Taking It Back

by Joseph Talluto

  Sarah had a look on her face and said, “You know, it’s funny.”

  “What is?” I asked, shouldering my pack and adjusting my holster.

  “You actually sound hopeful. Before you seemed to look at what you were doing as a kind of mission, that if you didn’t do it, no one else would and the world would eventually die out. Now, you’re almost smiling at the prospect.”

  I thought about that for a minute. “Is it a bad thing? Maybe we’ve turned a corner on this whole dead thing.”

  “Actually, it is kind of nice. You used to look at situations where if it worked, great, if not, oh well. Kind of attractive, in a way.”

  I puffed my chest out and gave my best Burt Lancaster smile. “I won’t let it go to my head. Much.”

  “Good,” Sarah said. “You’ll get yourself killed if you do and then you’ll be useless to me and everyone else.”

  I deflated when I realized she was right. I was alive because I took nothing for granted, never hoping for too much for fear of running myself into despair when things turned south. When this all started, I had one focus; save my son. Now that I have managed to secure some relative safety for him and others, my focus shifted; finding others and making sure they survived as well. I still needed to survive for my son and when I thought about what might have happened yesterday, I just shook my head. The fight was still out there and I still had a lot of work to do.

  “Thanks,” I said, kissing her on top of her head.

  “You’re welcome,” she said. “Jake needs you, the community needs you, and I need you.”

  “I won’t do anything stupid on purpose,” I promised.

  “Good.”

  Sarah and I walked down the street towards the east end of town. The sun was just rising, the blue of the sky chasing the purple of night back to the west. The morning air was brisk, it was still spring. But it promised to be a warmer day. I could still smell a little of the decay left behind by the dead and there was a large blackened area by the gazebo where the ghouls had been burned in the piles Charlie and I had made the day before. Looking at the gazebo, I suppressed a shudder when I thought how close of a call that had been. Had Tommy and the others fallen before we could have been rescued, we likely would still be up in the rafters, slowly starving to death.

  We passed through the town, raising a hand in greeting to those whose days had started as early as ours. We got many smiles and a few words of gratitude. I was grateful we were able to lend a hand here. This town deserved to live, these people were the kind that would rebuild and make things better than they were before. They had a real sense of community that would be hard to put down. And now, after they had been tested in battle, anyone trying these people would be shoved back. Hard.

  We reached the fence line shortly and climbed up the nearest ramp. On top of the fence, I saw we had climbed up too far to the north, so we wandered along the fence to the ladder that reunited us with our friends.

  Charlie and Tommy were already there as well as Rebecca and Jason. Charlie was checking the mini-train wheels which kept the truck on the rails and Tommy was finishing securing the supplies on the back.

  “‘Bout time,” Tommy said. “You wanting us to wait forever?”

  I stared at Tommy. “Yes, I do,” I said with a straight face. “If I let you and Charlie off by yourselves, I’d have to save your sorry asses within ten minutes.”

  Tommy scowled and Charlie hid his grin. It was a full minute before I cracked a smile and Tommy realized I was kidding.

  “Jesus, I fell for it. Damn, it’s early.” Tommy tried to look busy again, poking around the bed of the truck.

  I laughed and gave Sarah a kiss and saw Charlie do the same to Rebecca. Tommy jumped into the bed of the truck and Charlie moved around to the driver’s seat. I waited a second, giving Sarah’s hand a quick squeeze, a gentle reminder that I would be back no matter what.

  “Talk to Harlan,” I said to Sarah, Rebecca, and Jason. “I want you guys to work with some volunteers on Z cleanup. We got remarkably lucky yesterday.” I heard an ‘Amen’ from Charlie. “But these people need to be trained if they hope to survive another onslaught. Make sure you include the kids. This is their world too and they should be careful, not afraid.”

  Sarah and Rebecca nodded and I could see Sarah already forming in her head how to get the most going at once.

  “You have one day,” I said. “Good luck.”

  Jason stepped forward. “Before you left, the Mayor wanted you to have these. One of the townspeople is a woodworker.” Jason held out Charlie’s tomahawk and my pickaxe. The handles had been replaced and strengthened. My pickaxe handle was wider at the head, tapering a bit towards the handle end. Charlie’s tomahawk had a new, lengthened walnut handle gleaming with new varnish. Charlie’s eyes grew wide as I passed it through the truck cab to him. He stepped outside and took a few practice swings, getting used to the new length and weight. I swung my pickaxe and the little weapon positively glowed with malice, wanting desperately to sink into some undead skulls. Soon. Soon. The additional weight would mean less fatigue in a prolonged fight.

  “Tell the mayor he has my thanks.” I climbed into the cab and nodded at Charlie, who started the truck and fiddled with the controls. With a final wink at Sarah, we were on our way.

  According to the map, the first town we were supposed to reach was Gorman, but I couldn’t find a population note on the map. Come to think of it, I wasn’t even sure where Gorman was, except that the rail line went nearby. We would reach it in a few minutes, since it was only five miles away.

  Charlie kept the speed to thirty miles an hour, giving us a decent chance to look around the country and see how things were. We passed a lot of farmland and there was evidence of a lot of crops that had gone to waste because there wasn’t anyone to harvest them. Come to think of it, there weren’t a lot of people to eat them if they had been harvested. I guess it was good to keep these places in mind in case we got big enough as a population to use all this land again.

  Tommy thumped the roof of the cab and I opened the back window of the cab.

  “What’s up?” I inquired, not seeing anything of interest.

  “Nothing. I have to take a leak,” Tommy said, shifting his rifle to his back and tapping Charlie on the shoulder.

  Charlie looked at me and I shrugged, figuring it wasn’t a bad idea. I got out of the truck after Charlie stopped and walked down to the edge of the stones that marked the railroad. After I finished my business, I wandered back up to the truck and looked around as Tommy finished his. I could see a farmhouse in the distance, but it was too far away to see if it was occupied. It looked like a pretty decent place, neat and well-maintained, but deserted. I had a feeling we would see a lot of that on this trip. Maybe one day someone would come and make this place prosperous, but it was going to be a while.

  We rolled down the rails and I told Charlie to come to a stop where a road intersected the railway. I checked my map and looked around. I asked Charlie if we had gone about five miles from Coal City and he assured me that we had. I saw a small farmhouse in the distance and another house up the way a bit. A road sign said “Gorman Road” so I referenced where we were.

  “Why did we stop?” Charlie asked, looking over at the map.

  “We’re in Gorman,” I said, looking around.

  Charlie was incredulous. “Really? This place is smaller than where I grew up.”

  I just shrugged my shoulders and checked the map again.

  “Why did we stop?” Tommy asked from the truck bed.

  “We’re in Gorman,” Charlie said over his shoulder.

  “You’re kidding.” Tommy stood up to look around. “I guess the town is that house over there.” He pointed to a ranch house down the road.

  “Guess so,” I said.

  “We need anything here?” Charlie asked.

  “Nope. May as well move on. If we have the time, we’ll check the houses on the way back,” I said, scanning the map for th
e next town.

  “Got it.” Charlie thumped on the roof to get Tommy to sit down, then drove off past Gorman, the town you would literally miss if you blinked.

  We passed out of the town, or what was supposed to be the town and moved down the rails. The landscape didn’t change much, just expansive fields or crops and vegetation. I could see the winter-bent stalks of corn unharvested, and figured hunting Z’s in that mess would be a cast-iron nightmare. Better to burn the whole field than risk an attack.

  According to the map, the next town on the rail line was Mazon. This one was actually listed and was supposed to have a population of around nine hundred. Given the remoteness of the locale, I was optimistic about finding a survivor or three.

  About fifteen minutes past Gorman, we began approaching Mazon. It was wide open, no sign of any defense works or provisions for dealing with the dead. I motioned for Charlie to stop on the outskirts. I had no intention of running through the town until we had an idea of what we might encounter.

  I tapped on the back window to get Tommy’s attention. “Scope out what you can see, I’ve got an uneasy feeling about this place.” I did, too. Something was making the hairs on the back of my neck stand up and I had learned not to ignore the feeling.

  Tommy stood up in the truck bed and used the scope on his rifle to look a little further into the town. From where I sat, I could see a number of small, ranch-style homes indicative of most of the small towns in Illinois. Here and there were older, more stately homes, and they tended to have the larger, older trees in their yards. The homes were neat and tidy, a few having some expected debris in the yards, but in general seemed to be in good shape. One house in view had several children’s toys still scattered about the back yard.

  Tommy tapped the roof and I stuck my head out. “What’s up? See anything?”

  Tommy looked down at me with a puzzled expression. “I don’t see anyone, living or dead. I did see a lot of white flags on mailboxes, though.”

  I could feel my gut tighten instinctively at those words. The infection had made it here, then. So much for being far enough out to avoid contamination. We needed to be careful. “Keep an eye out, we’re heading through,” I said to both Charlie and Tommy.

  “You want to head down Main Street or stick to the rails?” Charlie asked.

  “Let’s stick to the rails, but if we see something worth looking at, we’ll take a peek.”

  “Will do,” Charlie said as he put the truck in gear and pulled forward. Tommy stayed upright, and scanning the town, looking for any sign of life. I noticed a couple of cats running from house to house, but that was the extent of the activity. I began to get the hunch we weren’t going to see anyone at all, that this whole town had up and disappeared. That hunch gave rise to the question of Where? Did the people go to the state center? Did they head to a larger town like Coal City? The empty houses and abandoned swing sets mocked us with their eerie silence.

  Charlie stopped the truck on a railroad crossing near the edge of town. We could see down a main thoroughfare which I guessed was the business district. Several stores and shops were there, a couple of restaurants, a fast-food place, one gas station, and two banks. ‘Earl’s Rail Stop’ was just across the street from us, advertising chicken dinners for under five bucks.

  Everything seemed normal except there was no one around. No living, no dead, nothing. As far as I could see, the town had not been hit by looters or anyone.

  “This is just weird,” Tommy said from his perch, scanning the street. “I don’t see anything out of place. There’s not a single piece of debris, no broken glass, no sign of violence. No bodies, no blood, nothing.”

  “Just ghosts,” Charlie said suddenly, causing me to jump.

  “Don’t be foolish. There nothing here for ghosts, either.” I snapped, much harsher than I intended. This abandoned town was creeping me out. I looked over at Charlie. “Sorry, man. This place is just wrong.”

  “No prob. What’s that?” Charlie pointed to an area on the outskirts of town. “That looks like smoke.”

  Sure enough, there was what seemed to be a cloud of smoke hovering over the far edge of Mazon. “Let’s go look, maybe they’re survivors who could tell us what happened here,” I said, hopeful.

  We stayed on the rails, the tracks taking us towards the smoke. The fire seemed to be on the other side of a small grove of trees and the vegetation was dense enough to not allow us to see through.

  As we got closer, Tommy thumped on the roof. “That’s not smoke,” he called out. I strained to see and as we went farther, we cleared the trees and could see.

  Tommy was right. It wasn’t smoke. It was thousands upon thousands of flies, hovering over a massive pile of corpses. Charlie stopped the truck and I got out, covering my face with my balaclava and goggles in an attempt to keep the flies away. I crossed over the greening grass and stood at the edge of the carnage. The people had been worked over by the flies and many of the faces were gruesome to look at, especially the children. I didn’t see any signs of violence or any indication of how they died. Charlie and Tommy spread out on either side, looking for clues.

  The bodies were clustered in small groups and as I looked around, I began to realize that the majority of the people died as families. What in the world could possibly have happened? Were they all infected and decided to save the rest of the community by coming here to die? I didn’t have any answers. One thing was curious, though. In every single group, one of the dead was clutching a small wooden cross. I started to circle the small clearing, mentally counting the number of bodies. After I reached six hundred, I gave up, figuring the entire town was here. The flies’ buzzing was extremely loud, nearly masking all other sound. Maggots were everywhere, writhing underneath clothing, causing me to swing up my rifle more than once when I thought I saw movement.

  I reached the other side where Charlie and Tommy were standing. “Anything?” I asked looking at another piles of bodies. This group, about thirty of them, was not as orderly as the others. In fact, they seemed to have been left where they fell.

  “I think these were zombies,” Charlie said, indicating with the barrel of his rifle a neat hole in the forehead of the nearest corpse. There were similar wounds in the rest of the corpses that I could see, evidence that these people were infected and put down. But if they put down the Z’s, why would they leave their town and come to this area to die? It made no sense whatsoever.

  I started back towards the truck, signaling the other two to follow. We wouldn’t get any answers from this place and like Charlie had said, this town was full of ghosts.

  Just as we passed the trees, a small figure stepped out into the open. Three rifles trained on the small man as he stood there, staring at the bodies. Flies landed on his face and clothes, but he didn’t seem to notice. He was dressed in casual clothes, jeans and a flannel shirt. I noticed the bulge of a holster under his shirt and signaled to Charlie the man had a weapon. He looked to be around seventy, but was probably younger. He didn’t seem to notice us, his haunted eyes were fixed on the death in front of him.

  I moved closer, lowering my rifle, knowing that Charlie and Tommy had moved to the sides and still covered the old man. “Sir?” I asked, “Are you from around here? Do you know what happened here? Sir?”

  “He lied to them,” the old man said, his voice barely carrying over the din of the flies. “He lied to them and led them here and watched as they died for him.”

  Confused, I pressed for answers. “Who lied?”

  The old man glanced my way, his piercingly blue eyes barely acknowledging my existence. “This town had a preacher, who told the people the dead rising was a sign of the end of the world. He told them there was no hope, that after the dead had finished, the world would be consumed by fire and cleansed by God, who was angry at the world. He lied when he said everyone was dead, that this town was the last one on Earth. He told them he had visions from God, telling him what the townspeople had to do to be saved.” />
  I just scowled, remembering preachers and pastors from my own past who were little better than charlatans, claiming a connection to God that was more false than their claims of salvation. But I also remembered how persuasive these men were and how with just a few words they could whip a crowd up to rapturous frenzy. Opportunists, every one, and the Upheaval brought more opportunity than most dared dream.

  “He had the people bring out their sick relatives, then made them watch as they turned into those nightmares. He said it was God’s curse on the land and the only way to heaven was on his path.

  “I didn’t think they would believe it, but they had no way of knowing they weren’t alone. Out here they were cut off and the preacher wouldn’t let them leave. He then told them that the day to get to heaven was here and he would help them along.”

  The old man brushed an errant tear that had strayed down his cheek. “He led them here and gave them pills and prayed over them as they died as families. This town died from lack of hope. They had no hope.” The man’s reedy voice faded off.

  I found it ironic that had the town just waited, we would have proven this preacher wrong on all counts.

  “What happened to the preacher?” I was curious to see if the man had moved on or followed his own teachings.

  The old man’s voice hardened. “I found him going through people’s homes, taking what he thought would be valuable. I gave him his reward.”

  I didn’t ask what that was, already guessing the answer. I backed away from the old man and signaled Tommy and Charlie to head back to the truck. We trotted back to the vehicle and spun around as we heard a shot behind us. The old man’s body lay crumpled in the grass, his blood showing bright red on the brown landscape.

  As I got into the vehicle, Charlie spoke up. “You knew he was going to shoot himself, didn’t you?”

  I nodded. “He had nothing left to live for. Not even revenge.”