Rapture: Survivor Chronicles 1

Rapture: Survivor Chronicles 1 Page 6

by Mike Sutton

Cars had been abandoned everywhere, all over town. Their occupants nowhere to be seen. The extra obstacles made the going quite slow and difficult even in Mrs. Francisco’s tiny car. The two of them had to turn around, or back up and retrace their path a number of times throughout the day. What should have been a fifteen minute drive across town, even in the worst traffic, turned out to be a lot longer than either of them would have ever dreamed.

  Crayson was obsessed with getting to the local Megamart. He figured that they would have all the supplies that anyone would need to survive the end of the world, and even live out their lives in some amount of comfort. The high walls would make the place like a fortress, they would have room to move. When he talked about the place he made it sound like a garden of Eden, and maybe that was how he thought about it too. The trick would be to get there, and if the building was locked, to get inside.

  They, several times, came across pockets of the strange walking dead, the zombies. But they were always too distant and too slow moving to be threatening. By the time the zombies were able to react to their presence, they were already on the move once again. It was a strange thing, the town was almost empty of people, they hadn’t seen a single sign of another living person, but Crayson still insisted on obeying most of the traffic laws. Like anyone would notice. Actually, they were noticed by the very things from which they were fleeing. But still he stopped at each stop sign, and he obeyed the speed limit wherever he could. He actually swerved to miss any of the monsters that had ventured out into the street. This the same man who had bludgeoned the walking corpse of his neighbor to death just a few days before was now being a frighteningly safe driver on the terrifyingly empty streets.

  “What are you doing?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Why are we going so slow? Step on it Crayson.”

  “We’re going slow because if anything happens to this car, we’re screwed.” He was right. Neither of them were qualified mechanics. Even if they were able to fix the car, in the time that would take, an army of zombies would have surrounded them. Still, Amy was almost ready to reach over and punch him in the head for his overly cautious driving. She breathed a sigh of relief when they finally pulled into the Megamart driveway. Crayson groaned and Amy let out a small scream. There were zombies. Hundreds of them. It was like the entire town had wandered into the parking lot of the Megamart. Most of them were milling around out side the front doors, though a few wandered scattered all across the parking lot.

  “Who are they?” Asked Crayson as he pointed to a pair of silhouettes outlined against the sky, atop the Megamart roof. Amy squinted, but they were too far away to make out and she just shook her head and shrugged.

  “Looks like I wasn’t the first person to see the Megamart as a safe port in this storm. Think they’ll help us? Or try to chase us off?”

  “What do you mean chase us off? They wouldn’t turn us away would they?”

  “I don’t know.” Crayson revved the engine a couple times and exhaled. “Only one way to find out though isn’t there?” He stepped on the gas and the small car lunged forward. They swerved in and out through the other cars in the parking lot, dodging the zombies and speeding towards the ally that lead to the back of the building.

  Then they hit something, the curb she guess and bounced off of it. Amy screamed as the little car flipped onto its roof and slid, screaming like a banshee as the metal was scoured away from the roof of the car. It felt like they slid forever before finally grinding to a halt with a resounding crash that threw them both forward against their harnesses. Amy hung upside down in her seat, shaking and crying and thanking God over and over. She was still alive, at least for another few minutes.

  Crayson groaned, and she reached over and touched him to see if he was alright. “I’m fine.” He said as she lay her hand on his shoulder. “We need to get out of here. Unbuckle your belt and see if you can get your door open. If you can, get out and start running, keep running until you get to the back door of the Megamart.”

  Amy started fighting with her belt, pulling and flailing at it, but it didn’t want to give in and let her free. “What about you?”

  “I’ll follow. Just take a breath, calm down and don’t panic.”

  She did as he said, squashed the panic and took several deep breaths to calm herself and release some tension. Then she went back to work on her safety belt, finally getting it to open up and let her out.

  “Alright, you’re almost there, now grab the tire iron there, open the door, get out and start running.” The tire iron was on the ceiling in between them. She picked it up with her left hand and grabbed the door handle with her right. The thunderous report of a rifle peeled through the air around her, startling her a little bit. Pushing the door with both feet, she got it to open up. Amy squirmed her way out of the car and stood, using the door itself as a handhold, as she got out. The first thing she saw was a zombie with a ruined head and something sticking out of its chest, lying on it’s side less than five feet from the car. One of the figures on the rooftop yelled down at her to run, so she did.

  Amy tottered as fast as her legs would carry her towards the side street and the safety that it promised. The sound another rifle shot filled the air, and another zombie fell down. On she went, dodging through the parking lot, when there came a scream from behind her. “Crayson” She cried and stumbled a bit and turned around in time to see that the car was surrounded by zombies, she took a step back towards the car when the figure on the roof yelled again “No, you can’t help, keep running,” and so she did.

  Another shot rang out, but none of the zombies fell that she could see, still she kept moving, making her way around the horde and weaving past lone individuals. She quickly rounded the corner of the building. The numbers had thinned greatly, but there were still several of the creatures between her and her safe haven. She heard the rifle and another body fell. Every shot made her path that much safer, until it was completely clear of the walking dead. On she ran. The door was in sight and there was a man standing in it waving her on. With a final burst of speed she flew up the steps and into his hands where he pulled her inside to safety of the darkness. The door closed and locked behind her.

  Eric hooted some more as they set off in a northerly direction. The streets within around a six-block radius of the compound had been largely swept clear of zombies in the last few weeks, discounting the occasional stragglers that crossed into their perimeter. The thinning of potential prey required patrols to venture out further and further each day. The patrol returned to the double column side by side formation that they came to prefer when marching with Ash at the head of the left column.

  Eric was back on point, keeping about a block or a block and a half between himself and Ash’s own position at the front of the troops. He preferred to run at a trot on the left side of the street, creeping along up the sidewalk with his shoulder nearly rubbing against the face of building as he passed. Since much of the area to his east was cleared of the undead, Ash felt that hugging the west wall would hide his people better.

  Twice he slowed to a stop at a corner, signaling the rest of the patrol to halt behind him. Both times the block ahead was crawling with hundreds of the undead, forcing the patrol to backtrack and take an alternate route. Both times Martin tried to convince Ash that they could assault the zombies and kick some major ass. Ash told him to shut up because he was sounding like an idiot. Two or three hundred against twelve was not good odds.

  They were traveling back east, about six blocks north and eight blocks to the west of their base, when they came across the miniature horde. The path had taken them away from yuppiville and into the standard urban sprawl, suburban setup at the very edge of the down town region. Instead of large buildings, they were now in neighborhoods full of decaying houses and gas stations.

  There were probably around a hundred zombies even and most of them were spread out across the
intersection when Eric stopped them. He was hiding behind what had once been a white picket fence, and was now a grey and rotting shadow of itself. Ash left the rest of the patrol behind, motioning for them to drop into a squat and keep under cover.

  Private Martin was looking over the fence hungrily, his skinny frame bent double as he wrung the handle of his club with sweaty hands. “Come on corporal, we can take these guys.” He whined. “They’re all spread out and moving slowly. Think of how bad assed that will be when we get back to camp and tell them that we took a hundred zombies at one time, no problem.”

  “No, we follow procedure. That way nobody gets hurt and the captain doesn’t come down on us, mostly me.”

  “We can take them. I know we can. We’re damn good and they’re just zombies.”

  “Private. I said no. We move on and find better hunting.”

  “Fuck that Ash, they’re right here, I’m sick of looking.” Martin sprung up, lifted his club over his head and yelled, “come on! Let’s go get the sorry bastards!” Before yelling what he must have thought had been a war cry and charging the throng. Ash stood up, and reached his hand after Eric, trying to grab a hold of his arm, or his shoulder or his clothing. Anything to keep the man from getting himself killed. His hand closed on empty air.

  Before he could speak to order Eric to return, five of his soldiers raised a war cry of their own and joined private Martin, sprinting at the zombies with their weapons raised. “Halt!” He yelled at their backs, watching helplessly as they surged forward. Martin was already among the zombies, swinging his club like a mad man. Yells of ‘Take that bitch!” floated back as he worked. He didn’t seem to notice that he was now the center of attention for the undead. They began moving closer even as he immersed himself in their embrace.

  God damn them. They’re acting like children. Ash turned to the rest of the patrol, Avery, Schmidt and a few others who weren’t a part of his original squad Davidson, Galahad, Jordan and Erickson. Tex and White had both joined private Martin’s charge.

  “What do you want us to do corporal?” Avery asked, as he stood up and watched the idiots play their violent game. Avery wasn’t one to risk his life recklessly, but he also had a sense of honor that would force him to help his fellow soldiers.

  “I guess we’re going to have to pull their dumb asses…” A man’s scream cut off his words. The kind of scream that only a wounded man would ever let past his lips. “Fuck me with a flag pole. Come on, let’s go!”

  His people followed him as he sprinted. Martin’s people had mindlessly raced to the heart of the horde and quickly found themselves encircled and fighting for their lives. “Cut a hole through the zombies and then pull those fucking idiots out! On the bounce folks. We don’t have much time.” Ash brought his bat down onto the head of the first zombie that he could reach, shattering it’s skull, and killing it instantly. His troops were on his flanks as he drove into the horde to rescue the rest of his squad. Each swing brought a kill, opening space for another step. Another scream came from the heart of the multitude. That made two down.

  In the space of a dozen heartbeats they had opened a gap big enough to reach their beleaguered comrades and free them from the noose in which they had stuck their heads. “Martin, White, Tex. Retreat and fall back,” he bellowed and he shoved away zombie that had reached out for his arms.

  Tex and White were the first to respond, dragging the other four along with them as they ran. A third scream came from his rear on the right. This was not going well. “Everyone else, disengage and do it now! Fall back a block and then take a left!” Ash followed his own orders, taking up the rear guard as his troops broke and ran from the battlefield like spooked rabbits.

  “Schmidt’s been bitten!” Avery yelled to Ash as they came to a stop. Ash was breathing harder than he had since trying out for track in high school and finding out that it wasn’t his thing. Avery was on the street next to their comrade and friend. Schmidt was crying, probably in both terror and agony. A mouthful of flesh had been torn from his forearm leaving blood to ooze from an ugly wound. Schmidt cradled his wounded arm like a child, murmuring over and over ‘please God no!’ through his tears as he rocked back and forth on the cold pavement. Schmidt knew what had to happen next.

  “Ash, do we have to?” Avery was looking at his friend as he patted Schmidt on the chest, trying to comfort and calm the doomed man.

  “You know as well as me what will happen if we don’t. Hell, you talk to the doc, and understand most of what he says, you should know better than me.” Ash drew his side arm, an old 9mm that had been replaced by the .50 caliber Desert Eagles in the real army, and so, passed onto the reserves. Another hand-me-down tool to add to the long list. The 9mm pistol was an old weapon, not as old as his rifle, but still older than Ash. Old as it may have been, the handgun was still sufficient for the job.

  “No, please, no.” Schmidt whimpered, changing his mantra, as Ash stood over him with the barrel of gun pointing at the middle of his forehead.

  Ash chanted back “Sorry buddy. I’m sorry. I gotta do this.” The gun hung a little loose in Ash’s hand as it rebelled against what it needed to do. Better to get it over with quickly. He wanted to cry too. Cry for himself and his friend. That weakness made him angry. He tightened his grip once more and squeezed the trigger. With an explosion of sound, the gun kicked slightly in his hand and Schmidt fell silent, his lifeless eyes staring up at Ash, the last of his tears seeping away as his body began to grow cold.

  “Tex, White. Strip all the gear that we’ll need to save. Divide it between the two of you. We’re going to go directly back to base double-time, no more stops.” In less than five minutes Ash got his battered patrol in line and on the move. Three of their number were left on the street with bullets through the heads. Bullets that had been put there by a friend. Eric at the back of the line, sobbing like a child and his head held low, his chin on his chest as they ran.

  The little office had been placed in the northwest corner of the warehouse near the roof so that the building’s manager could keep track of the floor below. The captain had made the office his own quarters, placing a sagging cot next to the flimsy metal desk for a place to sleep when he was too tired to work. A pair of chairs sat before the desk for the NCOs when they came to meet with the captain. Both the captain and Sarge were standing in the room waiting for him. The captain was in the middle of the floor, facing the door, while Sarge was staring out the window, through the blinds, down at the floor below.

  Ash hadn’t even made it as far as the chairs. As soon as the door was closed behind him, the captain was on top of him. The captain stood less than an inch away, nearly nose to nose with Ash. He tried to back away and make some room, taking only a half step before getting jabbed in the back with the doorknob and forcing the captain to pursue. The retreat only seemed to piss the captain off further. The captain’s face was already red, boiling with his unchecked rage. Ash had a feeling that it would be turning purple before the end of their meeting.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you corporal? You almost got your entire patrol killed. Why the hell did you attack a group that was so much larger than your own directly? Why did you ignore my standing orders? Three dead! Three dead, is the company’s worst loss so far, not counting that first miserable day!” His hot, breath stank as if he had been eating ass. His voice was quiet and the fury it held was near able to singe Ash’s eyebrows. The captain’s eyes shown. Ash expected that at any second light would burst from them and melt his face from his skull. Ash kept his eyes locked forward, focusing on the captain’s chin. He couldn’t bring himself to make eye contact with the man again.

  “Sir we encountered a group of a hundred or more zombies. Private Martin, our scout, got a little club happy and decided that we could take them on our own. We had already shown up two groups that were larger than our own with no trouble, so the soldiers were feeling a
little over confident.”

  “You lost control of your troops then.” The captain’s voice changed from a hot rage to a cold one. Ash shivered. Avery was right. The captain was insane. He would make certain to tell Avery to shut the fuck up when the man got to talking about the captain in the future, if he had a future. Avery was going to get himself killed.

  “The patrol hesitated for only a second, and before I could say anything, and half their number followed private Martin. I led the rest in myself to retrieve those who charged in before they were overwhelmed. By the time we disengaged, three had been bitten, two of those had followed Martin in.”

  “You ineffectual toad!” The captain pulled his sidearm and waved it under Ash’s nose. “I should kill you right here! To think, I was planning on promoting you to full sergeant. Are you trying to make me look stupid?” Spittle flecked on the captains lips as he spoke. At another time Ash would have found it hilarious, and a month ago he would have pulled out the old standard of ‘say it don’t spray it’. The line didn’t seem too funny anymore, much less so using it on the captain in the mood he was in.

  Sarge spoke up, his voice quiet and calm. “Sir. James here did a good job despite some bad circumstances. Some times in the heat of the moment soldiers get out of control and do stupid things. James handled himself and the situation well and managed to save the majority of his patrol.” The captain turned his gaze to face Sarge and Ash stole a glance of his own. Sarge’s face and voice were calm, but his eyes were worried and frightened.

  “Is that your expert opinion Lieutenant Frost?”

  “Yes sir, it’s what my experience suggests.”

  “How do you think I should proceed then Lieutenant?”

  “Punish the offender. James has so far had an extemporary record, and without his leadership today, more than three soldiers would have gotten themselves killed.”

  “So you think I should promote corporal James here then?”

  “I think that he should be given more time to see what he is capable of.”

  “This sounds like good advice Lieutenant. Corporal, you are dismissed, send in this Martin. I wish to talk to him myself.” The man’s voice bounced about, almost as if he had already forgiven Ash, and then decided to take new offense.

  “Aye sir.” Ash saluted, turned and walked away. He was barely able to keep his legs from buckling underneath him as he strode the floor between the captain’s desk and the door.

  “You join him Lieutenant Frost. I want to speak to this Martin alone.”

  “Aye sir.” Ash heard Sarge’s footsteps on the steel walkway behind him as he leaned on the railing with his knuckles turning white as he gripped it with all of his strength, waiting for the weakness to go away. Ash realized that he just come within a hairsbreadth of dying.

  “Well corporal, shall we go find this Martin?”

  “The captain is going to shoot him isn’t he?”

  “It looks that way, yes.”

  “Should we warn him? Maybe tell him to get the hell out while he still can?”

  “Do you remember my first bit of advice to you?”

  “Keep your head down and your mouth shut.”

  “That’s it. Good. I say that we do as we’re told.”

  “But then won’t that make us killers too?”

  “It might indeed. But we’ll still be alive.”

  “What about Martin?”

  “He disobeyed orders and got three of his fellow soldiers killed, he’s dangerous and deserves whatever punishment he gets. Perhaps the lesson will strike home and the rest of the company.”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “You don’t have to like it corporal, but you’re a soldier, so it’s your job to follow orders and try to stay alive and keep your friends alive. At the same time you need to remember to retain your humanity while those above and around you slip into insanity themselves. Your fight is to keep yourself alive and afloat in this sea of chaos.”

  “Still, shouldn’t we at least give him a chance to run? Sending him away has got to be better than killing him.”

  “No. It’s not better. That would only lead to more desertions, and we need all the soldiers that we have if we’re going to make it through this. And even if he does get out, who the hell do you think the captain will blame for his escape and punish in Martin’s stead?”

  Sarge was right. Ash hated to admit it, but Sarge was right. He felt cowardly and ashamed that he was about to sell a comrade up the creek.

  As they wandered the floor looking for private Martin, they passed the hippy chick who had lead the attack on their squad on that first day. She was bruised and even dirtier than before. Her face sad and her eyes permanently down cast. She seemed to flinch every time a man yelled or laughed or spoke loudly near by.

  Both Ash and Sarge had tried to protect her from the retribution that White and Tex had been planning on dishing out for her part in Cumming’s death. Then the captain found out what had happened, and he ordered them to step aside and let White and Tex carry out their justice. Revenge really. Even Ash could see that this wasn’t justice. Sadly, the rest of the company seemed to agree with the captain’s orders and turned a blind eye. Or at least they didn’t speak out against the crimes. Some even joined in on helping to ‘punish’ the woman. The whole situation left Ash feeling powerless. And sick. Very sick.

  The hippy chick had thought that she was helping people. Sometimes the government did committed crimes and then worried about protecting itself first and the population second, or even last. Obviously, the hippy chick and her friends had thought that this was the case. That the soldiers were sent to kill people who were sick instead of trying to heal them. So they had acted in what they felt was in the best interest in their citizens. In a way, they were heroes, though she was the only one who was still alive.

  Sarge called them all tragic heroes. That was another one that Ash didn’t quite understand until Sarge explained that they were heroes who made a mistake and then got royally fucked, Ash’s own phrasing. They had come for heroic purposes, under-armed and spitting venom, but were the cause of their own downfall. Another bit of irony Sarge said, since the hippy and her friends attacked for what turned out to be the wrong reasons.

  Sarge said that irony was sometime funny as hell. Ash couldn’t see how. It sounded more sad than anything.

  He had moved away from camp that night and closed his ears to her screams and their shouts. Ash hadn’t cried once since he was eleven years old, he hadn’t even felt like crying since then. He came so very close to breaking down that night that the shame still hung with him. ‘Men don’t cry you pussy,’ his father had told him when he found Ash on that day when he was eleven. His father had slapped him upside the head and told him to stop his whining, he sounded like a little sissy girl.

  Still, he wanted to cry now on some nights. Especially after every time he encountered Delaura, the hippy chick. She had actually been given to Tex and White, not just to be punished, but as their property. Like a car or some other object that could actually be owned. Actual fucking slavery after a hundred and fifty years. Tex and White loved the captain for that, and became angry with Avery whenever he badmouthed the captain.

  Sarge said that was ironic, and Ash had heard the word, but he hadn’t been sure what it meant until Sarge explained it to him. But Tex and White getting angry at Avery because of what he said about the captain was ironic because it was the captain’s giving the hippy girl to Tex and White that so pissed Avery off in the first place. After Sarge had explained the situation, Ash had to agree that it did sound ironic. Tex and White though had gotten pretty close to the captain, so close that he had made them his bodyguards.

  Avery was going to need to watch his mouth, since there was no telling what the captain would do if he heard what Avery was saying behind his back. The captain didn’t take well to dissension. Avery was a smart guy and what happened to
Grover should have taught him to keep his mouth shut and his head down. Ash even repeated the phrase whenever he spoke with Avery. Avery just grimaced and spat as if the mention of the words put a bad taste in his mouth.

  They found private Martin sitting by himself in his bunk and holding his knees under his chin. The company was avoiding him. After what he had done, they were all pissed off at him. He knew it, and stayed out of the way.

  Sarge took a position in front of Eric’s bed, his feet shoulder length apart and his hands clasped behind his back. His face was as cold as he captain’s had been. He knew that he was sending a man to die and was steeling himself against the pain. Ash could almost hear Sarge’s thoughts running over and over with ‘he’s guilty’ to make the betrayal hurt less. “The captain wants to speak to you private.” Sarge said, gruffly.

  Eric looked up and nodded, as if he had been expecting this summons and had himself been working up to it. He got unsteadily to his feet, his eyes full of unshed tears. He knew what was coming. He had heard the stories about Grover. “I’m sorry corporal.” Eric said, as if that could make up for the loss of the three company members who had been bitten.

  “A little late for ‘sorrys’ now private.” Ash had to make his voice hard so that he didn’t stammer the words. His voice didn’t sound like him.

  “I know. Please don’t remember me too poorly. I was just trying to help.”

  Sarge patted him on the back. “We won’t. But now, you have your duty to do, for the company and the rest of the survivors.” Eric left them, and began walking towards the captain’s office. Slowly at first, and then he picked up speed. Sarge shook his head and parted ways with Ash.

  “I’ll be in my bunk reading if you need me corporal.”

  Ash sat down to watch a few members of his platoon play a game of poker. Card games were a popular way to fill the dreary hours between sleep and work. The captain had outlawed gambling, as well as drinking and other drugs. Cigarettes were frowned upon, but allowed, if only by not having been specifically forbidden. After all nicotine addicts were still fairly reliable, if easily winded. Tex had a cigar lit and was taking slow puffs as he waited his turn to raise.

  Tex, Avery, Cervantes and White were all playing what looked like a variant of seven-card stud. While gambling was officially illegal, the players still used chips to make wagers. Not real wagers, since they had no real money. Which was ok, they didn’t have real chips either. Instead they used jewelry that was looted from a shop on one of Cervantes’ patrols and then returned to the barracks for poker games. Handfuls of gaudy trinkets that would have been priced at hundreds, or even thousands of dollars each crossed the table with each hand, only to return to the bowl where they were kept in between games. Though some of the more interesting pieces did tend to disappear into private collections. Cervantes herself had taken to wearing a large gold and diamond broach on one of her lapels when she wasn’t on duty.

  White dealt out another hand, laying two cards face up in the middle of the table. Those would be the common cards that all of the players would use to form their hand. The ace of diamonds and the three of clubs. Ash studied the soldiers as they studied their cards and wondered how long they could keep playing the game before it became boring. Poker was a fun game, but only when there was money on the table. Without that flare of excitement and loss to sharpen the senses and work against, the game was just a pointless fight against the odds with nothing ventured and nothing gained.

  A single gunshot rang out. Instantly halting the ever-present buzz of background chatter that had become part of daily life in the barracks as people held conversations or listened to music. Cervantes had stopped, mid-way through laying down her hand, the look of triumph fading from her face as their entire table turned and looked up towards the office from where the report had come from.

  The captain stepped through the doorway and out onto the catwalk. He looked out onto the floor below, taking in all the faces that were turned his way and then hollered. “Callahan, White, get up here on the double. I need you to clean up a mess.” White and Tex looked at one another over their cards, shrugged and put down their hands before excusing themselves and answering the captain’s summons.

  “Was that…” Cervantes began.

  “Yeah. The captain just shot private Martin.”

  “What for?” Avery asked.

  “For breaking ranks today and getting three of our people killed in the process.”

  Avery seemed astonished. “Aren’t you at the least upset about that? You sound like you’re discussing the weather.”

  “The captain was going to shoot me.” It was a simple statement, simply delivered. Matter of fact and straight forward. Cervantes gasped and Avery’s jaw dropped.

  “Why was he going to shoot you?”

  “Because I lost control of my patrol.”

  “Some idiots get themselves killed by doing something stupid, and you almost got blamed for it?” Cervantes asked as if he were telling her the truth that she didn’t want to believe was the truth.

  “Yep.”

  “Tex and White broke ranks too. Do you think he’ll shoot them as well?” Avery sounded hopeful. His dislike for Tex and White had been growing since the first day of their deployment. He lovingly stoked his hatred of White and Tex, reciting a list of their crimes, both real and imagined, on a daily basis. He had turned their actions earlier that day, which got Schmidt killed, followed by their nonchalant card game afterwards seemed to ignite his passions against the captain’s two lackeys into a fury.

  Cervantes shook her head. “Doubt it. They’re his men after all. His two most loyal grunts. Especially after he gave them that hippy girl as a plaything. Even after what she did, she didn’t deserve that fate. No, they’ll probably just get growled at and told to clean up the mess left behind by Eric’s body.”

  “Avery, I got one word for you before you go on. Shut up. You keep talking, especially around Tex and White, and you’re going to get yourself in trouble with the captain. Deep trouble. That kind of trouble only leads to one thing too, same place where Eric just went.”

  “What am I supposed to do then?”

  “Same thing that Sarge always says to do. Keep your head down and your mouth shut. We’ll wait for reinforcements to arrive and a higher officer to take over the operation.”

  Avery snorted. “What if there aren’t any reinforcements? It’s been weeks since we deserted our posts.”

  “Then we’re pretty well fucked. We can’t hold this city with just a company. We’re stretched thin with especially with the refugees we’ve taken in so far. Sarge thinks that we’ll probably have to start recruiting from them to fill our ranks. Anyway, I wanted to ask Sarge a question since earlier today. You remember what I said. We don’t need to lose any more good soldiers from our platoon.”

  Sarge had quartered himself with his platoon, about fifty feet from the common area in a little cubicle made of plywood to allow a little privacy in the wide-open warehouse. Ash found him lying on his bed and reading a book, as he said he would be. He had his head propped up on a pillow and his feet crossed as he the book rested on his chest. A reliable man, always as good as his word. “What’s the matter corporal?” He asked without bothering to look up from the page he was working on.

  “Worried about Avery Sarge. He’s fixing to cross the captain, and that isn’t a good idea.”

  “No it isn’t. Have you passed on my advice?”

  “Yes sir. It hasn’t seemed to have taken root yet. I even passed on my last meeting with the captain. Now with what just happened to private Martin, he seems to be angrier and angrier.”

  “I don’t know if you can do anything to help then corporal. You should probably just stop talking to him about the captain. That will only hurt matters and make them worse.”

  “Maybe not sir. But we’ve lost so many from my squad already, I don’t want to lose a
ny more. Schmidt and Cummings were my friends. Avery is too. If he gets it, all I have left are Tex and White, and they’re not as cool as they used to be.”

  “You always got me to look out for you corporal. And Cervantes is fond of you too. She seems to see you as being a little brother.”

  “That’s a relief.” Obviously he wasn’t able to hide either the sarcasm or the bitterness as well as he had thought, because Sarge lay his book down on his chest and actually looked his way.

  “My same advice still goes. Keep your head down…”

  Ash nodded along. “And shut up.” Sarge frowned, and went back to his book. He didn’t like being interrupted. But the fact was that Ash knew Sarge’s advice better than he had known any prayers that he had learned in church as a kid. Sometimes he even repeated ‘Keep your head down and shut up’ as if it were a prayer that would one day save his very soul. Ash sat down on the chair in the corner of Sarge’s quarters.

  “Sarge, where do you get them sayings from?”

  “What sayings are those? I haven’t said anything lately.”

  “Like ‘On the bounce’ and ‘you apes.’ You use them when ordering the squads around.”

  “Ah yes. Heinlein.”

  “What?” Sarge pulled out the trunk from where he had it stashed underneath his bed and then rooted around it for a moment before tossing something to Ash. Ash caught it. It was a book.

  Ash had to stop himself from dropping it and wiping his hands off on his shirt. “No thanks sir. I’m not too fond of reading.”

  “Read it anyway. That’s an order corporal.” Ash looked at the book. Starship Troopers.

  “Oh this. I know this one.”

  “You’ve read it before?”

  “Hell no, but I have seen the movie.” Sarge frowned as if he were going to bore a hole through Ash’s chest with his eyes. “The movie was pretty close right?” Some how the glower became even more intense and angry. “Sarge?” Ash felt himself begin to shrink a little. Sarge only glared like that when a soldier really screwed up, like the time when Grover had dropped the practice grenade during a training session.

  “Read the book corporal. Don’t bring up that movie ever again. There was nothing worth while in it, it was a joke and an insult.”

  “I thought the shower scene was pretty good.”

  Sarge thought a moment. “Ok. The shower scene was decent, but it did not compensate for the rest of the debacle. Now get out of my sight and start reading. I want a report in one week.”

  “One week?”

  “Now corporal.”

  “Ok, no need to yell.” Ash took the book back to his own bunk. One week to read the entire thing and then report to Sarge about it. The book had to be two hundred pages long, at least. Ash had a list of flaws as long as his arm, but procrastination wasn’t one of them. Aside from a few more minutes of skulking in self-pity he threw himself onto his own bed, opened the book and began to read.

  Jason sat quietly, staring out over the parking lot from his perch on the edge of the roof. He sat with his hand under his chin and his elbow resting on his knee with his shotgun lying in his lap. The thinker pose wasn’t just a clever ruse to cast off any unlikely passers by, he was actually deep in thought.

  There was a pleasant breeze, coming from over the rooftop behind that ruffled his hair, tickling his skin as he sat. Bringing the smell of hot tar. He stared blankly at the writhing masses below, unable to pay them any heed, his mind on other deeper subjects, ones that bothered him long before his current troubles arose. He was in the middle of a relapse of emotional turmoil. His feelings for Lynn were beginning to resurface once again, after years of bubbling below the surface. Years of ruthless suppression to keep them at bay. He thought he had stomped them down for good once and for all. That should teach him to think.

  It was times like this when he regretted giving up smoking. Smoking had always managed to calm him down, or at least give him something to do with his hands. But no, like an idiot he wanted to be healthier, to be able to run more than a step or two without gasping for breath and falling over. He kicked himself for tossing his smokes over the edge of the roof and to the zombies below. ‘Let them have em, they’re already dead’ he had quipped as the cigarettes tumbled down into the mindless crowd below, bursting from the package and scattering as they turned over in mid air. Dumb ass.

  His mind swirled about, leaving him in a haze. Normally his emotions were rock steady, with occasional outbursts of joy and sorrow. He loved Lynn and before everything else he wanted to see her happy. But he also wanted to be the one who made her happy. Both were important. Only one was within his grasp and it hurt him to hold on to it. His need for Lynn battled his love for her and left him in agony.

  He was, in spite of his own efforts to the contrary, beginning to like Douglas. Jason was at war within himself, he wanted to like Douglas for Lynn’s sake. But then he hated Douglas for what he had. A man so emotionally divided was an amusing sight to see, but it was hell being that man. The hand of jealousy crawled into and gripped his insides, making them burn and freeze all at once. At the same time he seethed with guilt and ached with want. His head pounded with the echo of his heart. He was almost considering, in desperation, drilling a hole in his head to release some of the tension. Metaphorically speaking of course. He wasn’t so desperate yet to be literal.

  Suicide was the cowards way out. He enjoyed life far too much to take that route. Old Scratch would have to drag him away from this mortal coil kicking and screaming. That was unless of course he was bitten, then he would go with Billy’s idea and shoot himself. To get bitten now would offer a solution, solve a lot of problems, and damn him to an eternity in hell. He never believed in hell per say, but if there was one, it was full of cowards who killed themselves. Deal with it, take it like a man, the words rung loudly in his ears.

  Long years had passed since his last descent into the spiral of hope and despair. To feel happy at one moment and depressed the next. He had done his best to stomp down all the feelings, to move on and find someone or something else. Living with the happy couple, day in and day out is what had finally broken his resolve again. Dragging him back to his private hell for another extended visit with misery. His only hope before had been the possibility of finding a woman to fill the place of Lynn, hope was so easy to lose.

  Jason knew that he needed to let all of his feelings out, just to tell someone, some understanding soul of mercy. It was times like this that he cursed his agnostic outlook on life, since talking to even a benevolent, if distant, God might offer some respite. Here and now, there was no release, nobody he could discuss it over, especially now.

  He had in a moment of despair considered unburdening himself on Billy. He knew how far despair and pain could drive a man towards insanity, but he retained enough of his wits in check to realize that that was a bad idea. Billy and Jason had often laughed together at people who got their hearts torn out and stomped upon, for Billy it was funny, for Jason it was sharing a bitter self-pity.

  Billy was a rock, an island. He hid behind his fools mask and never let a soul get close. Over time you might be able to sneak in little by little. Catch a glimpse of what lay beneath that colorful mask. But even then the man was an onion, and one made of solid steel layers. He made sport of all those weaker than he and that was most. Not sparing his barbs out of friendship, though he never went so far as to be cruel. Jason often wondered if he had ever been in love himself, or if he had been wise enough not to fall into such a trap.

  The voices of popular music sang over and over again that only a idiot opened themselves up to fall in love, it was better to hide behind the cold castle walls. Jason agreed with their assessment, but how hard it was to rebuild those walls after you tore them down and invited someone in.

  His father had told him once that it was a fool who wanted what he couldn’t have. To realize that you couldn’t have it
was a path to wisdom, to realize and still want, was the mark of an even greater fool. That was his dad, always spouting philosophical proverbs and the like, sometimes they even made sense and had something to do with what was going on around him at the time. Usually they just sounded good but were devoid of depth. All in all it left Jason knowing where he stood, he was a great ass of a fool.

  Jason laughed again. The same deep, though bitter laugh that had escaped him so often in the past. To his own ears, his constant whining was beginning to sound like a songwriter for a Pop band. He didn’t much care for it when other people where whiney and it was worse in himself. His father had always told him to deal with the pain, because nothing lasts forever, even when it feels like it will. Now was the time for him to deal. He picked a round stone off the roof and threw it into crowd below. It was time to lose himself in something exhausting.

  Jason picked up his shotgun off his lap and stood up. He turned around and walked towards the door, all the while flicking the safety switch on and off with his thumb, wishing that he could fire off a couple of slugs into the masses below. But Lynn wouldn’t be too happy if he did and it would end up causing more trouble than it was worth. Still the urge to do it anyways made his hands itch. The big problem was shooting zombies was that even after all of the thinning that he and Billy had done, there were thousands of the creatures and at best he only had a couple hundred shells. Ammunition was scarce, or at least it would be if he decided to start using it on a whim.

  Jason succumbed to his weakness and lit a cigarette and sat down in his chair to think. Life wouldn’t be so bad if he wasn’t stuck in a prison that he couldn’t escape. His friends thought of the store as a giant medieval fortress or castle, but Jason knew better, it was a prison. The zombies might make a moat for some, but there was no drawbridge to use to cross the moat with. So it held them in as effectively as the tallest stonewall or razor wire fence.

  Old sayings ran through his head, a golden cage was still a cage and so forth. He wanted out of the cage. He wished more with each passing day that they had followed his plan of heading out into the wilderness, away from all of the remnants of human civilization and just wandered the land freely. Life would be more difficult in some ways, but maybe he wouldn’t feel like he was chained to a sinking ship like he did with this store.

  It was a good long while before he noticed that Billy was standing behind him, a lit cigarette between his thumb and forefinger, he took a drag. “What do you want to do today?” Billy asked as he exhaled the smoke from his lungs.

  “I dunno.” It wasn’t enlightening and it didn’t offer any ideas, but it was succinct and honest. Jason had no clue what he wanted to do. He felt rather empty and trapped. That was wrong. He wanted to escape and be free of everything, all his worries and fears and foolish emotions. To be at peace again with the universe. He knew this, but he also knew that it wasn’t what Billy meant.

  “Well how about we start a new religion?”

  “A what?”

  “A religion, we make up a god, some rituals, some titles, and then wage war on all the non-believers around while sending out missionaries.”

  “What kind of rituals?”

  “I was thinking chants and sacrifices?”

  “Sacrifices? What kind of sacrifices?”

  “Well like killing things in the name of our god.”

  “Like zombies?”

  “Well maybe. But I was thinking more of SPAM. I hate that stuff. And if we sacrifice it all to our god, then Douglas can’t make any more SPAMwiches”

  “SPAM? How do you know the god would accept that as a sacrifice?”

  “Beggars can’t be choosers, besides, what else does he think he’s going to get? A virgin? Not around here he isn’t.”

  “Good point.” Billy came up with some of the best ideas. And some of the worst. Jason rubbed his arm as he remembered the time that Billy had decided to invent his own martial art. In the end it had meant a visit to the emergency room for the both of them, and six weeks in plaster casts. It had been fun until Billy had gotten a little overzealous and started swinging the broomstick while telling Jason to defend himself. He flicked the cigarette off the roof, half smoked. Jason had wanted something to do, and here was Billy.

  Jason laughed to himself at the thought of burning SPAM in honor of a god that they had just invented. It’s the kind of thing that would drive Lynn nuts, which made it all that much more fun for Billy. And that much more fun for Jason to watch.

  Ash was a slow reader. Reading was difficult and not an especially enjoyable activity for him. Always had been so for as long as he could remember. He had friends who had enjoyed reading in Jr. high. They had said that when they read, they would get a picture of all that was happening formed inside their heads, like a movie, only better. Bookworms he had called them, they had drifted apart as they found new loves, Ash with working on cars and video games and those friends with reading and computers. That was life though.

  Reading had always been a chore. There never was a picture as he struggled with all of the words. He had improved over the years of course, studying the automobile magazines and manuals became his life for a while when he was in training, that had required him to get better at reading. Still he didn’t pick up reading as a hobby, nor did he read for fun, the automotive magazines aside, though they were part business.

  For him, Starship Troopers was different. The book took him two days to struggle through the first time, short as it was, and then he read again on the third day. Sage let him keep that copy of the book, he said that he had others, on the fifth day when he gave his report.

  “Thanks Sarge.” He said as he looked at the cover. “Do you think it would work?”

  “Do I think what would work?”

  “A government like in the book. Where only soldiers can vote.”

  “Why would you ask that? Do you want to set up a government or something?”

  “Well, we need one don’t we?”

  “Right now, we’re a short company with a couple hundred civilians in tow, we don’t need a government.”

  “What about later? When we get everything cleaned up again?”

  “That’s awful ambitious of you. I don’t think that we’ll get everything cleaned up, as you put it. We might be able to kill a few thousand of these zombies, but if the rest of the world is like Jefferson, then there must be hundreds of millions of them, or even billions walking the planet. Anyone who thinks that they can clean that mess is as mad as a hatter. In the mean time. I think that the captain plans on installing a military dictatorship with himself at the head. He was thinking of making you an officer, until the little debacle the other day.”

  “An officer? Me?”

  “Well an NCO, you would still need to work for a living, but you could still push the privates around.”

  Ash returned to his own bunk and read through Starship Troopers one more time. Reading the book and talking was becoming an obsession with him, one that was pissing off everyone around him. They would roll their eyes and walk away whenever he started in on how it changed his life. He wasn’t a complete idiot, he got that he was being annoying, so he toned down his behavior a bit. Though he was nearly bursting with enthusiasm.

  Finally Sarge got tired of talking about Robert Heinlein and gave Ash a second book to work on. “Here, read this one next, you might like it too. It’s about a war, swords and spears and heroes and the like.” He said as he threw the second volume into Ash’s eagerly awaiting hands.

  The new novel was a bit thicker than Starship Troopers, with smaller text. As flipped through the pages studying the text, which looked like a long poem. ‘The Iliad’ it was called. A strange name for a book.

  He read The Iliad too. Slowly. The progress was much slower and more difficult than Starship Troopers, even during his first time reading it through. The writing was much more challenging, poetry mostly which
slowed him down even more as he tried to figure out what the Homer dude was saying. Still he enjoyed it, though he didn’t quite understand why anyone put up with Achilles’ constant whining, aside from the fact that they couldn’t kill him. He came to like Hector the most, a warrior who was fighting for the survival of his people.

  As he read, he went on with his normal duties. Patrols and guard duty. Most mundane chores such as cooking and cleaning were given to the civilians that they had taken in under their wing. Most of them seemed happy to do the work in exchange for being protected from the hell that was going on in the outside world.

  With each patrol came a virtual flood of the civilian population. Frightened people looking for shelter in a storm. They found a group of soldiers and followed them home like puppies. The captain gave that to them. He said that it was their duty to protect the civilians. They were still American soldiers after all.

  The captain was still treating Ash rather coolly and he hadn’t been allowed to lead any more patrols, which was fine with him, he hadn’t been meant for command, even of a platoon. Instead, he went out under the leadership of Cervantes. They whittled away at the hordes of zombies that still infested the streets. Pushing back their borders with agonizing caution.

  They started marking down the locations of the packs that were so large that a the two squad patrols wouldn’t be able to engage it and even have a hope of making a dent in the numbers, let alone surviving the confrontation. So they chipped and scratched, luring away parts of the big hordes, killing a few dozen at a time before running. An exercise in guerilla warfare at its least glamorous.

  They brought in hundreds of civilians of all colors and backgrounds. The captain put most of them on big projects. The first major problem was finding a way to filter the river so that it wasn’t toxic. A thousand people needed hundreds of gallons of water each day. Also, they would all need a place to sleep, so barracks were being built. While those problems were being handled, the individuals who were unsuited for either design or heavy labor were armed with either a baseball bat or a golf club and then drafted into the extermination crew.

  Now, instead of a dozen or so soldiers under her, Cervantes had a mob of a hundred idiots to wrangle every other day. Most of the old company was instantly promoted and placed in charge of a squad of the newcomers. Even as was put in charge of twenty of the conscripts.

  The first location that Cervantes led them to with their new numbers was where Schmidt fell. She figured that they had a reckoning to deal out and ghosts to silence.

  The zombies that had taken the life of his friend and cost him the fickle good will of the captain. Ash was savage when dealing with them, charging in with his bat in his hands and swinging away to release several long weeks’ worth of pent up fury and frustration. The street was a mess. One man, an idiot from the start, managed to get himself bitten and so had to be put down.

  Put down. That’s what veterinarians did with sick animals who were just too far gone to have any chances of recovery. The man they shot truly was an idiot. He was another real muppet who made Grover look intelligent. Ash and a few others had taken to calling him Grover II. He must have been borderline mentally retarded, and should have never been conscripted in the first place. But there he was, among Ash’s own squad. It was enough to make him wonder if the captain was punishing him.

  On one hand, he probably should have felt some sort of guilt, or sadness perhaps, that the man had been bitten. After all, he was human still and alive, and it was Ash’s duty as the officer in charge to keep him safe from harm as much as possible. But on the other hand, the man was a complete and total fuckup and a danger to everyone around him. Only a fear of someone finding out kept them from just killing him themselves without the excuse of his being newly infected.

  Neither Ash nor Cervantes was sad to see him go.

  Weeks had passed slowly since Amy had come. Jason was feeling less lonesome, but only a little. They had all gotten closer in the past weeks, working on projects together. But still he felt like the odd man out. Maybe it was because he truly was the odd man out. The fifth wheel tagging along with a couple of couples. The surreality of the experience at times shook him. That Billy of all people would find love, with the next to the last woman on the planet, almost blew his mind. That they had actually known each other before the zombie uprising.

  Keeping busy helped Jason retain his sanity. After Amy came they had all decided to improve their water collection system as best as they could manage. Really all they had managed to do was put dozens plastic kiddie pools along the roof, and weight them down with buckets full of concrete. This simple act increased the area that they had covered when the rain came, and they collected what they could into the water barrels. It was crude and lacked the awe inspiring finesse that a genius like McGyver or the Professor from Gilligan’s Island would whip up. Maybe using some coconuts and paper clips. But, it worked, and that was all that mattered. Though Billy kept saying that he could improve it, if only he had those coconuts.

  Water. Wonderful clean water. Jason had been surprised him how much he had missed the simple pleasure of bathing regularly. Clothing wasn’t much of a concern. In the store they were surrounded by it, and they all got into the habit of simply changing into something new whenever their old clothes grew too rank. The problem came up of what to do with the old clothes, to which Billy came up with a plan, and was subsequently forbidden to carry it out, though Jason would have loved to have had seen what a giant ball of burning clothing did when it landed on the zombies below.

  All that was left to maintain was their vegetable garden. They had built it on the roof, in between kiddie pools, using landscaping timbers and potting soil. The garden was their major reason for needing to collect more water. But it had been worth the effort, or it would be in a few more weeks when the vegetables, peas, green beans, carrots, a few watermelon, and tomatoes, started to ripen. After weeks of nothing but canned food, his mouth watered whenever he even looked at the growing plants.

  Jason had been alone on the roof for several hours before he saw anyone in the realm of the living. It was of course Billy, Amy refused to come up to the roof because of the zombie hordes below. Lynn and Douglas on the other hand were busy with other endeavors, mostly reading whatever they could get their hands on and discussing the future. Or fucking, they did a lot of that, wandering off together to a hidden corner of the store.

  Life had gotten fairly lonely since Amy had arrived. One wouldn’t expect that adding another person to a small group like theirs would have that affect, but it did. She monopolized much of Billy’s time, at least most of it. Lynn and Douglas usually only had eyes for one another. Though there were occasions were Lynn and Amy got together and sent the other two up onto the roof to get them out of their hair. Jason felt like he was left out in the cold.

  When Douglas and Billy were around they actually had a lot of fun. Douglas had been teaching them how to use their old melee weapons, as well as how to fight with their hands and feet. They would also spend hours working out various backup plans that they had gotten out of the Survival Guide. Douglas had long since come around, and actually enjoyed reading the guide. Though he seemed to take perverse pleasure in pointing out things that the author had gotten wrong.

  Jason watched his friend as he wandered around, his mind somewhere else entirely. Likely on Amy. Somehow or another, the woman had broken his friend, but in a strangely good way. It was like Billy had finally decided to grow up. He and Billy had known another for a long time, and until a few days ago, Jason had assumed that his friend would never reach a level of maturity beyond that of a twelve-year-old boy. He had mentioned it to Lynn the day before and she had whole-heartedly agreed. Billy was a changed man. And strangely enough, it seemed like he was changed for the better for once.

  As much as another half an hour or perhaps more passed before Billy ceased his pacing and walked ove
r to the edge of the roof to join Jason. He set the mace down on the roof under the umbrella before joining his friend in sitting and staring at the parking lot. From time to time enjoying the colors of the sky with the setting of the sun.

  They sat in silence together for quite some time, each waiting for the other to speak. Both of them enjoying the show, the reds and oranges that were painted so expertly across the sky ever morning and evening. Forcing himself to break the comfortable silence was difficult, but Jason finally did. “So, what’s up?” Billy shook his head. He looked as if something serious was gnawing at him, which happened to be a strange turn of events indeed. His face held an expression that was completely out of place on this bastard child of Pan and Loki.

  “Amy has been having nightmares.” Big surprise there, after all, who wasn’t having nightmares?

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’ve heard her wake up crying at night.”

  “Oh. Yeah.” The expression of confused worry returned to his face once more, replacing his happy go lucky mask. Jason was beginning to worry, that was a look that he had never before seen on Billy. It seemed combine the expressions worry, fear and that one that he seemed to get whenever he was thinking about doing something really stupid. Really stupid, like feeling up the town Sheriff’s wife and then giving her a sloppy kiss right in front of the man himself.

  “So, what’s on your mind?” Billy picked up his shotgun and began to fiddle with the harness strap. He was slow in answering, like he was trying to choose his words as carefully as possible, but he was still coming up short.

  “Amy thinks that her friend Crayson might have survived the fire.”

  “I hope not. To be burnt to death would be bad enough, but then to come back as a zombie…”

  “I know, but she thinks that he might have become a zombie.”

  “And she’s having nightmares of him coming to get her?”

  “Sort of, she wants to go back out and put him to rest.”

  That was pure insanity. “She wouldn’t survive, she barely made it to the store in one piece.” Amy was a nice woman, but she seemed to be rather weak in spirit to Jason.

  “I was thinking…”

  “You have to be kidding me!”

  “No, I’m not kidding. I stand a better chance than she does. And doing it would help her out.” Well, at least the look on his face finally made some sense. It seems that Billy would be the first one to be free of the confines of the store since they had gotten Kime. That thought made Jason burn with jealousy and a desire to help. No, not to help, just to be away. If helping Billy check a corpse out in a zombie infested parking lot for his girlfriend would get Jason out of the building for even a few minutes, he’d do it.

  “I’ll go with you.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll go with you, to help.”

  “No.”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s way too dangerous for you to come along.”

  “I know, that’s why I’m going to go along.”

  “Because it’s dangerous? That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “You’ll need somebody to watch your back.”

  “So, you can stay up here and use the rifle.”

  “You know I can’t shoot that damn thing.”

  “What about all that time you spent with John on his shooting range?”

  “We learned how to shoot the shotguns and handguns. There was no where near enough room to fire the rifles. As much as I wanted to try”

  “Well, but…”

  “Look, I’m coming with. Remember the first rule of survival, nobody goes anywhere alone.”

  “Alright, alright, you can come along.”

  “When do we go?”

  “I dunno, first we have to break it to Lynn.”

  “Well damn. She isn’t going to like it.”

  “Maybe not, but she’s going to agree, she likes Amy too much to want to see her in that much pain.”

  “Well, we might as well do it now as ever.” With that they got up and headed downstairs to find Lynn. Even though Jason burned with the need to get out of the Megamart, he still felt that the sooner that they got this little mission done with, the better. Wading into a ocean of the walking dead wasn’t exactly what he had had in mind.

  Jésus was had another sleepless night to look forward to. He knew it from the beginning that he wasn’t going to ever be embraced by blessed unconsciousness, even before his head brushed the pillow, so he gave up trying early on. Since rest wasn’t going to come to him that night, he got dressed and went down to sit on the front the porch. He sat down on one of the chairs, elbow on the armrest and chin on the elbow and he stared out into the night as his eyes finally adjusted to the faint light of the moon.

  The air was cold, but not bitterly so. Just a reminder that summer had not yet arrived, despite the warmth of the past week. The pleasant bite of the night air kept him alert. Though he may not be able to sleep, without the cool air caressing his face, he might not be able to reflect on his thoughts and construct plans for their future. Time was running too short to be wasted on sleep.

  Jacob’s movie inspired proclamations about the new world order held some truth for Jésus. Human beings were social animals. He learned that in his introductory psychology and sociology classes. Hell. He had known that for as long as he lived. Humans were a lot like wolves, they joined packs and hunted the weak, feeding of the flesh of their prey.

  Sure, civilization had masked the wolfishness of humanity, redirecting it and exploiting the drive. The packs grew with time and formed churches, states and corporations. In time the violence grew subtler as the pack matured, but it was ever there, lurking in the shadows. Hidden away and forgotten, left at the very corners of civilization in far off countries peopled by primitive cultures. Derided by modern minds as a failure of an unenlightened humanity. Eternally ready to spring back to full view. Waiting to be cut free from the baggage of civilization.

  Now it had its chance.

  Jacob believed that many small enclaves of humanity would cling to their safety blanket of civilization. They would strive to retain what had once been normalcy and stave off the ocean of insanity in which the entire world had been plunged. While others would give into their darker urges, taking the collapse as clearance to follow their base desires.

  The screen door closed and Jésus looked up and over his shoulder. Jacob was standing in his robe and staring sadly at Jésus. “Mind if I sit down?” He asked, his voice quiet as the night breeze.

  Jésus nodded and patted the chair next to him. He leaned back, kicked out his feet and crossed his hands over his stomach, putting himself in a better position for a conversation as Jacob sat down beside him.

  “Have you figured on which route you’re going to take yet?”

  “West, I think. We’ll look for one of those small enclaves you mentioned. We’ll try and help rebuild society. I thought about just finding a farm house around here, but I don’t think that Emily or Michelle would much enjoy living so primitive. After all, the generator won’t run forever.”

  “A good plan. Honorable.”

  “Any other ideas?”

  “Sure. Some.”

  Jésus waited a moment for Jacob to elaborate before asking. “Care to share them?”

  “Oh? Ah yeah. Where is my mind tonight?” He slapped himself lightly on the cheek as if to try and wake up his dormant brain, before continuing, “stay away from large towns. Look mostly at the small villages. There won’t be as many survivors probably, but there will be fewer of the zombies to have to confront.”

  What he said made perfect sense and Jésus kicked himself for not thinking of it himself. He was planning to explore the smaller cities along the way. But Jacob was correct, though there might be more survivors, they probably wouldn’t last very long against the horde of the zombies.

  “Stay away
from anyone you see out on the roads. They’ll probably be looking for easy meat. Folks in town too. You really can’t trust anyone anymore.”

  “What about you and Gretchen?”

  “Well, you obviously can’t trust us either, after all, look what we’ve done. Expelling a nice family just because they aren’t our blood.”

  “Blood carries a long way, you have to look to it first.”

  “Would you?”

  “My oldest brother is a no good drunk who has spent near half of his life in jail or prison. He beat his wife until she left him and took the kids. One of the few times my mother supported divorce. She sees him as her biggest failure in life. If he’s still alive, and asks for help, then I’ll help him because he’s family. Family is important.”

  “If he isn’t?”

  “Then I hope I come across him and get a chance to shoot the bastard myself. For what he did to his own family and what he did to mama. It’s the least I can do.”

  “It’s going to be dangerous out there.”

  “I figured as much.”

  “Gretchen and Rachel would like it if your mother stayed here with us until you found a place.”

  “I think that she would like that too. I’ve never seen her take to a person like she has with Gretchen. She seems fond of Rachel too. What will Henry say?”

  “Henry will learn to keep his damn mouth shut, which is a lesson long overdue.” The conversation drifted away on the breeze and they sat in silence, enjoying one another’s company in the timeless manner of men. Nothing needed to be said, all was understood. Jésus would like to remain with these kind people. Jacob and Gretchen would like to have them stay. But other responsibilities came first.

  Jésus awoke to something bright and warm seeping through his eyelids and the rattling grind of a wood chipper trying to devour rocks. The sun, it turned out, accounted for the feeling of warmth, while the other was obviously Jacob’s snoring.

  He tried to clear a dreadful taste from his mouth that reminded him of sweat socks, leaving him to wonder if he had swallowed a bug or two in the night. Jésus climbed out of the chair, working the kinks out as he watched some birds playing in a birdbath. He hadn’t meant to fall asleep, but when was the last time something he meant to do hadn’t failed miserably before his very eyes. At least he had received a good nights sleep out of the deal, which was a fair sight better than what normally greeted him when his plans fell apart.

  His talk with Jacob had inspired him and allowed him to lay firmer plans. They would head west, following a string of small towns marked on George’s map, until they found a place to stay permanently. Preferably somewhere with people who knew how to farm. For all of his interests, Jacob was woefully unprepared for living in a primitive world. He looked down on his sleeping friend, his bitterness receding, Jacob was a hard man to remain angry with.

  Jésus let himself back into the house, walked into the kitchen, and started feeding the stove. This morning would call for coffee, strong coffee. Jésus would feed his one true addiction that he had carefully cultivated over the years of late night television watching or study sessions. Caffeine ran through his veins like blood.

  The first pot was on the boil when Jacob joined him. His eyes red and puffy and his head held at a strange angle as he stumbled into the kitchen, groaning with each step and looking more dead than alive. He would remain that way, and had in fact done so each morning to date, until he had his first cup or two of coffee. “Stiff neck?” Jésus asked.

  Jacob groaned the affirmative, a sound which Jésus had learned meant ‘yes’ in early morning Jacob speak, as he poured himself a cup, straight black, no cream or sugar, the true man’s way to drink it. Or so Jacob claimed. Jésus preferred a couple spoonfuls of sugar to neutralize the bitterness. Being a man was one thing, drinking black coffee on the other hand was just crazy.

  The conversation was limited to slurping their java and blowing on the liquid to cool it down after it burned their tongues. Talking to Jacob during the early hours of “O’Dark’Hundred” was about as interesting as a conversation with Frankenstein’s monster, so Jésus let the opportunity pass him by and the two friends again sat in silence.

  With fifteen minutes, and a second cup of joe, Jacob was finally able to articulate his first thoughts for the day, and deep ones they were “Those chairs weren’t meant to be slept on!” He griped as he rubbed his neck. “Did you hear some strange rasping noise a little while ago? You must have it was loud enough to wake me up.”

  Jésus shook his head ‘no’ and suppressed a smile. Jacob had awakened himself with his own snoring. He wondered briefly how Gretchen could stand it and suspected that maybe she couldn’t and had kicked Jacob out of bed the night before.

  In ones and twos, the rest of the household awoke and in the words of Jacob, quoting Johnny Cash, stumbled down the stairs to meet the day.

  Breakfast was hearty, though largely cheerless. Jésus told his mother that she would be staying with Jacob and his family until they found a home. Gretchen and Rachel surprised him by offering to take care of George Junior and Christina as well. Michelle tearfully accepted. The kids cried too. She didn’t wish to be separated from her babies for such a long time, but here they were safe and would be well fed and keep their grandmother company. They would also have other children to play with. Besides, they would be back soon.

  “When you find a place to live, come back and get us.” Jacob said, shaking Jésus’ hand. “I don’t know how well we’ll be able to manage on our own. Besides, we’ll get to missing the company of civilized people soon enough.” The last was said with a glare over his shoulder at Henry, who had made several more abrasive comments

  “Will do. Thank you for everything.”

  Jacob grinned. “Thank you for getting our bathroom back in order. You be safe now, and get back to us soon. We’ll be watching.”

  Before ten o’clock that morning, the family was reduced to vagrancy once again.

  They skipped by the closest town, Devil’s Square, even without Selma’s warnings. Starting their search in a town so named didn’t strike them as a good portent for the search ahead. They passed their decision off as being logical, the town was too small after all, just about two score people, they most likely wouldn’t find what they were looking for in it’s streets. All the while, laughing at what Selma would say if she had heard the town’s name.

  Fenton, the next town along, was about fifty people, or had been, and was their first stop for the day. They stopped long enough for Jésus to back the van up and drive back the way they had come. Fenton was swarming with the walking dead. Passing through Fenton lead them to a long straight road. Another long straight road. Everything in the country seemed to be laid out on a grid of elongated rectangles.

  Jésus was the first to see the motorcycles approaching from their rear. He caught a glint of light reflecting off the chrome in his rearview and swore. He slowed the van down and took a left down the first road that he found. A dirt road. They kicked up a cloud of dust twice as tall as the van and three times as long as they raced down the lane, making turning from the road in secret and hiding impossible.

  Jésus kept one eye on the road ahead and one on his rearview. The bikers had slowed, making the turn themselves and following the van. They were gaining too. His foot grew heavier, weighing further down on the gas pedal, pushing the van faster along an unsafe road.

  “Watch it Jésus!” His sister yelled!” as they came around a bend, going nearly fifty miles an hour. Her finger pressed against the windshield pointing out at the road, over the hood. There were cows in the road.

  Jésus slammed on the breaks. The van skidded, slid and came to a halt five feet from the nearest cow. The stupid animal didn’t even flinch.

  He could hear the approaching motorcycles as they grew nearer to the van, cloaked as they were in the lingering cloud of dust. Jésus searched for the 9mm that he had stor
ed in the cab for such an emergency. “Get out and run!” He heard the doors open in the back and footsteps on the hard packed. Emily and George were on their way. Finding the pistol, he looked up, Michelle was still in the cab with him, the golf club in her hand.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m going to help!”

  “No, you’re going to run and find George and Emily. Don’t argue, just listen for once.”

  Jésus opened the door and jumped out of the cab with the gun in hand. Michelle ran around the front of the van to stand behind the door, tightly clutching the golf club to her chest with both hands as if she was on stage singing somewhere and it were a microphone. He turned to tell her to run again when something smashed into his jaw. His sister screamed. The gun seemed to go off on it’s own, and then a second time. Jésus fell backwards against the open door and was engulfed by blackness.

  There were other groups of survivors in the city. Many of them joined Cervantes and Ash in sweeping their streets clean of the zombies, only to disappear afterwards. After the weeks of having people gladly follow them home for the safety that trained and armed soldiers could provide, Ash had become used to civilians joining up on patrols and then staying. The new turn of events he found confusing, and he discussed it with Sarge as they watched the construction of their wall. The Captain had ordered a wall to be built around their fortress. He didn’t explain why, and the company guessed that he just wanted to keep the zombies out.

  The wall was being made of a car sandwiched in between two double thick layers of cinder blocks and then filled with sand. The end product was about five feet tall and then topped with barbed wire with glass embedded in the ridge. The wall would be solid and damn near impossible to penetrate with anything less than bombs made to bust reinforced bunkers. The construction didn’t make much sense to him, a zombie couldn’t climb, so anything over four feet should be able to hold them off and at the same time allow whoever was defending easier access. Sure, they would need something sturdy, and the wall looked that, but it seemed overkill to him. He had asked Sarge about it, and a few of the other NCOs, Sarge grunted, and nobody else knew any more than he did. They all thought it strange as well.

  “Maybe they’re shy corporal,” Sarge said as they watched a work crew tip an old sedan onto its side.

  “That could be Sarge, but they don’t seem to be so shy that they can’t help. They do that just fine. Though they look at us a little funny before taking off again.”

  “Have you been marking their locations like the captain ordered?” A funny question. Sarge knew that he did, he had even seen the maps, and Ash said so. “Well then maybe you should be a bit less careful. Maybe a little more picky about the information you pass on.”

  “You mean lie sir?”

  “No corporal, do not lie. Just let certain facts slip your mind. Like where these people live and how many there are.”

  “Why for sir?”

  “The captain doesn’t need all that information, too much and his brain might start to overflow. You would be doing him a favor.” Now that answer made sense to Ash. He had felt that way himself. The captain was a smart man, a lot smarter than Ash, but even he must be overwhelmed from time to time. “How is your read of the Iliad treating you?”

  “I like it sir. It’s not as good as Starship Troopers, and it’s a helluva lot harder to read, but the Iliad is good too. Did that really happen? Avery was saying that the book was about a historical battle between the Greeks and Trojans. I don’t know if I would like someone like Achilles to have actually lived though. Odysseus kind of reminds me of you though.”

  “Right. Just remember, don’t over burden the captain with a lot of extra information that he doesn’t need. I’ve talked to the most of the other squad leaders about this, and they all agree.” If everyone else agreed, who was he to argue?

  Patrols stretched further and further as the summer progressed and approached the onset of fall. Soon the captain ordered the troops to take the trucks since the distances involved would make hiking out, fighting and then returning before nightfall, more and more difficult. Diesel fuel was short and difficult to find. More problematically, they used it in the generators as well as the trucks. Despite this, they managed to clear most of the business district of the city of zombies before midsummer. Some of the suburbs too.

  Then there were the buildings. Hundreds, even thousands of structures all across the city were infested with zombies. A smart assed comment was not required, though Avery still made one when Ash pointed it out. The company, at the captain’s orders, left them alone. They cleaned out a few, supermarkets, their warehouses, and stores and shopping malls that they would want to take supplies from. They took weapons, clothing and other necessities form wherever they could find them. Food too, though they had enough still stored in the warehouses that they cleared during late spring. But by in large, they ignored the zombies in the buildings. Going in after them was just too dangerous. “After all,” Sarge had said, “they’ll rot eventually. This way, we’re safe and they can die in their own time. Everyone wins.” Ash was inclined to agree, as he usually did, with Sarge’s outlook.

  Life was hard for everybody, especially for anyone who hadn’t been a member of the company since the beginning. The captain treated his soldiers better than the conscripts and the conscripts better than the civilians. The way he saw it, the original company, or what was left of it as it had been badly mauled in the past months, leaving openings to be filled by people of the captain’s choosing. Most of those, Ash noticed, were fanatically loyal to the captain. He was bigger than Jesus, Elvis and the President combined.

  The original company was by in large held back at base, with a handful of NCOs going out at the head of conscript companies on their search and destroy missions. The conscripts were cannon fodder in the eyes of the captain, and he was more than willing to throw away their lives for unimportant missions. He even let them venture into the buildings if they wanted to. And many did, all in hopes that he would recognize their bravery and promote them to being full soldiers. A rare thing.

  The following day brought all five of the survivors to the roof together. There they stood, overlooking the zombie infested parking lot below. Jason, Lynn and Douglas were standing at the front edge of the roof over the entrance surveying the horde. There was probably around two hundred or so feet of pavement between the building and the compact car that Crayson was entombed in. Half of that space what packed with zombies who still seemed intent on getting inside the store below.

  Amy was begging Billy not to go, holding him tightly, pleading to let her go instead since she was the one who needed to know. Billy was stroking her hair and holding her closely to his chest. Saying nothing. No amount of worry on her part, no matter how much she begged, nothing was going to keep him from such an adventure. Billy wanted the adventure, maybe he even needed it. Jason had never seen him sit still for such a long time without doing something silly or stupid.

  Jason tried to calculate a rough estimate of number of zombies between the building and the car. The best he could manage was ‘thousands’, only because ‘a lot’ sounded too vague and rather lame even in his own head. “What do you think?” He asked Lynn, “Two, maybe three thousand?”

  “I’d say five thousand at least. Maybe more.” Five thousand, that was a lot of hungry mouths and must be at least a quarter of the population of the city proper, full time residents only. Students and summer people would add at least another ten thousand. His mind was wandering and he brought it back to what was ahead, and below. Five thousand zombies, maybe more.

  Most of the undead were congregating near the doors on either end of the building. Pushing against one another in a vain attempt to get to the doors and inside the store. If they had still been alive when they had come, the ones nearest the building would have been crushed to death long since. Looking down from his vantage point, th
e undead seemed like a the cross section of two of piles of sand placed on top of a box, reaching out to one another to blend together in the center, while at the same time spilling over the edge and down the side.

  Jason and Billy had decided that it would be best to lower themselves down at the rear of the building on the side furthest away from the loading docks. There was a fence in the rear of the building, dividing the property in half and segregating the loading docks from the rest of the property. Their needs were two fold, they needed a safe location from which to start and return, but they also didn’t wish to draw any undue attention to the back door at the loading dock and their vehicles. Doing so would only serve to block them in, and drive Jason further insane.

  They took one last look over the edge to make sure that their path was clear all the way to the front of the building before Billy and Jason slid down the ropes that they had lowered to the ground a few minutes before. There they waited for a moment. There was no need to rush, and plenty of reasons not to. Both Jason and Billy used the pause to take a deep breath of freedom, enjoying it while they could.

  Lynn watched her two best friends move over the edge of the roof and down the ropes down to the pavement below. Her stomach twisted in a knot as their feet touched the ground. The horror had only just begun. With Jason and Billy on the ground safely, weapons in hand and ready to get to their work, Lynn led Douglas and Amy over to the front edge of the building to take their positions.

  Lynn unshouldered Billy’s rifle, swinging it around into her hands using a fancy move she had seen so many times in the movies. She eased the bolt back, for perhaps the thirtieth time in the last fifteen minutes, to make sure that there was a round in the chamber and the rifle was ready to go. The safety went off with a flick of her finger. The rifle went from being safe to being deadly, with just a twitch of such a minor muscle.

  Billy hefted his mace “Lord Bashinator,” as he still insisted on calling the thing, and stepped out from around the back corner of the building, with Jason in his shadow, sword in hand, walking at a crouch towards the front, and the horde. Jason ran his hand along the masonry as they walked just to touch something real, safe and cool.

  Billy started whistling a tune, one of his favorites, something about a train chase, before Jason smacked him upside the head to shut him up again. The more things changed, the more some things just stayed the same. Meanwhile, their friends back on the roof moved around to the front, making noise and garnering the attention of the horde below. Lynn had the rifle in hand, in case they were unable to pull off the stunt as smoothly as planned.

  Her two friends exited the shadow of the Megamart and entered her line of sight, leaving a trail of corpses as they progressed along their chosen path. They met with light resistance, only a handful of rogues that had drifted away from the collective, drops of spray rising from the wave of what had once been humanity. So far so good. She just hoped that her friends remembered to hurry. Droplets were easy to wipe clean, the whole ocean would drown them.

  Lynn scanned the open lot between them and Crayson’s car. Aside from some more rogue zombies and a handful of cars, their route was clear. Jason reached down, flipped on his radio, and gave them the thumbs up signal before patting Billy on the shoulder and taking the first steps forward towards Crayson.

  Lynn brought the butt of the rifle against her shoulder. If anything was going to happen, it would happen soon. The duo moved forward in a crouch, using the few cars that speckled the blacktop as cover to protect them from the thousands of sets of searching eyes. The attempt at stealth was an empty gesture, since the zombies seemed to know exactly where they were hiding each time they moved, and they began to close in like sharks scenting blood.

  Jason and Billy continued to move carefully and slowly. Not a smart thing to do.

  A double handful zombies had edged around the side of the building and away from the front doors where so many of their number had congregated. Jason marveled at this course of action, wondering if perhaps the rogues had departed in search of easier prey.

  Most of them however were part of the large ocean of flesh, barring the few outlying stragglers. The two companions gave the horde a large berth, or at least as much as they could, as they jogged along the chain link fence that marked the border of the property. From time to time they slowed to dispath one of the unfortunate stragglers as it reached out to try and grasp them as they passed.

  Jason had seen video footage of schools of ocean fish in nature documentaries. The footage always showed the fish acting and reacting almost as a single living organism whenever danger was near. The horde reminded him of those fish, responding as one to a given stimulus. Today the stimulus was the arrival of Jason and Billy.

  A wave of faces turned towards himself and Billy as they passed. Jason changed his mental image, now it reminded him more of the creature from the movie the Blob. A horror movie that he was currently right in the middle. Then again, zombie movies were generally considered horror, and he had been living one of those for weeks. Jason slapped Billy on the back, urging him to hurry up, before sticking a foot of steel through the eye of another straggler.

  The group had talked their plan over several times, discussing it almost as if they were a committee. The duo, which Billy had demanded to name team Rowsdower, would sneak out with as much as they could muster and find the car that had carried Amy and Crayson. Once they found the car, Jason and Billy, or team Rowsdower, would do whatever needed to be done to whatever was left of Amy’s friend. After that, they would lure the horde out away from the back corner of the building before bolting to safety. Mulling over the running he was about to embark upon, Jason was thankful that he had the foresight to have given up smoking. And even more so that he started working out. Even so, he hoped that he had enough energy when the race was run to climb back up the ropes to the safety of their rooftop fortress.

  The zombies were slow, stumbling along in their wake as the duo passed. The undead movements jerky and delayed, giving them the advantage of speed. Jason found himself thanking God that they were slow zombies rather than the other kind, before he realized that thanking God for zombies was like thanking a thief for stealing the contents of his pockets and leaving the empty wallet. It was an empty gesture. The thought nearly lead Jason to wonder if he and his friends were in hell and what they had done to get there.

  They had all done their own special crimes. Billy said over and over that it was because they had spent so much time watching scrambled Cinemax as teenagers. Lynn had of course disagreed, blaming it on the time where they ordered a hundred boxes of Girl Scout cookies under a false name and address. Douglas had just stated that the line of conversation was stupid, that they were here, it had happened, deal with it. Billy wondered aloud if Douglas had been a serial puppy kicker or something behind all of their backs. Amy clung to the hope that it was all a dream. Jason just thought it was a gigantic cosmic joke on their part, the universe’s way of saying ‘be careful of what you wish for because you just might get it.’ Jason hated irony.

  Jason and Billy were halfway out, along the outer edge of the parking lot when they turned and made a beeline for the center. The adventurers had marked out where the car rested, which was rather unnecessary since the lot was largely empty in the first place. They could see the top, or rather the bottom, of the small compact from where they stood at the edge of the lot.

  “Let’s get this done” Jason looked back towards their crowd of admirers, both the living and the dead, “we’ve already draw too much attention as is.” He turned on his radio and gave a big thumbs up back to his friends on the roof before patting Billy on the shoulder and moving again towards the center of the lot.

  It seemed that Amy was reading Lynn’s mind. She broke in, yelling over the radio, “What are you two doing? Move faster, they know where you are.” Jason and Billy weren’t idiots, at least some of the time, and they followed Amy’s suggestion,
picking up and sprinting the final stretch, slamming into the car to halt their momentum. Billy dropped into a crouch wrestling with the door to get it open. The zombies were stumbling closer, slowly, maybe fifty yards or so now to the nearest. Billy got the door to the car open and looked inside.

  Billy had squatted down next to the car, it had been scorched badly in the fire. Paint had melted and then burned away, leaving large patches empty carbon scorched metal in several places. Billy busted the window with his mace and pulling the door open a crack to get a better look inside, before hauling the door open all the way. “Take a look at this,” He said, waving Jason over.

  Jason squatted down next to him. Crayson, it must have been him, was still active. The charred zombie was still twitching about. It had sensed their presence and tried turning it’s head towards them to, see or hear or smell, they weren’t quite sure which it could still do. All that was certain was that Crayson hadn’t been resting peacefully for weeks like they had hoped. Blackened flesh flaked off as Crayson struggled against the belt that was still holding him in.

  “Aw shit, just shit.” Jason said. He took the radio off his belt and said “Hey Amy, no problems, he seems to be quite dead and peaceful.” Jason turned his back to the rooftop, blocking the view on the onlookers and made a pistol gesture with his hand to Billy, who nodded and took out one of his handguns and put a single bullet through Crayson’s brain and out the opposite window, splattering the passenger’s seat with gore from the inside of the man’s skull.

  Amy’s voice came over the radio “What was that?” She sounded nearly panicked, “Is everything alright?”

  Billy grabbed the radio, answering his lover “we were just making one hundred percent sure. I don’t think anyone wants to make this trip again any time soon.” Billy gave Jason the radio and stood up. In his best cowboy voice (which was still terrible) he said, “Well, looks like we got this one pretty well wrapped up, wouldn’t you say pardner?”

  “Come on, let’s get out of here.”

  “There’s one more thing I gotta do.” Billy turned to a small group of perhaps fifteen zombies that were a little quicker and had broken away from the rest of the horde.

  “Damnit Billy, this isn’t the time!”

  Winking broadly at Jason, Billy sauntered over to the zombies and began his victory dance, taunts included, all while standing just out of arms reach of the encroaching undead. “Hey there ya big pile of ugly, do ya always smell like that?” It seemed to be lost on him that the zombies were immune to taunts, either that or it was an important part of his ritual of humiliation. Nobody was ever quite sure entirely who suffered the humiliation, the losers, Billy, anyone in the room with him when he did his dance.

  Jason wished that one day he could sit back and watch the dance that the friends had dubbed ‘The Billy’. Douglas had once likened Billy as having looked like a drunken moose when he danced, no matter which dance he did. The Robot, The Funky Chicken, a waltz intended to grace a fancy ballroom, he always ended up looking like a clumsy backup dancer for some third rate pop star running the county fair circuit. The spectacle was awful, the very spirit of Drunken-Moosedness, as Lynn had later dubbed it. Billy had no rhythm and to be honest, he seemed to only half know what the dances that he was attempting actually looked like.

  The final effect was like a train wreck, nobody wanted to see it, but they would be damned if they were going to look away, or even blink. The down side was that Billy always decided to do it at the worst of all possible times. Case in point, he was now doing it in front of a horde of ravenous zombies intent on devouring his flesh.

  “What the hell is that idiot doing?” Douglas blared over the radio. Someone was crying in the background, it sounded like Amy.

  “I think it’s supposed to be the Running Man.” Jason mumbled as stood transfixed, hypnotized, the train wreck analogy held.

  The dance had gotten more elaborate since the last time he had seen it begun. Evolving beyond the cartwheels and shouts of “WoooHoooo!” that it had begun as. Billy was in the middle of backpedaling while making pelvic thrusts at the zombies when his heel hit the curb sending backwards ass over head. He hit the ground hard, his mace flying from his hand towards Crayson’s car.

  Then the zombies were right on top of him.

  The scream came from two directions at once in a disturbing form of stereo. It echoed across the pavement, being torn from Billy’s lungs, and at the same time was blasted through the radio speaker in Amy’s hand. Amy threw down the radio and screamed, trying desperately to form something resembling a coherent sentence and failing. Lynn brought the scope to her eye, trying to get a better grasp on what was happening below, but there was a wall of flesh between her and Billy. She panned over to Jason, an expression of horror had spread halfway across his face before freezing. Lynn felt sick.

  Billy screamed again. A bloodcurdling sound that burned Jason’s ears to hear it. The zombies were getting closer to him and he was screaming louder as they did. This wasn’t supposed to be part of the game, or part of their plan. Something grabbed Jason’s left arm and pulled. He spun around and found himself face to face with one of the zombies. He clubbed the thing across the temple with the pommel of his long sword. There was a cracking sound and the thing went down. More were to follow.

  There were more zombies coming from back towards the Megamart, but they were still far away and moving slowly. Jason turned to face the zombies that surrounded his friend. He sheathed his sword, there were too many to stab or hack at, and instead went to the shotgun.

  The first one he shot was a tall skinny man in a ragged brown suit and then a woman in pants and a tank top. Three more and he was out of ammunition with his shotgun with no time to reload. He dropped the shotgun, hearing it clatter on the ground as he nudged it aside with his right foot. His 45s were in his hands almost before he realized that he had reached for them.

  Billy had stopped screaming but Jason refused to give up hope. If he got there fast enough... He started shooting, one at a time, carefully, trying to kill each of the hell spawn with one shot before moving on to the next. Zombie after zombie fell, oozing blood and brain matter onto the blacktop. Finally he emptied the magazines of his 45s and switched over to his sword once more, there were just a bare handful left, but they were gathered around where he had seen Billy fall. Jason knocked the creatures aside, stabbing and swinging, rushing to get to his friend. If he got there fast enough… If he got there fast enough… If he got there fast enough.

  Billy was dead. The zombies had ripped out his innards and his throat and eaten what they could while he was still alive. He had been screaming for help while being eaten alive. And no help had come. Jason had not gotten there fast enough. Jason threw up.

  Wiping his mouth on his shirtsleeve he walked back to retrieve his shotgun from where he had kicked it. He cleaned his long sword off on one of the corpses before sheathing it on his back. He picked it up and started loading shells into the tube magazine under the barrel and then shouldered the shotgun so he could reload his 45s.

  He looked up at the roof of the store. Lynn, Douglas and Amy were watching him, waiting for news. He simply shook his head. Amy fell to her knees and Lynn buried her face in Douglas’ chest. He knew she was crying, he could almost hear her sobs. There was a scrape on the pavement behind him. Jason looked back over his shoulder. Billy was standing up.

  What was at one time Billy was standing up. Blood was running out from his wounds and his eyes were glazed over. He was no longer Billy, but he was still Billy. The creature reached out at Jason and took a step forward. His words came flooding back into Jason’s head, he didn’t want to be like that. Jason walked over to the where Billy’s mace had landed and picked it up.

  He had known Billy for as long as he could remember. They were as close as could be. They had done everything together for years. Billy was dead. It was a surreal notion, one that didn’t
want to sink in. The thought rang in his head like a bell, shaking him to his core. Billy was dead. Jason looked at the creature that had so recently been his best friend. Billy, the zombie, reached out its left hand towards him and gnashed its teeth. The last of its blood draining out of the wounds that covered its body.

  Not so soon God, not so soon. Billy was supposed to be there for them until the end. This was not a part of the plans. Oh shit.

  Billy moaned again as it stumbled blindly over the remains of the other zombies, the ones that had eaten him alive, as he, it worked desperately to reach Jason and feast himself. The zombie’s mouth hung open as it walked, it’s head lolling back and forth loosely. Jason heaved a sigh and laughed bitterly. It was a sad turn of events that Douglas was still alive while Billy was dead. Billy had been hoping and dreaming about the zombie apocalypse coming for years beyond memory, while Douglas merely laughed at the possibility as a children’s game that they were still playing.

  He raised the mace and pointed it at the head of the walking corpse that had so recently been his best friend. With a sharp intake of his breath Jason closed his eyes lifted the weapon into the air over his head and stepped forward. His eyes opened as he brought the mace down on top of his friend’s head. Billy’s skull collapsed under the blow the bone shattering in a thunderous crunch, leaving the rest of his empty shell of a body to drop to the ground. To lie with the rest of the zombies that Jason had killed while trying to rescue his friend.

  “Vaya con dios comrade,” he whispered under his breath as he tossed the mace aside, turned his back and walked away to try and find a way through the sea of the walking dead. Back into his fortress prison and sanctuary.

  There was a screeching sound of breaks as Jason sat bolt upright. The screams from his nightmare still ringing in his ears. The day looked to be well into the mid-afternoon and he was lying on the bed in the back of the truck. The conversation that he had only barely been aware of as he slept had stopped, along with the entire van itself. He stretched and sat up, turning his neck to see what was going on.

  Lynn was in the front arguing over the walkie-talkie. She and Douglas were yelling about what they were going to do next. Kime, the SUV was about fifty feet ahead of the truck and Douglas was driving it. Amy was nowhere in immediate site, meaning that she was probably in the SUV next to Douglas.

  Listening to the conversation, Jason learned that the small town in which they had been aiming for, had been overrun with zombies. Tourists up from the south had packed the little burg to the gills most weeks of the summer. At the best of times those people acted like zombies, that they were actually zombies didn’t improve matters much.

  Now of course they could kill them without getting frowned at by members of the merchant’s guild. Come to think of it they would probably have to kill off the merchants guild as well. He grinned at the thought until he realized how bloody he was becoming. It was still bizarre and frightening to think of the zombies as being less than human beings. As being less than living beings.

  “How long have I been out?”

  Wake, eat, ride, stop, fuck, eat, get drunk and fall asleep.

  That was the pattern that his days followed. Dirk wasn’t really sure how many days passed. The booze gifted him with that little blessing. Little happened to break the monotony, so all the days seemed to roll together. Sometimes they ran into the walking corpses. The fucking things seemed to be everywhere these days. They would stir some memories up, and Dirk would then repress them by getting drunk.

  Fuck. He never swore like that before. Even on his worst day, he kept his mouth clean. It was how he had been raised. Then again, he had never killed anyone either. A lot had changed in the last weeks.

  Sometime in there, Chuckles, their idiot comic relief got bitten by one of the walking corpses. He was dancing with one of the females, grinding on her really, when she took a chunk out of his cheek. They had to put him down for good when he got sick, died and became a walking corpse himself before attacking the Chief. That was the only time Chuckles had managed to make Dirk laugh.

  After Chuckles died. Or maybe before. Who kept track? The gang ran into a helpless family of Mexicans driving along a lone highway in a van. The gang surrounded the van, demanding that they pull over and pay a ‘tax’. A couple of them came out shooting and swinging. There was a lot of screaming. Some of the gang members got hurt. They took it out in blood, killing two of the adults and keeping the rest for later.

  Dirk knew what was going to happen from the get go and decided that he would rather not actually see it. He started getting drunk, trying to blind himself to what was happening before his eyes, he tried to stop the screams from echoing in his ears. Worse, the barbaric grunts and laughter of his godly companions.

  So, life went on like that. Every time the Mexicans were used, it hurt Dirk. Nearly driving him mad with the pain. He began to hate them for being so damn weak and for hurting him like they did. He wanted to kill them, but they were kept locked away and out of his reach. Maybe if he tried, he could end both of their pain. Instead, opened a new bottled of scotch.

  That winter they stayed in a little town that they cleared out of the walking dead. It would be their new home the Boss said, a fortress that they could return to when times got rough out on the open road. They even found another survivor or two to add to their little menagerie. The newcomers fared as well as the Mexicans, and went to join the two who were left in the back of the van.

  While in town, the gang split up, each member or couple staking out their own digs. The boss claimed her own, and dragged along the Mexican man. Dirk never learned the man’s name, though he heard that everyone called him Jesus. Probably some sick joke thought up by one of his fellow Gods. Gods it turned out were jealous of other deities.

  Dirk spent most of the winter drinking. He would have forgotten to eat or bathe if the Chief hadn’t sent someone over to take care of him. Usually it was the poor Mexican girl. She was broken by then and the boss trusted her not to flee when given a chance. She was gentle and kind as she bathed and fed him. She treated him with something like love and compassion, like he was her child. Covering him with blankets as he slept. Working hard to keep him alive through the winter. The bitch. He hated her for that.

  No, it wasn’t her fault. The boss had commanded that he was to be kept alive. He was still big and strong and an asset to the gang. And if the poor little Mexican girl didn’t see to it that Dirk survived the winter, well then her brother wouldn’t either and her own end would be even worse. The boss would see to that, and so far she had always kept her promises.

  One of the gang’s toys, toys bieng what they called the human beings that they had kidnapped. Calling another person toy made them seem less human, made the abuses that the gang stacked on much more enjoyable. Well one of the four toys, a man, died that winter. He cut the throat of one of the gang members who wanted to have a little bit of fun at the toy’s expense. Oh how the rest of the gang had beaten him. There was little left that could have been recognized as being human.

  Gods still? Maybe. But not the human kind. They were little better than animals.

  Dirk stayed in his house and drank and wished that he was dead. The rest of the gang too. The sooner the better. Oh how he had hated them and wished that he was strong enough to make that hatred into something useful. But no, all he could do was go on hating.

  Then came the spring, when they set out again. The snows were gone, roads clean and the weather warmed. They piled the three surviving toys into the back of the van with a filthy mattress and left their winter stronghold. Dirk rubbed his eyes as he stepped out of his house for the first time in months. The sun glared powerfully, burning his eyes for the first time in weeks. He quickly blinked away his tears and put on a pair of shades, hand-me-downs from the previous Dirk to go along with his blood-crusted bandana. There was a great wide world out there and crimes to com
mit. The Boss didn’t want to waste any time.

  The journey out of town and into the hills was still rather blurry and confused. The parts he could recall butted up on one another, becoming locked together until one passed to the next as if they were the same. Jason remembered freaking out once he returned to the roof and demanding that they get the hell out of the Megamart. Amy meanwhile just screamed, Lynn and Douglas had to wrestle the gun away from her before she could hurt herself. She was still on suicide watch.

  The line of events that occurred immediately afterwards was blank in his mind, aside from the seemingly endless driving punctuated by stops to eat, sleep or pee. He went to sleep in that car and woke up here in the hills. He had functioned along the way, as a sort of automaton, sleeping while he was awake. Lynn told him later that he just seemed to shut down. He had scared her deeply.

  Somehow or another, they had ended up in the hills, with two new people that Jason barely remembered picking up. After several days in the highlands Jason’s mind finally began to clear once more as the sharp edge of his grief and despair began to dull somewhat. He began to awake once more. The pain was still there, as were the guilt and grief, but they were no longer a sea in which he was floundering.

  So much time had passed since they had seen another human being, living or dead, that they had at last relaxed the rules somewhat. Weapons of course were taken everywhere any of the companions went, whether it was to dinner, or a later latrine visit, or a midnight romp in the woods with a lover, their guns were ever present. Their weapons were what had kept them alive during their exodus.

  Even though they were armed twenty-four hours a day, they did relax a little. After just a few weeks in the quiet bliss of the hilly wilderness, they had slowly let go of the second most important rule:

  Nobody goes anywhere alone.

  Jason, more than the rest, took the greatest advantage of the newfound freedom to roam the wilds. After months locked in the Megamart, and bleary days trapped in one of the cars, either as a driver or a passenger, he was sure that he had been both during their travels, he had ceased the freedom to wander safely through the forest. The newly rediscovered freedom was neither complete nor carefree, but in days such as these, he took what he could get.

  Even in his wanderings around the hillsides, he had a leash or two attached to his collar, keeping him in check. First, he was compelled by the love he had for his friends to call in over his walkie-talkie and check in with them from time to time, to let them know that he was safe. That limited his wanderings to about an eight-mile radius of the base camp. That left a lot of distance to cover by foot and land to explore, but still it chaffed him some to be so reined in.

  More importantly, there was the ever-present threat of zombies. It was true that they hadn’t seen anything since they had arrived and set up their camp, but chances were that some of the cold bastards would eventually mindlessly wander away from their homes, leading them into the wilderness in search of food to try and satiate their eternal hunger. Just the merest chance of ending up like Billy kept Jason’s head up and his eyes and ears open. This held true even when he was in camp and encircled within the embrace of his friends.

  The more he wandered, the more he thought. The physical exercise did wonders for the philosophical side of his personality. A side that he had never known existed prior to his becoming a rover. The more he thought, the less he wanted to fall prey to Billy’s fate. An obvious conclusion maybe, but one that was repeatedly underlined with each hike concluded.

  Jason had taken to leaving his sword and one of his .45s in camp whenever he ventured out for a hike. All the extra gear just got in the way, and it was generally unnecessary. He still took extra shells for his shotgun, a couple spare magazines for his remaining .45 and a heavy bladed knife that could handle anything from chopping wood to splitting skulls. He was armed to the proverbial teeth.

  Aside from that he carried some extra camping gear that would ease his survival in case circumstances got hairy. A canteen, fifty or so feet of rope, some fishing tackle, a tarp, and an emergency fire kit rounded out the most important of his possessions. Just incase the Almighty caught him doing something extremely stupid and decided to teach him an abject lesson.

  Jason hoisted his bag onto his shoulders. The bag was still heavy, and his equipment weighed him down, building the muscles in his legs and back and expanding his lungs. With all the gear, he tended to clink as he walked, sending the wild life scurrying away as he approached, preventing him from seeing much in the way of wildlife. But it also kept him from sneaking up on and startling any of the large carnivores that still roamed the area. A startled animal didn’t always flee as might be expected.

  The weather promised to be pleasant that day, and he had a good deal of land to the north that still needed to be explored. There was supposed to be an old stone quarry that had half filled with water that he wanted to locate and explore further. He had heard descriptions of it from friends who had traveled the hills, wannabe hippies who loved the outdoors mostly, and they had come back with stories of their ‘adventures’. He knew it was nearby, so he thought he would take a look.

  The hills, as the locals called them, were actually ancient mountains. Worn away with the passage of so many millions of years that Jason’s mind boggled trying to comprehend the scope of those long eons. The once jagged peaks had been ground down through wind and rain transforming them into speed-bumps when compared to the Rockies. Still heavily forested, with some areas still being virgin timber, it had been set aside a century ago as a state park. A fortunate move that had left vast tracks of land lush, and largely empty of human life, or these days, unlife.

  Jason was enjoying the first sunny day to cross the hills what felt like weeks. He had been confined to the little camp for the last couple of days, imprisoned by the steady sheets of a drenching downpour that quenched his wanderlust. Huddling around the picnic table that they had found readily installed in their campground, they played Scrabble and Monopoly. How he hated those two games. But he had played, and done so until his feet felt like they were going to burst into flames because he was unable to scratch the itch that was his wanderlust.

  Finally the sun had returned, and the sky was nearly empty of the hated clouds. Jason was once more free to roam the countryside. Birds twittered and the trees whispered to one another as a pleasant mid summer’s breeze ran its fingers through their boughs, rattling leaves as it passed. The kind of day dreamed up by sappy amateur poets and then compared their love to and lamented over. It was a good day to be alive.

  Jason took the north trail out of their campsite, a winding path that was regularly bisected by the roots of the ginormous pine trees that it wound its way through. A trail gouged into the side of the hill by a strange force often unemployed by Mother Nature, generations of hikers. Trees so large that even with their hands linked, he and Douglas wouldn’t be able to wrap their arms around the trunk. They had tried. Getting the sap out of his hair had taken Lynn a week.

  The trail went up. Further into the mountains.

  Quitting smoking had paid off for him. Though he was winded by the time that he had reached the summit of the hill, he didn’t feel as if he was about to cough up a lung. Which was good since he was more than passingly fond of keeping his lungs in his chest. Where they belonged. The heavy breathing was good though, he felt more alive, stronger with each passing day. It was his new addiction, and he no longer wondered why those hippies he had known around school were so fond of the whole ‘getting sweaty and breathing hard while outside under the bright fire orb’ thing as he and Billy had then called it as they sat on the couch playing video games and avoiding natural light and unprocessed foods.

  Billy. Jason was stung by a pang of grief and anger as the name crossed through his mind like a heard of elephants. He had lost his best friend because his best friend for lack of better words had been a giant silly idiot. Not just once. Bu
t through his entire life. It was just the last time that had gotten him into trouble. Well more trouble than usual. He played the part of the sacrificial clown, and then Jason shot him in the face.

  Now Jason felt the need to go out and walk around the hills until he was too tired to think straight. Exhaustion helped quell the dreams.

  The air smelled fresh and piney. Piney? Was that a word? If not, it was now. How Douglas, the rule lawyer, had hated playing Scrabble with him. The mrqitz. ‘Ha’, he had roared as he set down his last letter tile! Triple word score. Though he didn’t get the fifty-point bonus for using all his letters, it did send Douglas sputtering. Define it? Sure, mrqitz: an expression of unexpected triumph during a game of Scrabble.

  Lynn nearly wet her pants with laughter.

  The air smelled fresh and piney and Jason took up a song, one of Billy’s favorites, therefore it made little or no sense to anyone else, an inside joke known only to Billy himself. “This is the song, written for the train chase, this is the chase Rocky and Ken! He tried to kill me with a…Ah sonuva bitch!” He yelled as he tripped over a root, stumbled several steps and nearly fell face first onto the path, interrupting the song with some cunningly improvised new lyrics.

  He had been so busy singing, while keeping his head up and watching out for zombies, that he nearly killed himself by tripping over a tree root. There had to be a valuable life lesson in there somewhere. That, or some higher power was just trying to tell him not to sing. Especially not songs from that stupid show with the guy and his two puppets who watched bad movies and made sarcastic comments as they went.

  Maybe Lynn was right about his voice and he didn’t sound as good as he had liked to pretend. It could be that there was a deity out there trying to silence his voice for the good of the universe. He vowed to keep his mouth shut and instead watch where he put his feet from that day forward. At least until he was standing in a nice safe flat clearing. Then he would both honor and curse his late friend by singing some of his favorite, stupid, songs. No dry and boring funeral rites would do, something fun and inane.

  That, after all, is what Billy would have wanted.

  Jason leaned out and looked over into the edge of the pit. The mine was even more impressive than he had expected it to be. Really it was just a giant hole in the earth, almost like a crater, one with steep sides. The pit was half full of green water. Jason couldn’t see the bottom, so maybe it was more than half full. The cool green water looked inviting for a mid afternoon swim, deep and cool and ever so calm down in the pit away from the blowing wind. The surface was like glass, so far protected from the summer breeze. It was reflecting the scattered clouds as they drifted overhead between the walls of the mine. Jason tossed in a stone, listening to the plunking sound of the splash as it rung off the walls and watching the rings form.

  It had been a long time since he had enjoyed a pleasant dip in the cool water. He so loved to swim, causing him to envy the stone he had just thrown. A pity that the mine was probably still poisoned from all the chemicals that the mining company had dumped before the mine had been abandoned. The water did indeed call up to him to experience its cool embrace, as he stood sweating under the hot summer sun. A pity indeed.

  He had just sat down to watch the reflected clouds, leaning his head back on his backpack, and catch his breath from the hike when a noise caught his ear. It was far too faint to be sure what it was. He scanned the rim of the crater. The edge of the mine was barren of all plant life for fifty feet, making it easy to quickly look over. There was no movement, and nothing but bare rock all the way around, except for the small shack a couple hundred meters further to the north of where he stood.

  He waited for a moment, ears perked and listening to the wind, when he caught the sound again, floating in from the direction of the small shack.

  Jason un-shouldered his shotgun and started walking at a quick pace towards the shack, and whatever was making the noise, leaving his camping gear where he had dropped it. He made slow progress over the rough ground, opting for safety over speed. He trudged along, stepping carefully over the small boulders that lined the cliff until he finally got close enough to make out what the sound actually was.

  It was a woman screaming.

  He immediately picked up his pace. It had been weeks since they had run into any other survivors aside from their small group, and that experience, had left them all with hope of finding other people to join up with. As he got closer, he could make out more details about the small shack. It was old and rather dilapidated. The wooden walls were a weathered grey that spoke volumes about the long years that it had stood alone and forgotten on the edge of the mine, doomed to stare into the green waters below.

  He crept up to the edge of the building, the screams were coming from inside, and now he could hear a scratching and pounding on the wall on the far side of the shack. He moved as stealthily as he could, footstep at a time, making no noise until he reached the far corner. Jason slung his shotgun back on his shoulder and pulled out his knife. He stuck the blade around the corner of the shack and used it as a mirror to see what he was up against. One zombie. One lousy zombie. The lone creature was making one hell of a racket, beating against the door to get at whoever was inside. Now was a good time to take care of it, a single zombie should be easy enough to take care of, but then overconfidence could just as easily kill him.

  Jason whispered a prayer to whatever deity might still be watching over him, though he had never before really found much use for religion. If he had any luck, the fervent prayer would make up for the earlier singing, neutralizing that deity’s annoyance with him. The idea that an all powerful being cared about the littlest details of his life had always struck him as absurd, and as soon as he had moved out of his parents home he had given up going to church all together. But then he was still alive, while it seemed that most of the rest of the world had perished. Worsed that perished, they had not only died, they had been damned to an eternity of walking the earth starving but never dying completely.

  If the occasional thank you to a God he had never before seen was required that he wouldn’t share their fate, then Jason was more than willing to say thanks, he might even pick up a nice card while he was at it.

  The prayer seemed to work, the zombie hadn’t noticed his approach. The creature’s full attention was on the door to the shack, its full will bent on trying to get through the flimsy plywood door.

  Jason could still hear the woman inside crying and moaning for help, her voice turned dry and raspy. That was a good sign, or at least better than the alternatives. Quietly, he altered his grip on the survival knife, making sure that it was both firm and loose before he tiptoed forward. The walls of the shack were too thin to trust a shotgun shell, or even a round from his 45. A bullet might go clear through and strike the woman inside. He didn’t have a good log or other bludgeon handy, which he would have preferred, better to keep the thing at further than arm’s length. The knife was all he had, so the knife it was. Besides, it was one zombie he was talking about, to shoot it would be a waste of a bullet.

  He had always wanted to try something like this, sort of. It had kind of burned in the back of his mind, probably from watching years and years of war movies, combined with the zombie flicks that he had gorged himself on. Sneaking up on his prey with a knife in hand and doing it in, commando style. Except, he wouldn’t be going for the throat. Or covering the mouth with his hand to make sure it didn’t scream.

  Jason lunged forward and grabbed the zombie by the skull, slamming the creature face first into the wooden wall of the shack. Let it eat splinters. Quickly he pinned its body to the door with his shoulder, before ramming the blade into the back of the creature’s neck, and sawing until he completely severed the spinal cord until the thing went completely limp against the door. Blood oozed out of the wound, down the thing’s neck and onto handle of his knife.

  He pushed himself away from the
wall and the corpse, pulling his knife out of its neck as he retreated. The zombie slid down the door and made a soft thud as it hit the ground. Jason squatted down over it and cleaned off his knife in the tattered and filthy clothing before re-sheathing it. There was a surprising amount of blood that had flowed for something that no longer had a pulse. Gravity had drained the skull of what remained after death.

  Jason examined the body. It had been a man, early thirties perhaps, skinny build, fairly tall. He wore what had been nice clothes at one time, and an expensive gold watch. The wallet said Allen Sutter of Seattle Washington. Allen had a bite taken out of his left arm.

  The man was a long way from home. But weren’t they all.

  He moved quickly. Pulling the Allen’s corpse out of the way, he tested the door himself to see how difficult that it would be to get it open. The door was locked, but opened inward. He could still hear the weeping from inside. He knocked on the door and yelled “Are you ok in there? The creature is dead, you’re safe now.” But go no response. Jason took a step back from the door and then with all of his weight behind him he kicked it as hard as he could, rattling the door in its frame, but no more.

  The woman inside started crying harder, and he tried to calm her down once more by telling her that she was safe. With his fourth kick, the door shattered off its hinges and fell down. Jason stepped onto the door and peered inside.

  The little shack was lit by a couple of heavily screened windows on either end. The first thing that he noticed has he stepped into the shade was that the stone floor was littered with old broken bits of discarded tools. The second detail to grab his eye was the rafters, they were full of cobwebs. The shack had been long abandoned.

  A bright flash of white drew his attention to the corner. There the screaming woman was sitting, huddled with her chin on her knees and tears flowing down her cheeks. She as rocking back and forth on her heels and cradling what looked like the limp form of a small child protectively in her arms.

  Jason stepped closer, slowly, like he might have done while trying to approach a skittish wounded animal. Holding up his hands and whispering to her in what he hoped was a comforting voice that she was safe. He was here to protect her and her child, he said as he closed with her step by careful step.

  No matter what he said or how close he got, she never stopped rocking or crying. The woman didn’t even seem to be aware that he was in the shack with her. She was about the same age as the man, wearing similar upper class clothing. Her hair was a mess and her face red from her time spent weeping. Standing next to her shoulder, he stooped down and reached out a hand and lightly touched her arm. The light pat made the woman jump as if she had been struck She looked up at him for the first time since he had entered the shack.

  The woman shrieked and took a swing at him, trying to scratch out his eyes with her chipped fingernails. She screamed, “Stay away from us you monster!”. Jason blocked a second punch with his other hand and backed away a full meter and a half. He kept up soothing speech, continuing to try and calm the poor creature down. He also tried to get a better look at the child, it was breathing slowly and shallowly and looked as if it was asleep in her arms. Jason would have bet his shotgun and all of the shells that he had for it that the poor kid had been bitten too and was dying in its mother’s arms. The mother didn’t look like she was capable of dealing with the death of her child.

  “Are you alright ma’am?” He asked in a voice so low that it was nearly a whisper. “I took care of the zombie that was chasing you and was outside of the shack, it won’t bother you or your child again.”

  She looked up at him with pure venom burning in her tear-reddened eyes. The woman scrambled to her feet, pushing Jason backwards against the wall so that he lost his balance. With a swift movement she picked up her child and fled through the doorway and into the sunlight, pushing Jason aside with superhuman strength as she passed him by. Jason stumbled back against the wall of the shack. There was another anguished scream followed by “Murderer! You won’t get us too beast!”

  Jason stumbled through the front door of the shack, giving chase to the demented lady, just in time to see the woman and the child disappear over the edge of the cliff. Falling into the pit below. He didn’t bother looking over the edge, there would be nothing to see, or so he told himself. He just turned around and began to make his way back to the camp and the others. He had had enough of being alone in the wilderness for the day, what he needed now was a stiff drink and conversation with friends to drown out the madwoman’s screams as they rattled through his skull.

  It was the very tail end of the afternoon when Jason stomped back into camp. His feet were hurting from the long day of tromping across the hillsides, and singing, like some sort of clumsy Julie Andrews. With the lovely singing voice of a wounded moose, he had marked Billy’s passing and tried to forget the horror he had witnessed at the mine pit. He had forgotten his earlier vow to watch where he was going, and tempted the repeated wrath same vengeful god as before by singing more of Billy’s favorites as he returned home. The god seemed to be willing to let him be, as if he had already suffered enough for the day.

  Jason passed easily between the bumpers of the two cars that they had line together to form a windbreak. Summer storms tended to be breezy, especially on the mountainside. The five people, his three friends and the two newcomers, were there, sitting around the picnic table and chatting and playing euchre. Euchre was an insane card game played with only a partial deck of cards.. Jason could never make heads or tales of the rules, something Billy was merciless about bringing up every time they went out camping together. Euchre after all was the game that everyone at camp was required to know how to play. It could be said that euchre players weren’t playing with a full deck, but that joke got old pretty damn fast.

  Lynn was sitting next to Amy and holding her close. A few short weeks had passed since Billy had gotten himself killed while doing her a favor. And a dark favor it was. Amy blamed herself for his death, both deaths in fact. Crayson had died too, in an overturned car, and from a bullet to the brain. Billy had done the honors for the poor bastard. First he had burned, then he had arisen, only to have Billy shoot him in the head as he hung upside down in the car. Jason never told her. She was till acting catatonic.

  Then there were the newcomers. The friends had rescued them from a miniature horde of zombies at some little Podunk named Barlsville that they had passed through on their way north. The two had barricaded themselves inside a Stop and Shop gas station and were overjoyed to see living breathing human beings once more.

  They were, it turned out, on their honeymoon. Newlyweds. The Guinness Book of World Records, had there still been one, would have no doubt listed this as the worst honeymoon of all time. To be trapped far away from their homes in a gas station surrounded by the living dead.

  Ralph and Maggie were sitting on the bench across from Lynn, Amy and Douglas. They were foreigners, it was obvious from their speech. Their use of the English language. It wasn’t an interesting accent, or a penchant for inserting words from their first language when they were struggling for the correct phrase that gave them away. They spoke perfect English. Textbook English. With full sentences and no slang. They stood out like Ronald McDonald on a farm full of Amish people.

  Ralph was a large man with brown hair and blue eyes and a strange obsession with wearing loud and tacky Hawaiian shirts. He had a happy face. Maggie was a small slim-hipped Korean woman with black hair and eyes, she favored tight blue jeans and loose fitting white t-shirts, reminiscent of the 1950s, to go along with a cheerful face of her own. Two happy faced people living at opposite ends of the world, met, fell in love and then married. A miracle in modern times brought about by modern technology. Destined to make happy faced babies, and live out a long and happy life together. And then only to be spat on by the universe when the world went to hell in a handbag. The thought often made Jason laugh silent
ly, long and hard. Bitterly. Ralph and Maggie on the other hand still looked happy.

  The two of them were both hard working and intelligent, he was a trained engineer and she was working on her MFA in painting. She didn’t know what she was going to do with the degree either, Jason had asked. But it was her love. Besides, Ralph would have made more than enough for them to survive off of.

  Despite the hardship, they were bright and optimistic people. After all the hell they had gone through, they still had one another. That made them priceless.

  They were accepted as friends immediately.

  Jason dropped his backpack to the ground next to the bench, and sat down heavily next to Maggie and across from Douglas.

  “You’re back early.” Lynn said questioningly. She knew how much the wanderlust pulled at him and how little he had liked staying around camp on days like today. “Something wrong?”

  He slapped a mosquito that landed on his hand and prepared to help itself to his precious bodily fluids. The breeze had died down, and there was little of anything left to drive the greedy little bastards away. “I ran across a couple of partial survivors.”

  “Partial survivors?”

  With a quick glance to Amy and back he said, “Their bodies made it, the minds didn’t.”

  Douglas was puzzled and asked, “You mean zombies?” Jason just shook his head and then told them about his adventure up at the quarry. Leaving out some of the choicer bits about the singing and tripping, and then the repeating of the singing and the tripping.

  Maggie gave him a firm hug, and Ralph patted his back, while Lynn and Douglas each squeezed one of his hands. Even Amy reached out and touched him, tears in her eyes as she did it.

  Douglas broke the silence with a deep sigh, and then “No time is better than the present then. We need to get back to what we were discussing before. What do we do now?” He wasn’t referring the short term, whether or not they would have yet another bloody round of Risk, or perhaps do some fishing. He was referring to their long-term plans. What do they do now that they had left the safety of their Megamart home and fortress? Now that they were away from their rocky and barren little island in the stormy sea of the walking dead.

  Jason for one wasn’t sure, except about one thing, he didn’t want to find another Megamart, or the local equivalent.

  Winter was on its way and they were living in tents on the ground in the hills. They had food enough for an entire year, even with a dozen more people to feed. They had made sure of that before they had left the tatters of civilization behind. They had guns and ammunition enough to both hunt and protect themselves should the need arise. They had clothing to keep warm and some basic shelter. But they were living in tents. Tents wouldn’t keep the cold out, or more importantly, the zombies.

  Jason was the first to speak, “I say we stay up here.”

  “We live in tents Jason, it isn’t safe.” Douglas shook his head.

  Lynn voiced the most viable alternative “Well then let’s build a damn cabin.”

  “Build a cabin?”

  “Or more. We’re intelligent, college educated people. We have an engineer and well a painter with us. We can build a cabin. The ignorant backwoods yokels of days gone by were able to manage that much.”

  “They had training.”

  “We’ll get books, we’ll get tools, and then we’ll do it. In the end, we’ll know how too.” Everyone was nodding, what he was saying made sense, in a romantic sort of way. Harkening back to their roots and all that. “We have something that they didn’t, power tools.” Douglas’ eyes gleamed. He wasn’t a handyman, but he did love tools. He, Jason and Billy had shared that, bonding over it in the house wares section of the Megamart. Grunting like a Tim Allen character. Lamenting, ‘Oh if we only had power think of all the things we could build with this.’ Leaving Lynn to shake her head and thanking whichever higher power still watched over the foolish remains of humanity that there was no electricity. The age-old anti-bb-gun adage, ‘you’ll shoot your eye out kid’ would have been altered to read, ‘you’ll chop your fingers off idiot.’

  “In the spring, we can plant crops, and raise animals. All we need to do is find a place with enough water that we can defend easily from all comers.”

  “All comers?” Maggie asked.

  “The living and the dead.” Jason was a cynic, and held no faith in humanity. He had seen enough movies, but more importantly he had dealt with enough real life assholes, and he was aware what his people were capable of. It was all in the history, with nobody to watch over the weak, the strong would take what they wanted. He and his friends, his family, were too few to be anything but weak

  They spent the rest of the night talking, discussing, debating and planning. They had all agreed early on that they would follow along with Lynn’s plan. Living in the wilderness struck some deep chord in the friends. Robinson Crusoe came up frequently. It fit quite well too. Even Amy, for so long silent, spoke up and offered a few single word suggestions. Earning smiles all around and a fierce hug from Lynn.

  First, they decided, they would have to find a place that would work. Jason had an idea of where to start looking. He had found a nice valley, a few miles to the west, with a small stream running through. Enough water to supply their needs, not too much for them to really need to worry about it flooding them out in spring or after every big storm rolls through. It was lightly wooded on one slope, so they would have enough wood to build with, but the land would be fairly easy to clear, and the other was grassy.

  “Look,” Douglas said, with a gleam in his eyes, “We can head back to that little Podunk and get at least some of the stuff that we’ll need. They had a small hardware store, hammers, nails and perhaps a couple of chain saws. But for anything more complex, we’re going to need to do a major raid, and soon. July is nearly over, winter will be coming sooner than we would like to think.”

  “First things first Duggy (he hated being called ‘Duggy’), we need to find our new homestead. Everything else is moot if we don’t have a good safe place.”

  “Any ideas Captain Cook?”

  “Aye, I found a valley, about two miles over that way,” he pointed vaguely westward, “a couple hills over.” And then he told them about the valley. Smiles slowly spread from one to the next, life a fire jumping from one tree to another in a bone-dry forest. They agreed that it sounded nice and wanted to see it. “We’ll have to wait till morning, The hike took me at least an hour and a half to complete on my own. It’ll take much longer with all of us going.”

  They had dinner that night, canned soup, roast rabbit and potatoes baked in the camp fire, while talking over their plans for the next day. Really there wasn’t much to plan yet, but the prospect of actually doing something, of having a real and substantial goal, made the entire group bubble over with enthusiasm.

  The talk died off eventually and was replaced by yet another board game and the noises that usually accompanied it. Friendly taunts, the clatter of the dice as they rolled across the surface of the table and the curses over a bit of bad luck. Lynn had even gotten Amy to play, another first for the day. They were playing Monopoly again, a game that Jasone had no real taste for and a tendency to quit soon after the last of the properties was purchased, whether he was doing well or not.

  Jason listened to his friends play from the comfort of his favorite folding camp chair with a bottle of water at his side. He sat with his back to the table, and the lamps that it held. He took a swig of water, his beverage of choice these days since he still hadn’t managed to acquire a taste for warm beer, and what they had left anyhow had finally started to go a bit flat and skunky. The thought of it almost made him spit involuntarily. There he sat, near, but apart, seeing to his gear. He cleaned and oiled his shotgun before putting it in his tent next to his sleeping bag.

  Next came his knife, he cleaned it once more, and then again, to make sure that it was spotless. It was
a tool that he used for every day purposes, he had it out and often, and wanted to be as assured as he possibly could that if he accidentally cut himself, he wouldn’t be infected. That would be a step or two beyond simply being cringe-worthy faux pas. It would nearly step into the realm of defining irony. World’s greatest swordsman, accidentally chops his own leg off. That sort of thing.

  The best part of being out in the wilderness was the stars. He and Billy and the rest had really enjoyed gazing at the stars after the world had finally gone dark. Here though, it just seemed more natural, they didn’t have the final haze of civilization clinging like a bubble overhead. They had a wall of trees and a roof of stars. Oh, they couldn’t see as much of the sky as they could while sitting on the flat roof of their old fortress, but it still felt better out here regardless.

  Jason leaned back, his face skyward. The stars were appearing one at a time, blinking into existence and taking their place in the deepening sky. He inhaled deeply, taking in the smells of the campfire, their dinner, and the trees around them. And there he sat, absorbed in the rotation of the heavens above as the constellations passed by his small window in the skies.

  It was a while, he wasn’t sure quite how long, before he noticed that Amy had left the table and joined him in watching the stars. At a loss for words he quietly asked, “feeling any better?”

  She looked over at him and nodded. Sighing and looking at the stars again she remained silent.

  It was Amy who finally broke her own silence. “Why did he do it Jason?”

  “Get himself killed?” He asked. She nodded. “Because Billy was an idiot.” Surprise widened her eyes. Not the answer she had expected. “Honestly, I’m astonished that he didn’t get himself killed before. Did he ever tell you about the time that he spit in a football player’s hamburger while the player was standing right in front of him, watching?”

  She nodded again. Smiling. It was a funny story, especially when Billy told it. Though, true to form, it had a tendency to grow with each telling. The last time Jason had heard it told, not only was the entire football team in line, but the manager and the owner of the McDonalds were standing right behind him. “It was one of my favorites of his.”

  “Mine too. But it just illustrates, Billy was an idiot.”

  “The story wasn’t real was it? I mean Billy wouldn’t have done…”

  “It was mostly real. I was there when it happened. And it was a good thing that he had those long legs and was a fast runner. Even as a smoker, he could still be pretty quick when he needed to.” Astonishment again, and the disbelieving head shaking that followed the expression. Surely no living human being could be that much of a glutton for punishment. “That was just one of his stories. He had a couple times when he actually got caught. Both of them, ironically enough, while he was doing his victory dance.”

  “If he was an idiot, then why did you hang out with him?” Anger now. At Jason perhaps, but most of it at Billy for getting himself zombified.

  “Why did you?”

  “Because he was funny, and nice and so very alive.” The choice of words didn’t sound right, especially after what happened, but he understood what she had meant. Billy was an idiot, but he was a lovable idiot.

  “Yep.” Another pause. “Billy got to see one of his fondest dreams come true. Sick as that may sound.”

  “Who would be fond of dreaming about the end of the world?”

  “You mean besides a half a billion Christians?” It got a laugh.

  “I never thought about Christians being eager for the end of the world.”

  “They were, for some of the same reasons as Billy, myself and Lynn.”

  “What reasons do you think those are?”

  “A test, one of who you are and your worth. It is often said that disaster brings out the best in some and the worst in others. What disaster can beat the end of the world as a test?”

  “Do you think he passed or failed?”

  “Neither, both. He survived for weeks, which is better than most people did. And then he went and pulled a Billy.” Jason felt his anger at his friend’s death beginning to slip away.

  “So he did well for the remedial class?”

  “That’s our Billy.” Another laugh. It was good to hear her talk. Better yet to hear her laugh. They didn’t need to lose another friend.

  Jason scratched himself as he opened the door flap to his tent and crawled out to meet the day. The morning was bright. A heavy dew coated every available surface. Jason figured that it was only a couple hours past dawn, since the dew was still intact. He stomped his feet into his hiking boots and set about getting some breakfast.

  Jerky, bread, some dried fruit and water to wash it all down with. It wasn’t the most creative or delicious meal that he had ever eaten, but it was quick, easy, stopped his stomach from growling and would keep him on his feet all day long.

  The others were slowly stirring, coming out of their own tents to meet the day and shaking off what was left of their night’s sleep. Jason stretched his muscles and walked around the camp as he waited for his friends to eat. They all chattered happily, talking about the adventure ahead. The ones who were remaining behind to mind the camp saying how envious they would be of those lucky enough to go and see their new home.

  It had been decided that Lynn and Ralph would be joining Jason. Lynn was their leader, something even Douglas had finally accepted, and Ralph, Ralph was supposed to have been trained how to design and build things. ‘Things’ being rather non-specific, Jason hoped that it applied to simple structures. Whatever they didn’t know, they could learn from books. If they could lay their hands on the right books.

  The small party said its goodbyes as it set off hiking, following Jason’s lead. They kept in contact as long as they possibly could before the hills blocked the radio waves from their walkie-talkies. From then on, they were alone. The thought seemed to make both Ralph and Lynn very uncomfortable, which was understandable, it had bothered Jason a little in the beginning as well.

  It took them about two hours before they topped the final crest that stood between them and Jason’s valley (it had grown to almost mythical proportions in the minds of his friends since he mentioned it the night before).

  His friends looked quite pleased with what stood spread out before them.

  The valley lay between two long ridges. They stood atop the hillside that was covered in grass, and over across the way there was the forest that he had vividly recalled. The valley was blocked off by hills on three sides, but open to the world on the fourth, where there was an old, nearly forgotten dirt road that ran along the creek about halfway along the valley’s length before it faded away. The creek itself was probably about ten paces wide, clear and shallow and leading up further into the hills beyond. At the back end, there was a little canyon, from which the creek came, they might be able to use it as a bolt hole should events take an unpleasant turn.

  “Where does that road lead to?” Lynn asked, while pointing at it. The road was largely obscured by the forest, that had grown thicker at the far end of the valley.

  “I’m not sure, I didn’t ever follow it. I would guess that it comes out at a paved county road.”

  “We should take a look,” she said. “That way we can find this place from outside, we can drive in.”

  “Aye,” chimed Ralph. “I am not in bad shape, but I would not look forward to carrying everything we need from the camp to here.”

  “Well, lets go then, light is a wasting, and we still have a hours of walking to do.” With that he took something that was half a step half a jump. Or would have been had he been gifted with even a bit of grace. Instead it was more of a yell “oop!” while tumbling down a hillside head over heals.

  “Jason!” Lynn screamed, jumping down after him. Watching him tumble and trying her best to keep up without adding her own acrobatics to the show.

  He ended up on h
is back, about fifty feet away from the crest. He articulated his feelings with, “Sonnuva bitch.” He could hear Ralph, as he slowly picked his way down the hill after Jason and Lynn.

  Lynn was standing over him, “are you all right?” She asked, her voice matching the worried expression she was wearing.

  “Yeah. Good thing it’s not a uprising of fast zombies, I would be quite screwed.”

  Ralph laughed. “At least we are not doing this in the alps, you would have called an avalanche down on us.” He offered his hand, which Jason accepted, getting pulled once more to his feet.

  Jason dusted himself off, mostly to try and remove the evidence of the non-existence of any cat like reflexes. “At least we wouldn’t need to worry about being eaten alive.” Despite the spill and a couple of bruises, and his mortally wounded pride, Jason was perfectly fine. He took the lead again, though he got the feeling it was mostly because that his two companions just didn’t want to be between him and the valley floor where he would likely come to a complete rest.

  With their final step off the hillside, the valley took an easy slope downwards. Jason looked backwards and stifled a groan. It was going to be a long and sweaty walk back up to the top, even worse if they added the valley. He had already walked the hill before, and knew it was a long, seemingly endless endeavor. And then there was the hike back to camp. Just thinking about it was making his legs feel sore.

  They set a comfortable, not too quick, nor too slow. Angling their way to the creek and towards the road that stood on the far bank. Despite the growing patchwork of clouds that sporadically blocked the sun and cast drifting blocks of shade across the valley floor, it was a pleasantly warm day.

  The three friends made it to the creek. It was a swiftly flowing over a bed of rounded stones, with the occasional bolder sticking out. Jason looked around, and could see the occasional shadow of a fish as it was fighting the current. Jason was about to set his pack down on the bank, keeping only his shotgun and what he carried on his belt. All in hopes that they would be back quickly, when Lynn stopped him. “We might not have time to come back for that,” she said. Reluctantly he agreed, thanking his foresight that he had not over packed. Also praying that they wouldn’t return after all so that they wouldn’t have to climb back up that damned hill.

  They took off their shoes and socks and waded across the creek. The water moved quickly around their shins, pushing them gently but firmly, trying to carry them downstream with it. It was pleasantly cool and refreshing after spending a morning with his feet roasting in his hiking boots. The sun had come out again, warming his face even as the water cooled his legs. Jason stood for a moment, his eyes closed, taking delight in such a simple pleasure.

  Lynn called him and told him to hurry up and join her and Ralph, they were already on the bank and walking along the road, letting their feet dry before they put their socks and shoes back on. Jason looked down at the creek one more time before hoisting himself out of the water and joining them. They would have to come back this way later, and he could enjoy getting his feet wet for a little while longer when they returned again.

  The road had been disused for a long time. Years, or even decades, perhaps. Only the tire ruts, packed down to be nearly as hard as stone, were free of the tall grasses and weeds that thrived so broadly across the valley floor. It was too late in the season to need to worry about ticks, but the other flies were about and making their presence known and bringing annoyed slaps every couple moments.

  The three of them followed the road downwards, there was a slight incline in the valley floor that led to the canyon in the back. They were walking in the ruts, to avoid the scratching weeds.

  Jason caught himself foolishly pretending to be a tightrope walker for a moment. An old game he had played during his childhood. He smiled sheepishly at his own silliness and was grateful that he was bringing up the rear.

  Lynn and Jason took the left rut while Ralph was on the right. It was an arrangement that Jason enjoyed, since he had a chance to watch Lynn’s butt. Theoretically anyhow, since she was wearing loose fitting dungarees. Pants which seemed to work hard to reveal little about what lay beneath. Still she had a nice sway to her hips as she walked. Jason enjoyed that too.

  He was surprised and relieved to realize that his love sickness had finally died down. It left a minor twinge in his stomach as it departed. The minor twinge was a regret over the loss of what could have been. But that was nothing compared to the burning ache that he had nearly been consumed by back at the Megamart. He was free of his own stupid Emo tendencies, for the time being, and it felt good. So did watching Lynn’s ass.

  After about a mile or so of walking, the road entered a heavily wooded patch that covered the valley’s mouth. The trees ran up the hills on both sides of the valley, and Jason guessed that they probably extended beyond even further, that they were on the edge of a sizable forest.

  Within the trees it was a little gloomy, which made the small patches of sunlight that filtered through the leaves that much more dazzling. The sound of birds and squirrels filled the air, interrupted only by the occasional gust of wind as it flowed through the trees disturbing the leaves and making them dance. The animals would fall silent as the companions approached and then take up their chatter again as they were safely passed by. It all made for a wonderful summer day stroll in the woods. Jason breathed deeply and enjoyed it. They all slapped away clouds of mosquitoes.

  The road ran for at least two miles after they entered the tree line. Twisting and turning a bit, so that they would have easily lost their sense of direction had they not been watching Lynn’s compass. They stepped over the downed trees, counting them as they went, a little under a dozen between the edge of the valley and the road beyond. None of the trees were huge, but most of them would be far too large to drive over without damaging their vehicles, they would need to get a chainsaw quickly and remove the trees before their true work could begin.

  At last, they came to the far edge of their small forest. The trees ran almost all the way up to the brink of the county road that bisected it like a river of stone. The road was losing its battle as the trees began immediately on the far side.

  The county road was a decrepit thing, numerous potholes, the pavement at the edges were crumbling away, losing the battle against nature. It looked as if it had been long ignored by a county road commission long strapped for cash. A forgotten road would be perfect for their needs. As soon as they could figure out where they were, they would be on their way back to the camp to sing the glories to the remaining friends. They crossed over the bridge that spanned their stream and walked along the road, their road, back towards their base camp, looking for signs.

  The closest mile marker said twenty-seven, They passed more signs, dip, bump, lane ending: merge left. They had walked another couple of miles along the side of their road before they finally came upon what they were looking for, county road 551. It was lying forgotten face down in the grass, were someone had obviously crashed into it years before. Nobody had even noticed that the sign was missing. Their hopes rose that they found a safe and deserted home.

  It appeared that Lynn had decided that instead of backtracking, that they would just make one giant circle. A lot of leg work, but it beat retracing six miles worth of steps, even if Jason wouldn’t get to take off his hot boots and comfort his roasting feet in that wonderful stream. Jason and Ralph followed silently.

  Their long hike was beginning to wear on all three of the companions when Lynn called for a break for lunch. Their first since they began. Jason felt as if he had run a marathon as he plopped down in front of a tree and leaned back. Lynn and Ralph followed his lead, with contented grunts.

  Jason took off his boots, and then his socks and wiggled his toes. Letting them taste the pleasant breeze. They ate their meal together, chattering away about their plans for their new home, enjoying the sun and the wind. It was the first reall
y happy moment that Jason had had since Billy had died. He had his friends, his future was ahead of him, and he had goals to accomplish. There was little worse than drifting through life without any form of challenge or meaning.

  Jason had just finished putting his boots back on, and getting his pack onto his back when the roar of engines flared up off in the distance. Lots of engines. Ralph looked hopeful, standing up and looking in the direction in which the sounds were emanating. Jason and Lynn felt differently, they each grabbed their friend by an elbow and pulled him back into the woods, and pushed him to the ground behind some bushes.

  “Why are we hiding?” Ralph asked.

  “We don’t know whether or not their friends.”

  “What better way to find out, than to step out of the woods greet them?”

  “Any way that doesn’t get us robbed, raped and murdered. Or worse.”

  The caravan drew near, passing before them. Traveling from the direction that they themselves were headed in. There were several motorcycles out front, followed by a mixture of other vehicles ranging across the spectrum from sports cars to the Winnebago that brought up the rear. They all looked rather new, and Jason suspected that they had been acquired in the same manner as Kime, his SUV.

  Lynn in the meantime was busy flicking through the channels on her walkie-talkie to see if she could by chance pick up any conversations that they might be having. Jason and Ralph recognizing a good idea when they saw one, did the same. Ralph was the first one to get a hit. Channel 15. “…y boss, where too next?”

  “Sized town up the road a ways, they should have some good pillage, unless someone else hit them first.”

  “Well iffin someone steals our stuff before we get there, we’ll just go out and take it back.” A chorus of laugher erupted from the handsets, fading out as the caravan put more distance between itself and the friends. Ralph looked ashen. “I guess that settles whether or not they were friendly.” Jason mumbled.

  The caravan roared past at sixty or seventy miles an hour. The posted speed limit was fifty-five, though that had no meaning anymore, and Jason suspected the only reason the people weren’t traveling faster was for safety reasons. They had places to go, but were in no real hurry to reach them. Any faster, and they might miss an opportunity for an easy score. Or on this road, lose control and crash.

  It was, fifteen minutes, a half hour, an hour? Jason wasn’t quite sure how long, before they dared to get up, dust themselves off, and then step cautiously back out towards the road. Lynn and Ralph stood for several minutes, staring in the direction that the marauders had gone, before they managed to make themselves move any further.

  They had suspected that groups of raiders and marauders would rise up with the undead. The concept had been long romanticized in cinema within the apocalyptic horror genre, the various zombie films had roving bandits, as did Mad Max. Jason and Lynn realized how stupid it was to base their life expectations off of what they saw in the movies, but then there was a certain amount of truth even in the most far-fetched fantasy.

  Historically, on the tattered edges of civilization, pirates and bandits were a plague to be lived with or fought off. An unpleasant fact of life that they now stood on that very tattered edge, fully aware that they were sharing it with the pirates. In the zombie movies that they had so loved in the past, life always got harder and more dangerous after the bandits revealed themselves to the heroes of the story. As if life wasn’t difficult enough before.

  Sure, there was enough food out there that would be ripe for the taking. There was no reason for one group of survivors to cross another, and try to pillage, for a long time to come. At least there was no physical reason. Humans, it seemed enjoyed the strain caused by personal disputes.

  Zombies, they were a mindless force of nature, like a storm or the ocean, something to respect and if at all possible avoid. They had no guile or cunning. There was no spite or hatred. They existed only to feed themselves, to ‘live’ by their remaining instinct which was to eat, no matter that food did not effect them. They were frightening, but not really mind-numbingly so. As long as they were handled with respect for what they were capable of. Something that Billy had failed to do.

  Living breathing warm-blooded humans on the other hand, they were nasty pieces of work. Especially when there was nobody around to watch over their shoulders and make sure they behaved themselves in a civilized manner. Another sad fact of history. People often developed an us against the world mindset which allowed them to do terrible things to other human beings.

  Worse of all, the marauders had come from the direction of the home camp. What if they had seen the smoke from the cooking fire? The same thought had occurred to Lynn. Even Ralph’s usually optimistic expression was strained with worry.

  The three companions regained their composure and took to the road once more. Though it would appear that it was no longer ‘their road.’ Lynn pushed as quickly as their strained feet could manage, cringing with each step.

  Looking over their shoulders, straining their ears for the sound of an engine off in the distance. A half hour passed as they trudged along the roadside, and nothing came. They began to relax a bit. Or as far as they could with the worry eating at their stomachs. They made a left turn at county road 400, headed north. As they walked, their route remained as near to the edge of the forest as they could keep it. Just in case.

  The sun seemed less full of warmth as they walked along the last bit of blacktop to the final dirt road that led to up into the hills to their campsite. Jason unshouldered his shotgun when they approached their final turn off into the hills. One of the few landmarks that he recognized from the blur that filled the first days of their flight from the Megamart. They were probably a mile and a half away from camp at the very most.

  Lynn fumbled her handset back to the channel that they had agreed upon before they left the camp that morning. “Hello, is anyone there?” Silence. The moments stretched out. “Douglas? Amy? Hello?” Lynn looked about ready to cry, when Amy’s voice came over the airwaves, she sounded cheerful “Hey Lynn, where have you been? You guys are late. Where are ya all at?”

  “We’re about a mile away, on the road into the camp.”

  “What’re ya doing there?”

  “We decided to take the scenic route. Have Douglas get something cooking for dinner, it’s been a long day.”

  “Rodger Wilco! See you guys in about half an hour!”

  “Oh yeah, would one of you guys scan the CB radio while you’re waiting?”

  “Can do. Is there anything I should be looking for specifically?”

  “Just folks talking.”

  “Will do!”

  “Bye dear.” With that the radio fell silent. They, all three of them, breathed a sigh of relief. Ralph hugged Lynn across the shoulder as a smile spread back across his face. The camp was safe. Their friends and loved ones were safe.

  “We’ll have to design some sort of defenses against that.” Jason said, stating the obvious. But it felt better to get it out in the open. Lynn and Ralph nodded their agreement, both of them were stuck in their own little dark fantasies, trapped by what might have happened.

  Douglas had prepared a nice hearty rabbit stew for their return. The vegetables were all canned, but the meat and potatoes were fresh. Jason inhaled deeply, enjoying the aroma as they finally returned to the base camp. This would be so much better than the cold biscuits and jerky that he had taken for lunch.

  “So, how did it look?” Douglas asked as they dropped their bags. Amy, Maggie and Douglas all wore looks of excitement and sweet anticipation painted on their faces. Lynn ran to him and squeezed him almost hard enough to break him in half. Jason didn’t want to ruin that just yet. So they told them about the valley, everything. Ralph had already come up with some rough plans and he filled them all in. They would need to cut down a lot of the timber, to use it for a large rough log house. They wo
uld also need to build a garage to protect the vehicles. Later in the spring they could build a barn before they went off to find animals to house in it. Crops could easily be grown on one side, probably corn and potatoes, they could put in a vegetable garden as well. Hard work, but it would be a good life.

  The excitement remained. And then Jason filled them in on the rest. The motorcade of marauders looking for whatever they could get. Lynn hugged Amy and then went back to holding Douglas as Maggie sat down in Ralph’s lap and squeezed him tightly. There was ten minutes of silence and contemplation, or perhaps just an appreciation of being held. Jason, standing alone, left them to it. Some things were just more important than talk, and that closeness was important.

  They talked a while about the new development, the marauders, before they decided that they would put off their move for a couple of days. They loaded up the truck and the SUV anyhow, with everything that they wouldn’t immediately need. There was also another change, everyone started carrying their weapons and keeping them close at hand. The past few weeks they had gotten soft and stopped going armed when they were around the camp. There had been none of the walking dead right outside their doors to remind them what the world was like. Now even Amy had a gun at her hip, one of Jason’s .45s, and she looked ready to use it.

  They enjoyed Douglas’ cooking. He was actually quite good with cooking over a campfire, something he had put down to his interest in all things medieval during college. And then passed the night with their ritual of board games and conversation. Jason broke his habit and actually joined them when they started setting up the Risk board. He played recklessly and did well, in his estimation. He didn’t last long, but he made sure that Douglas and Maggie didn’t long survive him. Attrition Risk. Better than the real thing, and a lot faster.

  The sky was completely dark, there were too many clouds for him to watch the stars so Jason stayed under the tarp with his friends, reading by lantern light until his eyelids began to feel as if they were lined with lead. He set down his book and made his way to his sleeping bag, waving good night to the few who were still awake.

  That night his sleep was troubled by dreams of bandits and zombies and sometimes zombie bandits. He fired his shotgun hundreds of times as he struggled and used his sword dozens more before the light of the morning interrupted the bloodshed, leaving him almost as exhausted as when his head had hit the pillow the night before.

  Jason was the last one out of bed that morning. Unusual these days, but not unheard of. He normally liked to get an early start, there were places to go. The start of a partly cloudy and a slightly breezy day. Breakfast was cold stew which was still good the second day running and Jason ate heartily, especially after his night’s adventures. All the preparations for their move were made, at least what they were capable of managing at the time. Ralph was drawing up plans for their new home. Nothing detailed, he was just sketching up ideas and making lists of necessary supplies and materials with Lynn and Douglas. Until they were ready to leave there was little else to do aside from sit around and wait.

  He was dressed and fully ready for another day. It looked as if wandering was in the cards, mostly cause Jason had stacked the deck in his favor and then made up the rules of the game. He had his pack on his back and was about to take the first step on his daytime adventure when Lynn called out to him to stop. She and Douglas stood up from the table and joined him at the edge of camp.

  “We’d like to ask a favor of you.” Lynn said.

  It was a strange way to make a request, and Jason was suddenly on guard in case they asked him to start dating Amy or something. She was nice, but she wasn’t his type. Though considering the fact that she wasn’t a zombie, and she was single, maybe she was his type after all. Human females were in high demand these days, even weepy emotionally fragile ones who had been a little too close to his late best friend.

  Yep. And he had thought his love life was bad before. “Whatcha need?”

  “We’d like you to marry us.”

  “Well I’m honored but you two aren’t my type.”

  “Jason!”

  “Sorry, I was channeling Billy there for a moment. But I’m still confused. What is it that you want?”

  “We’d like you to officiate at the ceremony.”

  “Ceremony? I figured that you two were already married. You’ve been joined at the hip, as it were, for a couple years now. What else do you need?”

  “We’ve never said any vows or anything.” Douglas said, clearing his throat. “We would like this to be more official.”

  “Official? What for?”

  Lynn punched his shoulder. “Tradition you asshole, it’s romantic.”

  “Ah, ok.”

  “Will you do it?”

  “Sure, but only if I get to invent the ceremony. Nothing tasteless, but I’m not doing anything dry and religious either. Do you want to give rings or other tokens?”

  “No, we don’t need any.” They said as one, smiling one of those sickeningly cute couple in love smiles.

  “When do you want to do this?”

  “Tonight, after you get back.” They both looked happy with his acceptance, Douglas squeezed his shoulder and Lynn nearly broke his ribs with a bear hug. Douglas was going to give him a hug, but Jason stopped him mid-step.

  He was officiator. Great. Now all he had to do was figure out what this was all going to be about. Jason started to sweat a little. Starting a new tradition was a big risk, if you did something really stupid and it caught on, countless generations could end up looking stupid for centuries to follow. Which was, come to think of it, pretty damn funny. Billy would have loved this.

  Jason hiked into the hills until he found a nice little stream to sit down by. He loved the sound of running water. He found it soothing. There, he took off his boots and leaned back against a tree, watching the stream, the trail and keeping an ear out for any approaching steps. He thought about the three weddings that he had attended over the course of his twenty or so years. One was for an aunt, one for a cousin, and the third for a friend. Two of them ended in divorce, one of those didn’t even last the summer. Jason didn’t expect Douglas and Lynn to end in divorce. They were meant for one another as much as anyone was had ever been. That was a sappy thought. Very sappy. But in all likelihood true.

  Was marriage even relevant anymore? Lynn and Douglas were both Agnostics, so they weren’t too worried about pissing off an invisible god with their sinful behavior. Looking around at the state of the world, Jason doubted that a god could be any angrier with humanity than it already was.

  They wouldn’t need to marry to assure the safety of their children. The friends lived in a community now, a large extended family, and were all dedicated to raising any kids that came their collective way. They were forming a small, close knit village. The idea actually excited Jason. He loved little kids as much as he disliked the adults that they eventually became. They were cute, and interesting, and funny, and smart, and always willing to learn. Any kids who were born to either couple would have at least six parents to watch over them. Poor rugrats.

  They didn’t have any worries about the scorn that society put on unmarried folks. The six of them were society. Amy, Maggie and Ralph didn’t care that they were unmarried. And as far as Jason was concerned, they were already married. Ceremony and pretty words or no.

  There was only one real reason to go through the ceremony. To hold on to the past. To what humanity was and to the tail end of their culture. It was an attempt to keep the past alive. This marriage was no symbol of their love, the two of them didn’t need another intangible symbol, they had that every time they held hands (to say the least, Jason didn’t want to let his mind wander onto any further physical expression of affection that they might enjoy, and rather did enjoy. Tent walls were rather thin after all.). To keep going with one of the oldest, and some would argue, most important value. They were trying to
grasp a degree of normalcy. And they came to him for it. Damn. If Billy were around he would have killed himself with laughter by now.

  Now was the time to build new traditions. Jason gave the concept several hours thought, sprinkled with a liberal measure of zoning out and watching his wiggling toes as his feet were tickled by the long grass. The ceremony would have to represent himself as well as Lynn and Douglas. With some Billy thrown in as well for a memorial to their lost friend. He watched for a while as a rabbit crawled through the grass on the other side of the creek, fleeing as he spooked it. Finally an idea hit him what the ceremony would be.

  Jason put his boots back on, heaved himself up off the ground and proceeded to hike back home to the camp. There was a hitching to be done. He always thought better when he was exercising, and indulged regularly in his old habit. His mind crunching over the details as he hopped from stone to stone back down the side of the mountain. He kept an eye out as he walked and thought, it was automatic now days for him, like breathing. And tripping over roots. Damn it. Stupid arrogance.

  Jason timed his arrival to be just before sun down. He wanted everything to be right for that evening. For their communal trip into the realm of the spiritual. As he got closer and closer to the camp, Jason could smell the wondrous meal that his friends had been working all morning and afternoon for. More rabbit stew, roasted fish, baked potatoes. It would a feast to remember.

  “Shall we begin?” He asked as he set down his backpack. Sitting down to take his shoes and socks back off, not for any spiritual or religious significance, but just because it felt right to air his hot and sweaty feet. This was to be an evening about doing what felt right.

  Lynn smiled when she saw him and waved for everyone to follow her over. She had woven a plait of flowers, daisies mostly, there wasn’t much else to be found on the mountain side, and placed the ring atop her own head in place of a wedding dress and veil. Jason walked to the western end of the camp and onto an outcrop overlooking a steep cliff into the valley below. There he stood, with his back facing the sun, before motioning everyone to their places. Douglas and Lynn stood before him, facing one another with their hands intertwined. Amy, Ralph and Maggie stood next to one another facing Jason.

  “My friends. My family,” Jason began. “Here we are, looking on human civilization and possibly the human race, as the sun sets on it for the last time. A short run in the grand scheme of things, only eight thousand years or so, a fair bit longer for the race, but once again, a drop in the bucket compared to the age of the universe. And a wild ride it was. With wonderful highs and terrifying lows. Perhaps we will rise again from the ashes like the phoenix of legend. Or this might just be our final death rattle. We have before us two good people who are willing to fight. They have been together, through thick and thin, mostly thin.” He paused for the laugh before going on, “They have asked me to make it official, so here it goes, please look into one another’s eyes. Douglas repeat after me, ‘Lynn, is you is or is you ain’t my baby?’”

  Douglas repeated his words “Lynn, feel free to answer when you’re ready.” Jason said as soon as Douglas’ mouth closed.

  Lynn replied with a resounding, “I is your baby.”

  “Now Lynn, please repeat after me ‘Douglas, is you is or is you ain’t my baby?’” She did so. “Douglas, you know the routine.” Douglas smiled, never moving his gaze away from hers, and said “Lynn, I is your baby. Completely, heart and soul.”

  “You two were already joined. It was your own decision long ago. This was a mere reaffirmation of your choice. Not even a formality. Because we no longer have need for such things. I have no holy or temporal authority other than what you two have given me. But with that authority I will command you this: Protect one another. Nurture one another. Raise smart and happy children. But try to keep it down a bit when you make those children, because your neighbors need to sleep. May you live happily ever after. May we all live happily ever after.”

  The bride and groom embraced and kissed, an old tradition mixed in with the new. “Hey, I didn’t say that you could kiss yet.” Lynn and Douglas split apart, looking abashed and waiting for the rest of the ceremony. “Ok, now you may kiss.”

  Amy was crying tears of joy, for a pleasant change. Ralph and Maggie were holding hands and smiling, at Jason, at the newlyweds and at each other.

  Douglas cocked an eyebrow, “Is you is or is you ain’t my baby?”

  “Buggs Bunny has never steered me wrong. Though I do not plan on trying to plug someone’s rifle barrel by jamming my fingers into it.”

  “Thank you Jason, it was beautiful.” Lynn too was crying tears of joy.

  The festivities lasted long into the night. It wasn’t every day that they had a wedding in their little group. There was singing and dancing (Amy even managed to pull Jason in once, but only once, he had two left feet and preferred to watch). Maggie played a bit on her guitar, though she was in sore need of practice, she pulled of a passable rendition of ‘Ba Ba Black Sheep’ which by then Douglas was drunk enough to sing along to. And add some crazy steps of his own. Or maybe he just tripped. Billy would have said that it was a song at his level of intellectual development, then Billy probably would have joined in as well. He was never one to miss out on a chance to make an ass of himself.

  They finished out the night’s festivities with a round of the board game Life. Jason wanted to slap himself for agreeing to play along, and he made the best of it by playing the lesbian couple and their four daughters. Drunken board games. Bored games? Whatever.

  Life, in his humble opinion, which nobody else seemed to share, was a stupid game. Despite the imagined glories that the lesbian couple brought to his mind. It was a game that exemplified the worst aspect of the American dreams. The whole concept was based in getting to the end of life and accumulating the most shit possible. The best house, the highest paying job. He who has the most stuff when they die wins. The entire game was tallied in terms of dollars earned. Everything had a dollar value.

  Happiness? Contentment? Education? They meant nothing. All that mattered was getting more money and a better house than the other players. The whole experience was twelve different kinds of fucked up. But at least he had the lesbian car. They kept him company, and made his dreams happy ones that night. Six lesbians. Jason himself. One car.

  The group had a slow start the next day. Moving day. Everyone was a little sluggish to get moving, cursing their hangovers, quietly, and promising that they would never drink again, also quietly. The sun was well up making it late morning by the time they eaten breakfast and had the camp packed. Getting all three cars, Ralph and Maggie had brought along an aging station wagon, turned around and back down the trail was a bit tricky, but they managed it and before noon they were back at the little Podunk where they had met and picked up Maggie and Ralph. A half hour drive away from their campsite.

  The village was just as they had left it. The bodies were still in two rough stacks on either side of the doors to the little IGA grocery store. No scavengers had bothered corpses in the intervening weeks and they had begun to rot, further. The smell did much to keep the small party away from the IGA until the end of their chores.

  The village, wasn’t even a village. It was a nameless crossroads that housed a gas station/grocery store, a pottery studio, a small hardware store, and a sporting goods shop and a little over a dozen houses. The crossroads was there merely as a stop over for the vacationing tourists and sportsmen on their way to their summer cottages in the hills.

  The hardware store made their first stop. They were planning to build a house, or from what Jason recalled from Ralph’s sketches, a fortress. To do so, they would need to pick up enough tools to keep six people busy. They loaded shovels, hammers, nails and anything else they could lay their hands on and thought would come in handy.

  The two most important implements that they found were the pair of g
as-powered chainsaws and the electric generator. Electricity. They had been without it for so long. The generator opened up the door to a whole selection of power tools that made Jason drool. He couldn’t help himself. It just happened.

  Jason had never been handy with tools, or overly interested in shop class. But he had begun to twitch with anticipation as they loaded everything into the cars. It must have something to do with his Y chromosome. By the time they finished picking the bones of the hardware store Douglas’ truck and Jason’s SUV were packed to the gills. Maggie and Ralph were over half full. Sure, there were a few items that they didn’t necessarily need. But Lynn had put her foot down when she found Douglas and Ralph petting the table saw, keeping the extravagance to a minimum. Or so she thought. Ralph and Douglas vowed to come back for the saw one day, even if it took them weeks or years.

  The companions then turned to the sporting goods shop to fill the rest of the empty space. They had a number of firearms already. More than they would ever need. The store though had different odds and ends that would come in handy. Ammunition and camping supplies. Lynn and Douglas had mentioned something about taking up fishing in their little stream.

  Jason took a couple of nice compound bows, and as many arrows as he could cram into the remaining crannies Kime’s stuffed interior. They also scored a pair of snowshoes for the each member of the party. You never know when you might need to go out in the winter months. Finally there was the cold weather clothing and blankets and other necessities that they hadn’t thought of looting from the Megamart.

  When they finally left the Podunk behind, the interior of the station wagon was packed, with new acquisitions piled onto the luggage rack on the roof and held in place with a tarp. Unloading all three cars would take an hour in and of itself, at least, but they wouldn’t need to worry about finding more supplies for a while. Until it came to actually building their homestead. They had found tools and equipment, they were just short on actual lumber and materials. A log cabin might sound quaint, but Ralph said he preferred to work with modern compounds to keep things safe and simple. There was another trip in their future.

  The three cars turned off the highway and onto their little dirt road which was easy enough to find, even though they had failed to leave a marker for themselves. The first fallen tree was about a hundred feet into the trees and around a bend in the road, which gave them enough room to hide all three cars from the road in case any unpleasant guests should happen to pass by.

  Looking at the overcrowded truck bed, Jason was thankful that Lynn had had the foresight to pack the chainsaws and the spare gasoline in the rear, next to the door. The thickest tree across the road was about as big across as Jason’s waist, the smallest was about the size of one of his legs. With Douglas and Ralph cutting, and Jason and the Lynn were set to rolling or draggin away the sections, while Amy and Maggie stood guard at their rear. Clearing all of the trees took them better than two hours. There they stopped for a break to eat lunch and rest.

  There was a small clearing in the woods that Ralph had found while they were eating lunch. The clearing started about a hundred and fifty feet beyond where the road finally disappeared into the earth, in the wooded half of the valley. It was about two hundred feet wide and fifty feet deep, making it the perfect place for them to build their compound. Jason did a small celebratory dance. They wouldn’t need to clear any more trees for the time being. He had had enough of that for the day.

  With a couple tarps, the corners tied to nearby trees, the companions set up a simple shelter to keep the rain off of themselves and their supplies. Unloading the vehicles took longer than expected, every square inch was packed and getting everything out was like playing a game of Jenga.

  By the time they were finished with unpacking, the sun had nearly set and they were all exhausted from a day of hard labor. So they enjoyed the night, and wished that they had brought along the picnic table from their old campsite. On the upside, there were no board games. So they instead filled the night with talk about their plans for the place. Some pipe dreams, others they could make a reality. Jason thought that a catapult would be a great idea. Too bad Billy wasn’t around, he would have loudly agreed.

  Ralph went into an extensive list of what they would need to get before they really started construction on their home. Lumber, roofing shingles, concrete, windows, furniture and storage shelves. Not only what they needed to put together the outside, but also fill in the interior and make it comfortable. He also put together his dream list of materials that he could only wish for. Jason was glad that they had Ralph along. He would never been able to think of half of the details even given a month to plan.

  Ralph outlined his building plan for the group. One main living area and kitchen that took up most of the ground floor. Most of the space would be wide open, with a high ceiling. Ralph also pointed out the pump with a line leading to the creek directly in the kitchen so that they wouldn’t need to fetch water by hand. They would have to burry the line so that it didn’t freeze with the coming of the winter. And even then, maybe it still would. If they could manage, Ralph had big plans for drilling a well. The water would be safer, cleaner and less likely to freeze in the winter. All he said that they needed was a special machine to do the work for them. Good luck with that Ralphy boy.

  His plans called for putting a couple of bedrooms at the rear of the living area, and a loft above for extra sleeping space (where Amy and Jason would be). It would suit their needs well for the short term, but come the spring they would want to build outbuildings for the couples to live in, and just use the main building as a communal area.

  They would need a wood stove and chimney. Insulation for the walls. Ralph wanted to dig a hole in the ground and put in a concrete floor. Concrete mixed and poured by hand in buckets. The description of all the labor made Jason’s back hurt just hearing Ralph talk about it. There were only the six of them, and they had no power equipment, bulldozers and the like. They would be doing most of the work the old fashioned way. The task was beginning to seem insurmountable. He didn’t say anything though, as he sunk into a minor depression. After all, it was his idea to begin with and everyone else seemed so excited by the prospect.

  Jason cut him off from his list, “this is a hefty list of materials that you’re giving us.”

  “We want it done right don’t we?”

  “Yes, yes we do. The problem is, where do we get it all?”

  Lynn cut him off. “How about we wait a few days, and then follow that marauder band? They were headed towards a bigger town they said. The only city out this way is Eagle Rapids, which will probably have one of those big box hardware stores, if not more than one. We can loot till our hearts content there.” As usual she had a smashing idea. The group voted and decided that they would give the bandits a couple days head start and take off themselves, which was the only thing that stopped them from piling into Kime and going.

  They spent those two days making more plans, and finally getting to work. Ralph had them dig out a large rectangular hole near the edge of the clearing. He wanted room to expand in the future before they had to start cutting down trees. The hole would soon make up the foundation and first floor of their new house.

  All of their digging gave them a hole that was three feet deep towards the bottom of the slope nearest the creek and seven at the top. Nearer the deeper end, they found solid bedrock. Ralph was happy about this. The rock would make a sold foundation, even more so than a foot of concrete. He who builds his house on rock and all that jive.

  The second floor would look as if it were rising out of the hill, while the first would be largely hidden under ground. Surrounding the first floor with earth would help regulate the heat and the cold as the seasons changed, it would insulate the house a little better, making life more comfortable. Ralph Also planned on

  There was sod to bust, roots to hack out, soil to move away. It took all six o
f them the better part of that first day to get it done, and the rest of the day to collect rocks from the creek to use as a foundation of sorts.

  Digging a hole, especially a giant hole large enough for a house, was a Herculean task and Jason wondered aloud, and often, why they were digging a hole in the ground in the first place, why not just flatten it out and build atop that? Ralph finally told them all why “You’ve seen the cowboy movies right? With Clint Eastwood?”

  “I’ve seen a few.”

  “Well the bandits always get around to attacking the house right?”

  “Yeah, They did that in the Outlaw Josey Whales.”

  “Well, if the bandits ever come here, we’ll have a whole lot of earth between us and them when we go to shooting back at them.” Jason thought it over, shut up, and redoubled his efforts.

  Summer passed and fall came. Thousands of civilians had been taken in, though the company and the captain had no real use for any of the people. They were just penned into the civilian barracks, the largest of the warehouses in the district.

  “The captain wishes to speak to you corporal.” White said, standing in the doorway to his bunk. Trying to loom and failing as usual. He looked more like a monkey pretending to be a gorilla. Ash put down the Odyssey. Another loan from Sarge. He wanted to take back his comment about Sarge being like Odysseus, smart as the man might have been, he was also dumb as dirt. Sometimes he made Ash look like a mental giant. Really, to go out of your way to piss off the gods, that was just dumb.

  But then, that was what Avery had done. And so he had paid the price. What a terrible price it had been.

  “Alright. Lead the way sergeant.” Sergeant White. All of captain Arseneau’s favorites had been promoted to sergeant and taken off of any duty that didn’t involve looking out for the captain’s best interests. Or their own.

  Tex and White no longer shared the hippy chick. She had been too used up and abused. Finally one day she had snapped and attacked, giving Tex one helluva scar under his eye, a pity she had missed it and his heart. They beat her to death. And then found other girls to take her place. The other girls fared about as well.

  Keep your head down, and your mouth shut. It got harder all the time.

  White walked through the doorway and sat down at one of the chairs near the desk. Ash came to a stop just outside, waiting for permission to enter.

  “Come in corporal.” Sarge said as Ash stood at the door waiting to be admitted. It wasn’t so much a thought for privacy or general courteousness that stayed his feet, but more a growing dislike for being in the captain’s presence. You never knew when that was going to get you shot, or worse yet, lowered into the pit like Avery. The pit. That made his hair stand up on end. He’d much rather be beaten to death than to suffer that. The pit was a public execution where they cheered your death on.

  “Corporal James reporting as ordered sir!” Ash stood in front of the desk and saluted captain Arseneau.

  “I see that, corporal.” The captain replied with a sneer. White smirked and leaned in his chair, lifting the front two legs off the floor and resting the back against the wall. “Come, have a seat next to sergeant White.” He made the rank clear. The captain was still angry with him over the mess with private Martin. With the captain being crazy, there wasn’t much chance that he would ever forgive Ash for that.

  At least the captain hadn’t shot him yet.

  Thank God for small mercies.

  Ash sat at attention waiting for the captain to speak. If it took an hour of him sitting with his back straight in the uncomfortable wooden chair before the captain told him why he had been ordered to the office, then he would sit for an hour in the uncomfortable chair.

  “Sergeant, how is the roundup going?” The captain, according to rumor, had ordered thousands of zombies to be rounded up and then packed into the ground floor of every building in the immediate area that he wasn’t planning to put to use to house the growing population of their community. The brunt of the work was performed by civilian laborers, using their bare hands. If one happened to get bitten, then there was just one less zombie to find and one less mouth to feed.

  After the ground floor of a building was packed as tight as was dared, then the doors were chained shut and they were left to their own devices. A hundred different rumors and theories drifted through the camp as soldiers and conscripts alike tried to figure out why the captain would order such a thing. Ash just figured it was because he was crazy, but he didn’t say anything, he didn’t wish to end up like Avery.

  “I think the work going fairly well captain. We’ve finished the first floor of every building within a two-block radius of our location in every direction with exception of across the river.”

  The captain sorted some more papers, putting them in neat and orderly stacks. Who knew that there could be so much paperwork with all the world shot to hell? Ash didn’t. But finding out didn’t surprise him much either. Army types loved having lists and reports to read and file and forget before ordering a new one to be written.

  “Good.” The captain turned back to Ash. “Corporal,” the captain began as he set down a stack of papers on the desk. “We need you for an escort mission that will culminate in an attack on…” Culminate, what the hell does culminate mean. He looked at Sarge who mouthed ‘End with’. Ah. Ok, an escort mission then they were going to attack and take over an unfriendly village.

  The captain would call it an enemy village, since anyone who wasn’t under his direct command seemed to be the enemy these days. His command seemed to be getting more and more brutal, especially to anyone who wasn’t either part of his original company or conscripted afterwards. Even then, you weren’t guaranteed safety. Competition to join the ranks had become fierce, even to the point of murder. That was until the captain sentenced murderers to go to the pit. Rapists too. And thieves. Most especially traitors. Traitors got savaged before their final sentence was carried out.

  To the soldiers, he lavished wealth and privileges. If they saw something they wanted, they were free to take it, as long as the object of their desire didn’t belong to a fellow soldier. Even if who they wanted didn’t wish to be taken. The free hand with his troops was how he bought their loyalty. Only murder or treason brought around any real punishment, and a light one compared to what the civilians received. They were shot in the head. One bullet and it was all over. Rather than days of a slow painful death. Rank had its privileges, Sarge had often said. Though some how Ash didn’t think that this was what he was talking about. Except for treason. That was the same all around. As Avery discovered.

  Maybe the soldiers of his company wouldn’t have even dreamed of taking such bribes in normal times, but these weren’t normal times. Even Sarge had been shaken to hell by the collapse, and Sarge was the strongest and bravest man that Ash had ever met. The feeling that had taken over the company was that of ‘the world is ending, so I’ll try to get my kicks before the whole shithouse goes up in flames.’ Tex and White exemplified the company’s new company. Ash hated it.

  Ash just did like he always did and followed Sarge’s lead. That way he didn’t really have to think. And he managed to stay alive in the process.

  “You will be expected to suppress any enemy activity within the compound, and help install Stanley as the new leader. If anyone gives you any trouble, then shoot them. Is that understood corporal?”

  “Understood sir.”

  “Any questions corporal?”

  “How many soldiers will be under my command captain?”

  “None corporal. You’ll be the only soldier. The rest will be conscripts under Stanley’s control. About fifteen in all, including Stanley.”

  “Will I be under Stanley’s command then sir?”

  “No, you will be separate. An observer there to add your firepower and training to the mix should something come up. Your duty is to see Stanley to his objective and then return here with y
our report.”

  “Will they be armed?”

  “They will have some of our older rifles with a couple of cans of extra ammunition. Those who don’t have M-16s will be carrying whatever they can scrounge.”

  “Where will we be going sir?”

  “Stanley will tell you that when you rendezvous with him.”

  “One more question captain.”

  “Ask it private. Sorry, slip of the tongue. What is your last question corporal James?” Slip of the tongue. Yeah, right. Ash wasn’t certain why the captain hadn’t demoted him, or shot him, or even tossed him into the pit. He wasn’t going to second guess. The captain got crazier with each passing week, as if his brain was devouring itself. He was also going to need to keep an eye over his shoulder when he was with Stanley. He didn’t trust that man. Even Tex and White didn’t seem to like him.

  “Sir, what is my purpose on this mission? If I’m not going to be in command, and without any backup to escort a mission of conscripts?”

  “Your mission is to get them there and report back to me the status of the mission and Stanley’s command. Does that make sense corporal? No, it probably doesn’t. But I’m feeling magnanimous so I’ll let you in on a piece of my plan so that you don’t feel so left out.” The captain sounded if he were talking to a whiney child. Ash kept his face straight and his mouth shut. “I’m going to use Stanley and his men like sheep dogs, and have them herd any civilians they find back towards us. Those who don’t comply immediately will be bitten to speed them on their way. And like a sheep dog, Stanley will be out there protecting the herd from wolves. Is that clear?”

  “Yes sir. Perfect sense. When do I leave?”

  “In about two hours time. Get your gear ready. And report back here before you go.”

  “Yes sir.” Ash stood up and saluted before returning to his quarters.

  He grabbed a meal first thing. All of his necessary gear had been stowed in battle ready condition for weeks just in case orders came on the fly like now. Really, he didn’t have much to take along anyway. He didn’t know when he might next get the chance to eat any more than he knew where he was going.

  In two hours, he was back in the captain’s office, gear on his back and rifle in hand. “Reporting as ordered captain.” He said, saluting from the doorway.

  “Prompt as usual. Very well corporal. Stanley and his men are gathering out in front, go meet them and tell them that I have high expectations that they will perform their duties as ordered.”

  “Yes sir!” Ash saluted and did an about face, before trotting down to find Stanley.

  The next day, they all took a much needed rest. Jason resumed his wandering. This time leaving the shotgun, and taking the bow instead. He had seen an abundance of game wandering the hills during his travels. Deer mostly, and though he wasn’t big on venison, he was beginning to tire of eating rabbit or canned beef every day. He wouldn’t touch the canned poultry with a ten-foot pole. That stuff was just an outrage against the majestic deliciousness that was the noble chicken.

  His legs, back and arms and, well to put it shortly his entire body, were all still tired and sore from the digging the hole and hauling rocks the day before. But he felt good, good enough to go out hunting anyhow. Even considering that success would require dragging a deer carcass through the woods.

  Jason packed light. Making sure to add a folding saw to his normal gear. The saw would make his life easier to get rid of as much weight as he could for the return trip. He had enough foresight, guided by an innate sense of laziness, to know that much.

  Finding a balance, while walking through the forest, was difficult for Jason. The balance being - how to watch where you put your feet, all while trying to keep an eye out on the territory that you’re passing through. It was easy enough to find actually if you were smart. All that was required of a hiker was simply to slow the pace. Jason figured all this out as he began his hunt and he walked the trails that the deer and other animals had etched into the hillsides. Here roots and exposed rocks caught his toes, causing him to stumble and let out a stream of profanity.

  Four or five such embarrassing occurrences were required before he changed his pace. He had spooked yet another small herd of deer, when finally figured out exactly what he was doing wrong. His mistake was so blatantly obvious that he slapped his forehead in a cartoonish gesture of disgrace. Jason walked along slowly along the trail from that point on. He was still too clumsy of a woodsman to be said to have stalked as he threaded his way through the trees, with an arrow knocked in his bow and ready to draw. He had already lost two arrows, firing them at spooked game, he wasn’t in the mood to loose a third until he was certain he could score a hit.

  He had made his way to the far side of the hill from their new camp, when Jason came upon a large grass filled clearing where a herd of deer consisting of a large buck and his harem of does, were grazing on small leafy plants. He stepped on a twig, snapping it with a loud crunch. The deer looked up staring at him, searching for the source of the alien sound. Their ears pricked, they scanned the trees. Jason stood stark still, sweating and staring back. Willing the dumb animals to go back to eating. All while thanking whichever gods were fond of killing defenseless woodland animals that he was downwind from them. If they caught his scent, it would be all for naught. That much he had learned from his years of watching television.

  Minutes passed before the herd decided that there was no threat and returned to the important business of grazing. Jason crept closer, slowly, watching carefully where he placed his feet with each step. He picked out a doe one the edge of the herd closest to him. She was a little smaller than the rest and perfect for his needs. He raised his bow, drawing back the arrow as it came higher, bringing it to bear on her chest.

  He loosed the arrow.

  He felt a rush of exhilaration as the doe fell to her knees, trying to fight the inevitable. Her herd bounded away and vanished into the woods, leaving her to her fate, as it had always been with grazing animals. Jason stood up, slung the bow over his shoulder, drew his knife and walked over to the doe. She was still thrashing about, still not willing to surrender to her fate.

  Jason cut her throat. Ending her pain quickly as the life-blood drained from her still thrashing body. It was all he could do for her. Sadness replaced the exhilaration. He had grown used to killing zombies, creatures that had one time been his fellow living humans. But this was the first time that he had killed an animal that had still been full of life. In the weeks in the mountains Douglas and Lynn gathered the rabbits that they ate.

  He stood quietly for a moment, thanking the animal for the meat, the short prayer of thanks seemed like proper thing to do, before setting to work once again. This was another first for him, Jason had never before cleaned and prepared an animal after it was dead. His mouth began to go dry as he delved his hands into the bloody work. Jason suppressed a feeling of nausea as he removed the internal organs, leaving them in the field for the carrion birds and insects. He had always been told not to waste food. But he couldn’t carry the entire carcass back to camp by himself. He cleaned off his knife and the arrow, putting them back into his belt.

  Jason hoisted the carcass onto his shoulders and began the trek back. He was near the crest of the hill so this time he went straight over rather than around. There was no need to be quiet or slow, so he stomped through the woods, smashing through brush and leaving a trail with his passage.

  The top of the hill offered a beautiful view of the surrounding countryside, though it hid the valley below. He was breathing hard by that time, uphill with a hundred pounds of deer on his back, the ordeal made him glad that he had given up smoking. He stopped and enjoyed it for a moment, he was in the middle of nature and free, before pressing onwards, hoping to get home soon and unload his burden.

  His friends waved at him as he entered the clearing and walked around the giant pit that they had made for their
home. Lynn was trying to pull fish out of the stream her new fishing pole. Amy and Maggie were sitting on the bank chattering away as they wached. They were talking and giggling loudly enough for Jason to hear their voices, if not what they were discussing. Douglas and Ralph were sitting in the shade, going over lists once again. Exactly as he had left them. Those were too men who dearly loved lists.

  Jason walked the last few feet and dropped the deer in front of them. He then set down the bow before leaning against a tree and sliding down to the ground. They looked up from their work and saw the deer. “Alright, venison! Where did you get her?” Douglas said.

  “On the other side of the hill, a nice clearing. There was a herd of them. You guys wanna finish preparing the meat? I need a nap?”

  “Sure, I got it. This is going to be great!”

  He looked on as Douglas took care of the rest of the deer, skinning in and then butchering the corpse and dividing the meat. Jason wondered if he could ever kill a human being in cold blood like that. The deer had been tough, especially after he shot it. He pushed the notion from his mind. Best just to do what needed to be done, and not ponder too much on it ahead of time and then just do what needed to be done.

  “I’m going to need to turn most of this in to jerky, and quickly. Else it will spoil and be a waste.”

  “Ok, you do that. Do you need help?”

  “Not really.” Good. Jason leaned back further and let his eyes close. The hike out had been pleasant, but the one back had been murder. Sleep took him quickly.

  He was shaken awake by Maggie, her smiling pretty face hovering over his own. It was suppertime, and they were having a venison roast, with more potatoes. Home fries this time. He sat up and helped himself. The meat was far better than he remembered. The first time he had eaten venison, had been an unpleasant experience. Maybe you just needed to kill the animal in order to enjoy it completely. His friends cheered his success on the hunt and complimented Douglas on his cooking. Lynn calling him a regular Betty Crocker. If all their plans fell into place, life in the valley looked to be a good one.

  Jason took another helping of the roast and thanked the deer once more. He didn’t think much of religion, but a little spirituality didn’t hurt.

  Only a few days passed before they were willing to poke their heads out of their valley and continue with their plans. Jason hoped that with the passing of those days that they had gained a buffer between themselves and the gang that they had briefly encountered earlier in the week. The six of them piled into Kime, armed to the teeth, with Jason driving, and headed towards the city.

  Eagle Rapids was a good-sized city. A population of over a hundred thousand souls had made it their home. That much they knew, though nobody had visited it yet in all the years that they had collectively lived in the state. The city was largely a summer playground for the upper middle class and the wealthy, and there hadn’t been too much draw for anyone else. It wasn’t a huge metropolis of teaming millions, but it was bigger than the town that they had lived in for so much of their previous lives. Eagle Rapids it was named, though there weren’t any eagles within a hundred miles or so, and the rapids, well there was a river, but it more resembled a long snake like lake.

  The town was situated on a plain beyond the northern edge of the hill lands where they had taken up residence. It had grown by leaps and bounds over the years and had sprawled out to cover the face of the closest hills all while straddling the Eagle River which lent the city it’s name. Surrounded by wilderness, at least wilderness to the standards of the folks who lived in the civilized southlands, Eagle Rapids’ main industry was recreation. Making sure that the wealthy folks who came to visit for a few weeks every summer were able to live out their wilderness survival fantasies. In a safe environment.

  The sheer size of the city gave them hope that it would have at least one of the huge chain hardware stores. Or maybe even two. A giant hollow box filled to the ceiling with everything that they could ever possibly need to build their new homestead. Just the thought of all that hardware made Jason start to drool a little, as it tickled his Y chromosome kicked it into high gear.

  The city was closer than they thought. A mere sixty-seven miles. Jason watched the distance tick away, marking each mile as they drove. At least as the crow flew. Dodging around cars, and avoiding the small towns along the way as best they could, it took them more than two hours. Jason didn’t mind, it gave him plenty of opportunities to test Kime’s four-wheel drive capabilities. And to stick a arm out the window, wave a fist and yell ‘wooooh!’ as he did. The fist waving ‘wooooh!’ yelling, just seemed like the right course of action at the time, though it annoyed all of his passengers to some degree.

  The family would need far more room than any of their vehicles could offer individually or collectively. So the first and most important task ahead of them upon finally making it to the city, was to find one of those do it yourself moving truck rental businesses. With a big truck like that, they would only need to make one or two trips, though they might consider more just for fun.

  They expected to see more living zombies moving around when they entered the city. They were rather pleasantly surprised to find the streets relatively empty of active zombies. Seeing the occasional solitary zombie here and there. Jason wondered aloud where all the zombies had gone off to, at least until Ralph pointed out the increasing number of dead ones lining the roadsides. On closer inspection they found that none of the corpses had just lain down and died under their own violation, they were all sporting rather nasty head wounds.

  The marauders had apparently cut a path through the jungle of human flesh. If they followed the trail for too long, they would likely find something even worse than the undead. The living sometimes had more repugnant inclinations that mere cannibalism.

  Jason was all for driving around the city, until they found a truck to liberate. Lynn slapped him on the head lightly and told him to pull into the first private driveway that they came to. She and Douglas got out, and a few minutes later came back, cleaning gore off their weapons, and with a phone book in hand. Sure, take the easy way out Jason thought. But daylight was a burning and it would save them time, and hopefully help to keep them from accidentally finding the seedier parts of town.

  “Ok, there’s one on Euclid Avenue, off to the east. We’ll need to turn left on Cheshire right up here, then drive about five blocks.” Douglas said after he finished flipping through the pages to find the map in the front.

  So they went. They rolled down the windows, and those who could reach, stuck out their melee weapons, braining the walking dead as they passed. A simple precaution that they decided to take to keep their back trail clear. Staying alive meant being cautious and thinking ahead. But it was all a gamble. A line of fresh corpses would be an easy trail to follow should the bandits still be in town. It made Jason’s guts rumble with worry.

  The YouMove store was easy enough to find, even in the forest of signs. A forest with several different levels of canopies. So many signs, and all of them fighting one another for what they seemed to feel was their rightful share of attention. Garish things made out of brightly colored plastic. The signs were the same from one town to the next, only the smallest burgs escaped the clutter, and even then it wasn’t a complete escape. Still, no traffic to worry about, they had time to look, and six sets of eyes with which to find.

  With a left on Euclid and three more blocks they pulled into the YouMove. There was a line of bright orange trucks, each seemingly bigger than the last, just waiting to be taken. They settled on a twenty-four footer and sent Douglas and Ralph in to find the keys. Haley stayed back and looked through the phone book for a hardware store. There were two of them in town, Big Box Company and Mega-Tools. Haley chose to visit Big Box first, it was closer, and it was on the way to Mega-Tools.

  The moving truck led the way with Kime following as close behind as it could. Lynn calle
d out instructions over the radio, though those were few since the store was straight ahead further on down Euclid. The Bog Box was perhaps two miles away. Two miles of road cluttered with cars and still moving zombies. Jason could feel the anxiety building. The truck blocked his view of what lay a head, and the road behind them was slowly filling the zombies.

  The anxiety stayed with them until they pulled into the parking lot of the Big Box. Jason found himself startled at the number of zombies inhabiting the parking lot. The Megamart across the highway being crowded he could understand, the Megamart was always busy. But where there really this many people intent on finishing their home remodeling when the apocalypse struck? Most of them seemed to be pressing at the door, unable to get in, while a few wearing brightly colored vests seemed to be wandering the parking lot at random as if they had gotten lost while collecting carts.

  Amy prayed aloud with “please let this be all of them,” as she hoped that the inside of the building would be empty of the walking dead. Lynn joined her in the prayer, and Jason silently added his own.

  Douglas lead them to the left side of the Big Box, to the gate leading to the fenced off area that held the lumber inventory. The gate was locked and chained, which was easily overcome with a pair of strategically used bolt cutters. The trucks quickly passed through the opening and the companions closed the gate behind them and got to work.

  The Big Box was largely empty of the walking dead. The few there were easily dispatched and pushed aside.

  Ralph had painstakingly calculated out how much lumber they would need. So they busied themselves getting that all onto the truck, plus a bit more, in case there were mistakes made. Other things followed, aluminum siding, roofing tiles, more nails, pipes for plumbing. They found a couple of gas powered generators and took those, which opened up a field day on power tools. Ralph, Jason and Douglas almost drove themselves mad with the choices.

  Then there was the concrete. Damn concrete was heavy. That was stating the obvious, true enough, but still. It was even heavier than the books. They had taken all of the how too books on each subject that the Big Box carried. Not just one of each, but all of them. An instant library. Even the ones that they would never really need, like ‘Planting a Wildflower Garden’.

  They grabbed more than a single copy of each just in case more than one of the friends wanted to read any given title simultaneously, and they also had some visitors who also wanted to dust up on the fine art of installing electrical wiring, or whatever. It was a bit favoring the side of overkill, but they did it anyways. This kind of knowledge would be priceless.

  The back of the truck was nearly full with miscellaneous odds and ends when they separated to fill out the rest. Jason was looking at the lawn Gnomes when from across the floor came a loud and excited “Ach der Liebe!” The shout was clearly in Ralph’s voice, but Jason had never heard the man speak a single word of German. He dropped the lawn Gnome that he had been examining and sprinted towards source of the exclamation.

  By the time Jason arrived, Ralph was dancing in circles and had an audience gathered around him. Ralph was located in the lighting and electrical section of the store, dancing from foot to foot and speaking in what sounded like a very rapid German. It was the first time that Jason had ever heard the man use any other language than his crisp and clear English. Maggie was trying to calm him down, speaking in a slower German herself.

  Getting him back under control took Maggie a couple of minutes. When he was finally standing still and speaking English, it turned out that he had discovered the Big Box’s entire stock of solar panels. Eight in all. Enough to power a refrigerator and a few lights, and maybe a few hours of television a day. It turned out that Ralph was fascinated by solar energy. Renewable energy was his area of concentration in school. Maggie expressed a personal shock that he didn’t lose control of his bladder when he saw them.

  The solar panels were loaded in the back of Kime, along with several dozen car batteries. Seats were lowered, room was made and Maggie joined Douglas and Ralph in the truck. They were nearly packed to the gills as it was, but they still stopped at the Mega-Tools, upon Ralphs insistence. He was interested in getting his hands on more of the solar panels. He had no luck, but that only managed to dim his exuberance a bare fraction.

  Jason had thought that the bags of dry concrete were a pain to move, but working with the wet stuff was even worse. It was even heavier, and it had the pouring consistency of thick oatmeal. He was glad that Ralph had installed the water pump first, since bringing buckets of water by hand from the creek would have only made the ordeal unbarable. There was a lot of sweating, and even more swearing as they mixed the concrete and poured it onto the ground to build their floor by hand one section at a time. It took four of them a week to finish. Amy and Lynn during the meantime worked on the wooden framing for the rest of the house, under Ralph’s supervision.

  The man was everywhere. It was almost as if he had learned how to teleport. One minute he would be chiding Amy for her unsafe use of a power saw and the next he was standing next to Jason and telling him to add a cup or two more water to the mixture. The supervision chafed, but it was better than having to do it all over again.

  Raising up the wall of stone to create the foundation went a lot faster. By the time they had the foundations in place, Amy and Lynn had nearly finished cutting and assembling all of the framing. Raising the walls in place was fast and easy, after they got past a couple of miscommunications that resulted in an entire wall falling outwards. Jason still thought that Douglas should have spoken more clearly that just yelling ‘Blert!’ and pointing.

  They risked another visit back to the city, this time they hit up the Mega-Tools, leaving only with rafters, another giant pile of car batteries for the solar panels and some pre-built windows. The last of the material that they would need to get the house up.

  They finished building by early October. Down to the last touches on the paint inside. The house had brown siding with green ceramic roofing tiles. Atop the tiles and on either side of the peek and above the two skylights, were the eight solar panels that Ralph spent so many hours drooling over. The latrine went downstream and their water pump went up, Ralph had been very livid about that point after catching Douglas and Jason digging in the wrong place. They had built sealable rifle ports into the walls, for use should they ever have any unwelcome visitors. The walls around loft under the windows were lined with steel plates. It was half house, half fortress. Much better than the Megamart.

  All that was left was the furnishings and other odds and ends. To make the house a home, so to speak. In one trip they had three couches, a couple of comfortable easy chairs, a new dining room set (Lynn insisted, she wanted at least one formal meal a week), several beds and a forty inch flat plasma TV (Douglas insisted). Dishes, pots and pans, silverware. Jason even managed to snag himself a decent off road motorcycle, though he wouldn’t get much of a chance to use it before spring came again.

  Like Robinson Crusoe they were, except that they had it made. They had all the necessities out of the way, including some livestock and feed that they rescued from an abandoned farm to the south of Eagle Rapids.

  They were making a list for their last town visit. They had their necessities, to live, and comfortably. What they still needed was entertainment for the long dark winter months coming up, especially after Jason swore that he would go insane and kill them all if he had to spend four months cooped up indoors playing Scrabble. They had already liberated all of the movies that they were interested in seeing and then watching over again over during the dark nights of winter. Television shows too. They were prepared to worship at the altar of mindlessly passive entertainment for hours straight. That wasn’t quite enough.

  The one exception to their exuberant movie collection was zombie movies. Douglas had grabbed a couple, he had finally gotten into the spirit of things, but Lynn made him put the disks back where
he had found them. They were just too close to the real horrors to want to relive it in movie format. He tried to argue that mayhaps they would work as a survival guide, and let them come up with new ideas. She told him that she had already seen all of the movies, and that they would just bring on depression. The prognosis wasn’t ever good for the survivors in zombie horror. She did let him bring a copy of Night of the Living Dead, the origional, but that was all. It would have to be enough.

  They had also gotten a lifetime’s supply of video games. Every console, and every game that they could possibly lay their hands on, they picked up and put into their cart. Including the ones that might not be exactly a first choice in days gone by. Honestly, Barbie Dream Adventures. Douglas couldn’t quite tell them why they needed to add that to the cart. But there it was. Who knew, after slaying the dragon and rescuing the princess umpteen million times, perhaps leading Barbie through the shopping mall for the perfect pair of shoes would seem like an entertaining diversion. Right. And maybe Jason would end up rescuing and marrying a lingerie model.

  Books too. They had books. Lots of them. A second instant library to go along with all of their building references. Fantasy, science fiction, actual science, romance, mysteries. You name it, they got it. The library was a potential source of both entertainment and pain in their future. How many of the series’ were unfinished when the cataclysm came? Just a cliffhanger ending that would never be revisited and wrapped up. The characters out there floating for all eternity, never to see an end of their ordeal. Jason thought that he would let Lynn read the series first, and stick with single volume novels in the mean time. It was safer that way.

  It was Lynn who found one last store that she needed to visit, though she refused to tell Jason what it was or where. Only that he, she and Amy were going to hit it up and acquire more material to keep them entertained for the future. Douglas had disinclined the invitation as had Maggie and Ralph. They had work to do around the house. That should read ‘Douglas and Ralph were still competing for the grand champion spot in Barbie Dream Adventures’.

  Jason tried to get her to tell him what the secret store was, but she wouldn’t. Nor would anyone else. He had a feeling that he was being set up for a visit to the yarn store. Lynn and Amy had been talking about taking up knitting as a hobby now that they had the time and nothing else to distract them. So he got into the SUV and sulked.

  So far all of their trips into town had been uneventful. They had come across zombies, by the hundreds at times, and avoided them when they could, killed them or ran away when that was the only sane option available. They hadn’t seen a single living human being yet. Neither bandits, nor survivors either had graced them with their presence. Jason couldn’t quite fathom their luck, either good or bad. It would be nice to have some more people to help seed their tiny community. But on the other hand, who knew how those people might react to having strangers in their midst.

  Their last trip came about mid morning one dreary day in late September. The three of them began their final visit to the city for the season. With this last trip, Lynn said that they would have everything they would probably need or want for the upcoming winter months. It wasn’t raining, yet, but the sky was promising. A miserable day to be out and about.

  They piled into the SUV, as well as three people could pile. Sat down and buckled in. The usual survival gear stowed under the seats and weapons within easy reach. More weapons than they would probably need, but it was better to be prepared for any advent. It felt like being part of a military expedition. Jason checked the knife on his belt, feeling a little like a Stallone or Schwarzenegger character. Sans the huge muscles and squad of bad-assed hombres at his back. He looked at Lynn and Amy. Lynn was stowing her shotgun and Amy was inspecting and cleaning the .45 that Jason had given her. Any character in an action movie would be happy to have either of them along.

  Jason had grown comfortable driving the back roads by the time they made that trip. The roads were free and clear of all cars until they were about five miles out of town, where they became more heavily congested with abandoned vehicles. But with all of their prior experience with visits into town, they knew where all the worst areas were, and how to best avoid them.

  The shop that they were looking for was somewhere in the old down town shopping district. None of them had been there before. But it was easy enough to find, after a fashion. They were forced to find a parking lot that was largely empty, but relatively near to the store that Lynn was so intent on visiting. So instead, they walked the two blocks along cobblestone-paved road. The old downtown of Eagle Rapids was of those real old fashioned looking set-ups that the tourists flocked from all over to see. Quaint they called it. Jason liked the buildings as they were, old fashioned and made of brick and mortar. They didn’t have the cookie cutter feeling that was so pervasive in modern cities. It was historic district in a time where historic seemed to be torn down and then half forgotten and buried under a pile of modern ugliness. It just felt so cheap, tacky and shallow.

  Now the cities all across the country, large and small alike, covered countless square miles, spreading out like some giant amoeba and absorbing everything round about. They all looked the same, that was what annoyed him the most. No matter where you went, every town or city looked exactly alike the last. Oh sure, there might be some minor differences between the two. Perhaps in one town the Megamart and the Big Box would be sitting right next to one another, and in the next they would be across the street. And there might not be a second Beefy Burger just up the road. But that was about all. The buildings were the same from one location to the next. Carbon copies. Boring, boring, boring. After all, why go visit one city when you could pretty much take in the sites while standing still?

  There were twenty or so zombies on the street that they could see. In either direction. The three of them moved together, towards Lynn’s shop, killing anything that moved between Kime and their final super-secret destination. The rest of the zombies on the street were closing in on them, slowly and it was obvious that they would have to slay some more when they came back from the shop, but that could be put off until later. No point going and looking for trouble. It was always possible that if they went out in search of those few other zombies that they might run across an entire horde of hundreds. Or something even worse.

  There it was. Jason nearly glee-ed in his own pants when he saw the sign. The Geek Palace! Comics, Cards and Games! Oh my! He hugged and kissed Lynn and then Amy, with them giggling as he did. Jason gibbered in excitement for a full minute before finally coming enough to his senses to pick the lock and let them all in to behold the geekly heaven that awaited them on the other side of the glass.

  “Happy birthday Jason.” Lynn was squeezing him on the shoulder. She always knew what to get him, which sadly didn’t ever seem to work in reverse. He hoped that she still liked socks.

  “A whole gaming store. You shouldn’t of.”

  “It’s ok, you’re worth it.” They were grinning at one another. Amy joined in, though it was clear by her body language and facial expression that she had no clue what was going on and that she saw them as acting like couple of loons. It was ok. He had his own gaming store now. Soon the world would come to know the most preeminent GM in existence, ever. And if he was unable to live up to that grandiose title, he would just have to settle for the being the best equipped.

  Through the door he went. And there he stopped. The sight was beautiful. Games and comics and toys. Oh my! Lynn pushed him forward and made a smart assed comment about stepping over the puddle of drool that had developed in front of where he had his feet. If she was so worried about it, she could always wipe it up.

  Jason nearly blew his mind trying to decide what to take first. Which books? Or perhaps the comics? Maybe even the card games. Decisions, decisions! He stuffed eight or nine sets of dice in his pockets, all different colors before
moving on and looking at the miniatures.

  “You know, it’s going to take a long time to get all of this over to Kime.”

  “We have time. They’re not expecting us back until this evening at the very earliest.” Jason nearly skipped when he heard that. Lynn and Amy in the meantime were over standing next to the boxes full of comics. Hundreds or even thousands of issues packed into boxes from scores of different titles. Jason wished that they had brought the big moving truck rather than his puny SUV. If they had, then he wouldn’t need to make so many difficult choices.

  Amy had a copy of what looked like an issue of one of Frank Miller’s graphic novels open in her hand. Lynn was looking at one instance of the multitude of X-men titles. Jason decided to walk the store before he sorted through what they would take and leave. They had books from every game system that he could think of, and a few that he had never seen before.

  He ranged along the exterior wall of the store, avoiding the bookshelves that took up much of the interior floor space. His walk around the perimeter eventually led him to the office that was tucked away behind the checkout counter. Jackpot. The store had a large selection of games out on the shelves, likely the ones that they thought would best sell. Largely core rulebooks only since space was so limited. In the back room on the other hand, they stored all of the other books. Expansions galore. Jason felt himself begin to salivate all over again and forced himself to move so that the drool wouldn’t accumulate at his feet.

  Jason began his selection. There were so many books and worlds to choose from. So many interesting places to explore and venture through. Adventures and tales to weave for his friends. Battles for them to fight and kingdoms to save. It beat the hell out of playing scrabble, no matter what Douglas might think. Paper and pencil Role playing games were even better than any video game ever made as far as he was concerned. Sure, there were no cool, ultra-realistic graphics to appreciate. Everything was locked up in your mind. A game was like taking part in a story or a movie, one where the players decided how the next twist would flop.

  He started the collection. Two of each core rule book in the store. He had found in the past that having more than one book sped things up in the beginning processes of opening a new game. Rolling new characters and all that jive. After that, he took all the supplements that caught his eye. There were a lot of those. Lynn stared the growing pile, elbowing Amy to get her attention and pointing out Jason’s gaming avarice. They both smiled, wearing looks of grand amusement, until they realized that they would be helping him get it all back to Kime. Then their expressions changed to what that can only be dubbed as: “Ahhhhh Craaaaaap!”

  The pair of women were industrious, and while Jason was in the back room, skull-locked by a host of choices that would need to be made soon, they took a armful each of what he had picked out to the truck. Before killing a couple zombies that had stumbled in to closely, on their way back to the shop for the next load.

  The SUV was getting full. Jason had found everything that he would ever ‘need’ leaving Amy and Lynn to haul it to the car as he puttered around the storage area. They had even managed to secure a couple of boxes of comic books that had caught their attention.

  The two of them joined Jason in the storage area at the back of the shop. He was staring intently at a large safe that had been buried in the back corner. Not just staring, he was fiddling with the dial, with his ear pressed to the door as if he were some sort of expert safecracker from a spy film. Really, he had no idea what he was doing and it was fairly obvious to even the most casual observer when Lynn asked, “What the hell are you planning to do with that?”

  “Open it.” It was really lame response. Really lame. But she had startled him with the blunt question. The safe was a closed door in an open world. Curiosity killed the cat and all that jive, but here was a door that was calling to be opened.

  “Really? How were you planning to manage that?” Really obvious.

  “Do you think you can…”

  “No, I don’t know how.”

  He opened his mouth, when a disturbing sound came from the shop.

  “Why the hell would the two of them come into here?” A strange and gravely voice asked from the front entrance. It was a man’s voice. Jason switched off the lamp that he had been using for light in the back storeroom. Now the only light came streaming in from the windows in the front of the building. Just enough to see Lynn and Amy’s features. Amy was frightened, and Lynn was angry.

  “I don’t know. But we saw them come in. So here they are.” A second, deeper voice answered.

  “Yeah, so did Carter, bet he’ll be back with the others as soon as you can spit.”

  “Who the fuck cares? By the time they get here, we’ll’uv had our fun already. They can have the sloppy seconds right?”

  A loud braying laugh, and “Yeah right. Lets go introduce ourselves!”

  The deep voice called into the shop. “Oh girlies, we know you’re here, saw ya come in, saw your light switch off. Why don’t you just make it easier on yourselves? If you do, we’ll be gentle. Promise.” The two voices guffawed. A miserable sound that made Jason’s hair stand up on end. What he hated most was that he expected this to eventually happen. In all of their trips into Eagle Rapids, he had expected to meet these people. The sad remnants of humanity turning savage when civilization collapsed around them. Now here those remnants were, A couple of would be rapists blocking off their only escape route.

  “What do we do?” Amy asked in a whisper. She had her fear under a tight control, but only just. Jason stood up, and pulled his knife from the sheath.

  “Go stand at the doorway and look out, make sure you’re seen and then scream and run to the back. Lynn, you hide in the darkness waiting for her.”

  “How about you?” Lynn asked, pulling a knife of her own.

  “I’ll stand next to the door, and stick the second fucker as he comes through the door.” Lynn nodded grimly. Amy looked frightened still, but resigned. Or he hoped she was resigned. It was difficult to read her expression in the gloom.

  Lynn took her position, behind a shelf at the back of the storage room, her knife in hand. Jason followed Amy to the front of the storage room. He hid behind a cardboard cutout of the extremely curvy Jerri Ryan from one of the numerous Star Trek shows, Voyager he thought it had been. The shop had obviously been owned and run by men.

  Amy played her part perfectly. The men saw her and hooted and gave chase. Jason let the first pass. The second received a breath-stealing kick to the stomach for his tardiness, dropping him to the floor, as he clutched his gut. Jason was on the man as he tried pushing himself up off the floor. The knife gleamed dully in the dim sunlight as Jason thrust it for the man’s neck. The gang member deflected his attack with ease, taking only a slice across his forearm. The man was huge and muscular and much more powerful than Jason.

  Jason hit the ground with a roll that ended in a crouch.

  The man was on his feet, his own wicked looking knife in his hand. Murder burning in his eyes and his face full of rage. He was furious that Jason had tried to spoil his fun. Jason stood to near his full height with his shoulders hunched a litt, holding the blade out before him. The man charged.

  Jason dropped down under a heavy swing that probably would have made his head quit his body. There was a clatter over his head as the man connected with the doorframe. He slashed out with his own knife, severing tendons in his opponent’s knee, sending blood gushing out and soaking the pant leg and the floor beneath. The man howled and brought one huge fist down on Jason’s shoulder before collapsing in agony.

  Jason saw stars, but forced himself up to his feet again. The gang member was struggling to rise, but his wound wouldn’t allow him up further than his knees. Jason moved around to his wounded side stabbed again, this time sinking his blade into the man’s unprotected throat. The man gurgled a bit, and then fell backwards. Jaso
n watched the shadow draped body thrash about for a moment and then finally still. He stood there in a dazed manner, waiting for something else to happen. A distressing thought worked hard to bubble to the surface of his consciousness.

  A moment later Lynn and Amy were leading him by the hand. Lynn had cleaned his knife and sheathed it once again. The thought that had been struggling so hard finally popped, echoing through his skull. I’ve killed a man. A real live living man. And not like that crazy chick who cursed me at the reservoir before killing herself. I actually stuck sharpened steel into his flesh and ended his miserable existence. Jason was now an honest to God murderer, and that fact didn’t agree with him. Zombies were zombies. This was a human.

  Lynn slapped him hard across the face. Waking him up completely from his shocked fancies. They were standing in the sunlight just outside the store. “We have to get moving! Now!”

  The others. One of them had said that there were others. And that they would be coming soon. Jason unslung his shotgun. He looked sadly around the shop one more time as his mind slipped into gear and engaged once more. So much that they were leaving behind. He tore his gaze away from the small stack of left over books that they would be abandoning and took up his position as the rear guard.

  Jason followed Amy and Lynn out into the street, discarding his silly angst about losing what he never really had in the first place. Books and games. That was all. Stupid books and games. No reason to be greedy, there were more important concerns right in front of his eyes. Such as getting himself and his two friends out of town and away from the feral dogs who had come hunting them.

  They sprinted across the street and ducked into the entryway of the store that stood there. Jason pumping his arms as best he could with the shotgun in both hands. He did his best to breathe around the final Dungeons and Dragons game manual that he had put in his mouth as they left the store. Jason peaked his head out. The street was empty. Both ways. Not even a single zombie was in sight. He motioned Amy and Lynn to follow him as he jogged back towards where they had left Kime.

  Amy was sporting a long, shallow slash across her forehead. Jason had presumed that she received in her fight with the piece of human garbage that was currently littering the floor of the storeroom. Lynn looked as well as ever, though she was cradling her left arm a little as if it pained her. Jason’s own head began to ache with each jarring step.

  They could hear the distant thundering of engines rolling over the empty streets, reverberating within the buildings. The sound was chasing them as they ran and getting louder with each step. There was more than one engine out there, a whole pack of them perhaps. Hunting wolves.

  That much he knew, and little else. They all seemed to harmonize together and form into a single roar, like ocean waves pounding a beach during a storm and echoing through a canyon. It made picking out individuals impossible, and worked to spur them on, faster, faster before those goons’ friends arrived and found out what happened to their compadres. Jason sprinted the last half block, with Amy and Lynn on his heels.

  Jason slammed Kime’s rear door closed as he bound past. Amy and Lynn opened their doors and launched themselves into their seats. Jason ignited the engine, threw the gear into reverse and hit the gas, driving straight through a patchy civic lawn and down the sidewalk. Before turning around and launching themselves forward, fleeing their pursuers and hammering down the rising panic as he worked. In the store, they had been humans setting a trap for a couple of errant wolves, now they were rabbits fleeing from the pack.

  Lynn worked the pump, chambering a round into her shotgun. She rolled down the window. Jason and Amy followed her lead. Jason traded his shotgun for Amy’s .45, flipping the safety switch off and placing the gun in his lap before putting his hand back on the wheel. It would be for emergencies only, right now he had to concentrate on making good their escape. They were about to embark upon a journey into unknown territories of the urban jungle. Urban jungle. Jason laughed at that. Maybe suburban, - savannah? - best evoked the spirit of the town Eagle Rapids. But not jungle.

  The racket caused by the engines of their hunters was dampened by the sound of their own engine. But Amy kept swearing that she was certain that they were getting closer. Jason didn’t doubt her. They sounded like they were using motorcycles, and those bikes would be able to navigate the traffic jams in was unpassable by Kime. They all bounced up and down in their seats as Jason ran up on a curb to avoid some more blockage. The .45 flew off of his lap and landed on the floor between himself and Lynn who was sitting strapped into the passenger’s seat. She picked the gun back up and placed it in his lap.

  Two miles from the edge of town, Amy screamed, “there they are!” Just as two bikes, and a pair of four-wheelers entered his rearview. The riders pointed their way and accelerated, giving chase. They started howling at the top of their lungs with a savage fury. Waving guns, heavy pistols, in the air as they came.

  Amy unbuckled herself and turned around in her seat. Jason heard her ready her shotgun. Lynn turned around and said, “Wait until they attack first. That way we don’t get ourselves further into trouble. Maybe they’re friendly.” And maybe she was the President of Madagascar.

  Jason pulled out the cup holder from the dash, put his second .45 through the ring for easier access if things got hairy. The hunters were less than two hundred feet behind them and closing. Jason kept flipping his eyes back and forth between the mirror and the road ahead.

  The crack of a gunshot rolled over them, followed closely by the screeching sound of the bullet punching through metal. There was no misunderstanding of intent. Nor more hope for a peaceful resolution. The bikers got their answer. Jason stepped on the gas as both Lynn and Amy responded by letting their shotguns speak for them. Amy managed to knock one of the four-wheelers off his ride, for good. The man fell to the pavement and didn’t move again as his vehicle jumped the curb and flipped over onto its side.

  Jason swerved in and out through the labyrinth of forgotten automobiles. Finally they came to a straightaway. They had nearly made it to the edge of Eagle Rapids and onto the safety of the open highway.

  The rattle of gunfire originating from their rear increased dramatically after the first hunter hit the ground dead. The bikers began to panic saw that their prey was no longer trapped and hindered in the maze. One of the bikers tried to sidle up on the driver’s side to get off a shot and stop the car. Kill the driver the car would stop. He was a bearded man with a narrow face. His long hair was held back by a grease stained bandanna and in his hand was a sawed off double barrel shotgun. Jason pulled the .45 from his lap and emptied it out the window, aiming with the side view. He missed the biker, but not the bike. The wounded motorcycle began to bellow and belch, tipping over and spilling its rider onto the blacktop. Stupid bastard was wearing kahkis and not leather. Jason didn’t envy the skin that the man lost, but he didn’t pity him either.

  Jason dropped the gun on the floor and stole a glance at his companions. Amy was just finishing reloading her shotgun when the back window exploded inward. She dropped the shotgun to her seat, screamed and clutched her hand. Lynn was leaning out the window a little bit and taking aim. She fired. Sending the second biker to the ground, skidding along the blacktop, chased by his motorcycle.

  The last of their pursuers stopped and turned around, leaving the chase to go help his surviving friends. Jason gunned it, all the way up to seventy all the way home. Lynn unbuckled herself and climbed into the back to help Amy.

  “How is she?” He called back.

  “A bullet took two of her fingers and there is a shard of glass lodged in her hand.” Lynn set to removing the shard of glass, carefully as she could. Amy whimpered as she worked, but bore the pain and fear stoically. In a few minutes she was bandaged up to stop the bleeding. When they got home, they would have to stitch her up as best as they could manage, and pump her full of antibiotics and paink
illers. But for now she would just have to sit and wait.

  “All of that just to play a little D&D.” Jason shook his head.

  Lynn responded, “We’re lucky it wasn’t worse. With all those bullets flying our way, we could all be wounded dead right now. That was all luck.”

  “Luck, or two feet of paper, and a couple millimeters of steel between them and us.”

  A look of horror struck her face and she moaned, “Oh the books. Do you think they’ll be damaged?”

  “Some of them. But better them than us.”

  “I know, just all that hard work and then getting attacked and shot at. Amy’s hand. I would hate for it to all have been for nothing because we returned with a carload of ruined books.”

  “It won’t have been for nothing. Now we at least know that Eagle Rapids isn’t a safe harbor that we had hoped for.” They all fell silent and Jason thought over the words and actions of the would be rapists and their friends. Relief and terror washed over him in turns. They had escaped, but how many times had they stuck their heads in the bear cave? How many times could they have been attacked? They had made at least seven or eight trips into town, most of them with that monster moving truck. What if they had been seen before? Could they have been followed home without realizing it?

  No, they would have noticed. They had been watching their tracks closely in all the other trips. It was the last one where they had been a little careless. That was how it always worked. Ignore the rules one time, and bam, disaster struck. What about the people of Eagle Rapids? Had the survivors befallen the same sort of unpleasant fate? Raped and murdered by bandits in their own homes?

  They would have to be vigilant, even more so when they got home again. They had killed at least two of those fucking marauders, maybe three or four, and it was pretty damn expectable that their friends would want blood in exchange for the blood already spilled. Once again life had just gotten a bit more interesting, and a lot more frightening.

  He didn’t slow down until they were a mile away from home. Lynn and Amy kept watching the road behind them at his request, telling him that there was nothing there to calm his nerves. He had stopped several times, pulling into side roads and waiting, for ten minutes at a time for any sign of pursuit. There had been none. They finally pulled into the long dirt driveway that lead up to their home. Jason relaxed a little.

  He parked Kime about ten feet from the front porch, and the three of them jumped out. Lynn led Amy into the house, calling for help as she went. None of them were doctors, none of them had any real medical experience, none of them were trained beyond basic first aid. But they had books, and some of them were pretty smart, so they would have to manage. Amy would need stitches in her hand and maybe some in her forehead and she would come away with a couple of wicked looking scars. But for now there was nothing life threatening.

  Jason stayed out next to the SUV and let them work. He would only get in the way should he go inside. He walked around Kime’s exterior, running his fingers along the paneling as he went. It was when he rounded the rear of the car when he found out how right he had been, and how lucky they all were. The back of the SUV had been riddled with perhaps fifteen or twenty bullet holes. Seventeen exactly, he counted. From the bumper, just above the driver’s rear tire, to the shattered plate glass rear window.

  Everything came back all at once. From the man who had almost killed him and then died at Jason’s hands, to the rolling gun fight through the streets of Eagle Rapids. Jason felt the need to throw up. He stumbled over to the nearest tree and did.

  They took what they could from the back of Kime. A lot of the comics were nearly ruined and little better than kindling anymore. But that was ok, they served a greater purpose. Amy was kind of upset that she wouldn’t be able to get the full X-men experience, and would have to settle for the movies and cartoon DVDs that they had liberated in previous trips. Most of the game books however came out in pristine shape, much to Douglas’ dismay.

  Amy’s hand healed before too long. Though it was rather stiff for a month or two after the bandages came off, and she often complained about an ache in her missing fingers. Jason didn’t understand the physiology of phantom limb syndrome, even after both Douglas and Lynn tried to explain it to him and he just chalked it off to the female brain being wired in a bizarre manner.

  Fall settled in, the first snow coming just after the six of them celebrated Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving was a new holiday for Maggie and Ralph. They had heard of it, and had their own versions in their homelands but had never experienced it in the traditional American fashion. They came into the holiday with a nearly clean slate. Without the years of social baggage tied to the meaning. It was Ralph and Maggie who managed to get the most joy and reward out of the festivities.

  Thanksgiving wasn’t just turkey day for the family anymore. Though Jason had found and shot a wild turkey for dinner. He was getting pretty good at hunting. No, they were able to enjoy the full meaning of the words thanks giving. Though that holiday everyone was thankful.

  None of the Americans had ever really thought about, or understood the meaning of the holiday before. Turkey, potatoes, and time with family while the television flickered with images of boring parades and football games. Then there had been the fights. Jason recalled one time where one of his cousins came out to the entire family over dinner on Thanksgiving. About a decade before. There was a sudden air of ‘what the fuck?’ and then everyone went back to eating. Though his two brothers, Ed and Joe, had edged their chairs a little away from their outted sibling, eyeing him doubtfully for a while. Being the joker he was, he went and flirted with them until the entire family started laughing at the absurdity of the whole situation. By the time that the pies were laid down on the table, life was back to normal.

  His cousin had been killed a few years later during St. Patrick’s day in New Orleans. He had been beaten to death by a couple of frat boys after a party because they “hated faggoty Yankee Nancy-boys coming into their town and acting like they owned the place.” The frat boys spent a year in jail and then were released for good behavior. The prosecuting attorney never bothered to invoke any of the hate crimes laws. Ed and Joe went out and found and kicked the shit out of the two afterwards for what the frat boys had done to their brother. They had gone to jail themselves and served the same amount of time. In the words of Vonnegut, “So it goes.”

  Their first bout of good news came in by the end of October. Maggie was pregnant. Followed soon after by Lynn. They were both a couple months along by then, though not yet beginning to show. It seems that they had taken to heart Jason’s words at the close of the wedding ceremony. They had been making babies. They were both due sometime in May or June.

  All three women went literally bonkers. From then on out, it was baby-mania. They spent hours talking about giving birth and looking over the health books that they had brought home, reading up and studying for when the ‘magic time’ came. Jason was a man who had finally come to terms with the blood that he had shed. Both human an animal. Killing and preparing a deer no longer really affected him. The dreams about the man he had murdered had faded. The near constant talk about birthing fluids and female periods on the other hand made him a mite queasy and looking for a place to flee to.

  Ralph and Douglas in the meantime made a couple of cribs out of spare lumber left over after they finished building the house and storage garage. Jason wasn’t sure if they were building it because it was a good idea to be prepared, or that they just wanted to escape the crazy hormonal women inside the house. A little from column A and a little from column B.

  From time to time when they were sure that none of the woman were in hearing distance, they would slap one another on the shoulder and boast about what they had made. Congratulating one another on a job well done.

  He didn’t know about those two, but he himself opted for the escape option. When he was
n’t talking to them over the hum of power tools and the smell of sawdust, he was out wandering the hills looking for game to kill. Six people ate a lot of food. And they all felt that it was better to get fresh food when they could, saving the canned goods for emergencies. No matter, game or not it was good to be out in the cool air and away from the pregnancy talk.

  Amy was studying to be the midwife. Of the three woman, she had become the most gung ho about, well everything related to birth and babies. It was soon apparent that she wanted one of her own. Jason would never have noticed, except that she had cornered him and informed him that she wanted one of her own, and that since he was single and she was single, maybe he could go about helping her. The desperation and slightly feverous light in her eyes made it quite clear that turning down the offer would mean a bit of unpleasantness over the coming months.

  Jason wasn’t the brightest member of the group. He knew that. Douglas, Lynn and Ralph were defiantly smarter than himself. Billy had outstripped him by a long shot. But he was smart enough to take Amy up on her demands. Though they weren’t really compatible, there wasn’t too much selection, and beggars couldn’t be choosers.

  Amy was a cute girl, with a nice athletic body and full of energy. The sex was fun. A lot of fun. For a while. Tiring was a better word for it. She cornered him wherever she got a chance and milked him dry. He had to hand it to her, when she knew what she wanted, she went out and chased it down, beat it with a stick until it stopped moving and tried to seize it with all her might.

  Sadly, he was unable to get her preggers, though not for a lack of trying. They were just incompatible. Or perhaps one of both of them were infertile. They tried until well into March before it all suddenly stopped. Amy was a woman inclined to have rapid mood swings and that was one of them. He was of course, in her eyes, entirely at fault for her inability to catch, and she voiced her opinion quite loudly while crying.

  Jason breathed a sigh of relief. Finally some rest. He considered taking a vow of celibacy for there on out, but that resolution only lasted a week. He was after all only a man.

  Winter in the hills was a lot harsher than the ones they experienced before. The snow was a lot heavier than anything they had ever encountered at home. Blizzards came and went, and they spent days cooped up indoors, with one another, trying to kill the time. They got together and roleplayed a couple nights a week at least. Characters lived and characters died. Dragons were slain and wars fought. Heroes were made and destroyed. Even Douglas, with his distaste for gaming began to look forward to their adventures. Everyone even got the chance to run the game. They had infinite worlds to explore, and almost as much time to do it. It was one of the few activities that distracted them, if only for a few hours at a time, to how much the world had changed over the past few months. They never once fought a zombie in game.

  Television and movies were watched in great abundance. Video games were broken out and mastered. Tournaments were run. Jason even learned how to play chess, though much to Douglas’ annoyance, he didn’t take it very seriously and was liable to make rash moves. It was all good since Ralph was Douglas’ equal at the game and was more than willing to take up the cause of providing Douglas with a true challenge.

  He even learned a few words while playing scrabble. They even modified their rules to allow slang, which was good for him. Jason knew a lot of slang.

  They were happy months. For all of them. They sort of became a commune of hippies, except without the overt hippiness.

  There were many a deep and spirited conversation about who would win in a battle royale, with random and comparable names thrown out, and both sides argued. The cast of Cheers vs. the kids from Harry Potter. Who would win? Jason was in favor of Godzilla taking them all down. They were geeks, it’s what they were meant to do.

  They also discussed over and over what had happened to the world and why. Ralph showed a previously unseen deep religious streak and claimed it was all punishment by an angry God. Nearly the rest of the house disagreed. Jason voiced Billy’s favored theory that it was an evil wizard bent on controlling the world. Someone needed to speak for the dead. The theory brought smiles and they talked about their fallen friend for the first time since he had died.

  Douglas and Ralph often got into long, pointless, boring, drawn out conversations about the evils of society. They would go for hours, bordering on arguing. Until Lynn, or Jason or one of the others pointed out that it was pointless to continue ranting about the wrongs of a dead culture. That would shut the two of them up, for a time.

  Life was good again.

  Then April came, and the babies became due. Lynn and her new daughter came out happy and well, Maggie didn’t, but she left behind a son. They mourned deeply for the happy woman, and buried her among the birch tress when the ground thawed. Her now less happy husband, they took care of, and helped through their time of woe. His new son did more than anything. Franz after his grandfather. A man who the child would come to know only through stories never in person. From what Jason heard of the man, that was a shame.

  When the cataclysm finally came, the good was washed away along with the bad. Quoth Vonnegut again: So it goes.

  Amy filled in the void that Maggie left. Or did her best to. For Ralph and the rest of the group. She cheered up immensely with the births, the death being a minor sadness for her in comparison. The babies helped ground her back in reality, helped her work through her own guilt and sorrow.

  So they found themselves with spring a-springing. The sun came closer, the days got longer and the weather got warmer melting the snow and revealing the long forgotten grass. As had happened for countless billion years, the world just kept on turning. The snow melted, and their little creek flooded a little. The ground got soft with mud and green began to return to the grass and trees.

  The long winter indoors, both the happy times and the more recent sad, left Jason with the powerful need to stretch his legs.

  Sure, he had taken snowshoes out over the winter to go and try to kill a deer for fresh meat. But that wasn’t quite enough. He wanted to range over days, travel tens or hundreds of miles. His feet itched and the only way to scratch them was to get out his motorcycle and get it running.

  Conscripts were, in the eyes of the captain, less valuable than his regular company. Which made sense to Ash and at the same time made him laugh his ass off, since the regular company was made up of reservists who weren’t even trained line soldiers, just jumped up civilians with guns. Still, the company had received some training, and in the beginning had they been more disciplined that the ordinary civilians who crossed their paths. So the captain had a certain point. Maybe they were more trust worthy. Then again, they were also becoming armed thugs.

  “Stanley.” Ash nodded. Stanley wasn’t his commander, or even a soldier, so he didn’t need to be saluted or addressed by rank. Stanley was a little larger than Ash, who was himself a fairly big man, not huge, but taller and heavier than average, Stanley was even more so. The man had greasy brown hair and brown eyes and a moustache that was in sore need of some maintenance. Their clothes were, like everyone else’s, stained and dirty. Unlike most of the conscripts though, they seemed to have created their own uniforms. Blue jeans and leather jackets, like those outlaw rebels from a fifties movie about angry teenagers.

  Stanley, and his conscripts, were heart and soul owned by the captain. He had elevated them from mere civilians to something near soldiers. The soldiers had guns and power. They got women when they wanted them and better food. The conscripts only received scraps from the table and were allowed to entertain their dreams of one day being elevated to full soldiers. Plus, they didn’t have to work as hard as the civilians and conscripts were never forced into any of the captain’s special projects, like the roundup. Life was still hard, but a lot safer and more comfortable when you weren’t on the bottom.

  In return, they were expected to giv
e absolute loyalty to the captain. Their duties tended to be to act as sheep dogs as the captain called them. They were around to keep the civilians well behaved and in line. They had become like prisoner guards and were more brutal and heartless than the ordinary soldiers could ever be. Even those like Tex and White had their limits. Anything less than total loyalty to the captain, thought, was punished by a week or so of careful torture (so that the offender didn’t die too soon), followed by a lifetime in the pit. Even a hint, or a whisper of treachery could gain an unlucky conscript the same horrible fate as open revolt. Even the captain merely disliking a brief facial expression

  To rise so high in the ranks so quickly, Stanley must have been brutal and cunning in his dealings with his fellow citizens. He wasn’t a man to ignore or cast aside.

  They marched in silence, walking along streets that were littered with rotting corpses and little else. Ash tried to count them, but gave up after getting to two hundred and tripping for the third time in ten minutes, while leaving the majority of what he stepped over excluded from his tally. Half the city must be lying in the streets by now. Without the facemask he had been issued, the stench would have been overwhelming, it was still powerful enough to make him feel like gagging.

  “Stanley, if you don’t mind my asking. Where have we been ordered?”

  “We’ve been ordered that way,” Stanley replied, pointing in the direction that they had been walking.” A few of his men guffawed roughly.

  “That I see. But what is our final destination? A specific building?”

  “You’ll find out when we get there corporal. The captain sent us out to take a community over. He needs more people he says. And outposts that don’t seem to be connected to him. The captain can always find use for more warm bodies. He has lots of plans.” Stanley laughed. His people laughed along with him, though some looked as if they didn’t really think that Stanley’s jest was very funny. Ash wasn’t even sure if it was a joke. There was no punch line. It was just a callous and cruel thing to say. Ash felt the need to shoot Stanley, but kept his head down and his lips tightly locked in place.

  And they walked. Ash tried to ignore the stupid jokes and comments made by Stanley’s people. Some of those guys were even dumber than himself. But they all seemed as if they wanted to take a crack at him and make a joke at his expense. Beginning with Stanley himself. They made him miss the good old days with Grover. Grover had at least been a nice enough guy, if you could get past the drooling and vacant stares.

  As they marched, rather, as Ash marched and the others just ambled along in a shapeless group, there was little to break up the monotony, so Ash spent time thinking about Avery and what he had been saying over the last weeks. Summed up and without the pretty and passionate words the message was simple: the captain is nuts, we need to get rid of him and find a replacement. All of it was true. Thankfully he had the sense not to suggest a replacement. That would have gotten Sarge into hot water too.

  The problem was that the captain had managed to draw in hundreds of loyal conscripts, and armed them. They hadn’t liked what Avery had been saying, so they beat his ass unconscious and hauled him before the captain for treason. And then it was ‘to the pit with the ungrateful scum!’ A classic movie villain line if there ever was one. The conscripts had repeated it over and over during the actual execution of the sentence

  There was only one break from the monotony of his thoughts and the rhythm of his feet. Zombies. Two of them. They had cleaned most of the streets. But the city was so huge that it was impossible to get them all.

  Ash was dragged away from the slow process of mulling over the captain and how far they had fallen from being civilized Americans, he figured that they had fallen far, by the sound of rifle shots. He had been so deep in thought that he hadn’t noticed the yelling until the first shots rang out, causing him to jump and nearly drop his own rifle. Ash had forgotten about keeping a watch on Stanley, and his first thought was that they were shooting at him.

  Stanley had his people, those who had rifles, in a line, and they were firing at a pair of zombies who were standing a full block and a half away. Not a difficult shot to make, if a soldier was trained, and too his time. The head was still a small target, and the creatures were moving, if slowly. His people were missing. And wasting ammunition on two miserable zombies.

  Ash wondered about what the captain would say if he heard about this. He might blow his lid, he hated people wasting ammunition, they didn’t have an infinite supply. But then, Stanley was one of his favorites, and his men obviously needed the practice with their weapons. Ash decided to shut the hell up and let them have their fun.

  They slowly chewed the zombies apart, one bullet wound at a time. The creatures could ignore major bodily wounds and keep going even if you made Swiss cheese out of their carcasses, but with luck, you might be able to shatter the bones in their legs, making walking impossible, or blow off an arm so that they couldn’t grab you. It would have to be luck too, since anyone who knew what they were doing would just immediately go for the head and put it down for good.

  Eventually that happened here. One shot through the eye, and another through the neck. If you severed the spine, it was almost as good as a headshot. The zombie could no longer move its body, though it could still bite, if you were dumb and got close enough. He had seen it happen before when one conscript was teasing an incapacitated zombie. One of his friends pushed him. The same friend clubbed the man to death as he was screaming obscenities.

  With the little bit of fun over, they went back to marching. The two idiots who finally made the kills got point, and acted smug about it. Ash went back to his thinking.

  Sometime in the evening Stanley stopped them and said, “Here we are.” He pointed towards a darkened alley that smelled like piss. “Now all we have to do is wait for dark, then we can get to work.”

  Ash adjusted his mask and then sat huddled in the alley until night fell, ignoring the stench and the idiots around him. The stench was harder than the idiots. Ignoring a strong odor was almost impossible, especially while sitting surrounded by it.

  At twilight Stanley roused them again, giving kicks and orders to get their asses in gear, tonight was the big night and they would make the captain proud. Or he would suggest to the captain that they were all plotting together and get them sent to the pit. If nothing else got them going, threatening punishment in the pit did. Ash was just glad to get out of the alley. He thought that was probably going to smell like piss for the rest of his life.

  He fell in at the rear of the group.

  He was supposed to make sure that Stanley arrived ok, and Ash figured that he could do it best by taking a rear guard and making sure that nobody snuck up on them. Besides, Stanley was hiding in the middle of his people, using them as a walking shield of meat. It was good for Ash because this way could keep an eye on the man without getting shot in the back. Either from outright betrayal, or just poor marksmanship.

  Stanley’s people were stealthy, disciplined and quiet. During the night. Taking Ash aback as he stalked along behind them. Surely these couldn’t be the useless bastards that he had marched with the entire afternoon.

  “There it is Ash. Our final objective.” Stanley pointed out a squat looking building, that looked like several stories of stacked concrete slabs. Light was flickering here and there in the windows. The building was inhabited by survivors. He said so and Stanley looked at him as if he were pointing out that nighttime was when the sky was dark. “Of course there are survivors. The captain wants us to take over this community. Sort of a test run for later on.” Stanley grinned again. “Alright you maggots, time to get to work. Remember, the sooner we finish our work, the sooner we get to play.”

  Stanley divided the group up into two sections. One for the front door and the other for the back. He was planning to take the front door himself and Ash would be there with him. They gave the
second half of their force a five minute head start and then crept up and let themselves in. The community hadn’t posted guards on the front entrance, nor even locked the doors to keep strangers out.

  “You would think that they would lock the doors at night.”

  “They did. But we have a turncoat planted in their midst. He’s been here for weeks now. Makes things easier in the long run to plan ahead.”

  They mounted the stairs and padded along the hallways. Stanley knew exactly where he was going as if he had a map of the building in his head and he were homing in on a beacon. Maybe he was.

  There was gunfire on the floor below. M-16s. Maybe a couple of shotguns and rifles were answering.

  Stanley stopped and they gathered around a closed door. “Open it up.” Stanley commanded. Two of his stronger lackeys stepped forward and began hammering on the door with their shoulders. In less a minute they had managed to bust the door off of its hinges and fall in after it. A couple conscripts snickered until they were frozen by a glare from Stanley.

  Stanley stepped over the two idiots on the ground and walked unarmed to the center of the room. His soldiers followed at his heels, weapons clutched in their sweaty hands, held out before them. That left Ash once again bringing up the rear.

  A shirtless man in stained grey sweatpants stood in the middle of the room. He had a big revolver in his hand, a .357 or maybe a .44 magnum. A pretty mature woman in a long nightshirt at his shoulder, clutching his free hand. Ash could see children’s faces peeking out from one of the back rooms.

  “Hello. My name is Stanley. And I’m the new leader of this little village.”

  The man didn’t say a word, he just raised his gun, pushing the woman away. Stanley’s people opened fire. There were few misses, at that range, and the man screamed as his body was ruined by a score of bullets as they tore through him, one of the idiots was on full auto, spattering blood on the wall behind as they passed through his flesh.

  He got off one shot as he fell, shattering the leg of one of the bruisers who tackled the door. The conscript went down, clutching his mauled leg as his life drained away in spurts that covered his comrades in red. “Ok boys, have your fun. Take the bitch. Leave the children.” Stanley said, as he walked over to the apartment’s former owner and picked up the gun. The conscripts hooted and the woman screamed as they dragged her back to the room. “We have to maintain some civilization.” Stanley said as he leveled the massive pistol on his wounded soldier and fired one round point blank into his eye, disintegrating the his head in a cloud of vaporous gore. He did the same for the dead owner, before the man could arise again.

  Ash left the room, trying to close out the woman’s screams. Civilization. Where?

 

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