come again to the Flowers Mansion. When the lady of the house died, so too did any remaining semblance of class and self-control.
The Swansons must die! This was the new mantra of Henry Flowers. This was how he grieved for the wife slain by his very own hands, albeit accidently. Rosie wholeheartedly agreed with her father, the Swansons must die. Daisy had no opinion as she slipped back into her basement dwelling habits. Tegan didn’t like it. He no longer cared for Henry Flowers. But he was stuck now to Rosie and all her craziness. Tethered by an unbreakable bond that had eluded him all of his life. Love. He would follow her into hell and back.
Chapter 38
“Reverse Counter Strike”
Henry Flowers would have his pint of blood and then some. Getting inside the secret back door to the luxury townhome complex was no longer an option. A person might get one over on old Bill Swanson occasionally but it would rarely happen twice.
In an effort to draw him out, Henry cooked up a rather convoluted scheme that somehow worked. He arranged for the questioning of his cellar guests to be henceforth conducted in his office on the second floor. In that room a few pointless beatings were given, a few questions asked about the layout of the Swanson Compound. All routine stuff, the prisoners had gotten used to it since they began their stay a week prior.
Running with the Horde Page 24