by TW Brown
“I imagine it could be seen as such.” Slider shrugged. His voice held absolutely no emotion and reminded Jody of what a snake would sound like if given a human voice. “But the fact is that we need leverage to hold our position. Logistics are not in our favor. We are grossly outnumbered and need to ensure our authority.”
“So what will we be doing with the women and children?”
“The women will be kept safe and secure. They will be tasked with support services.” The captain went over to the desk with a series of maps of Bald Knob and the surrounding areas. “The children will undergo an educational program and, based on age, some will begin military indoctrination.”
Brainwashing, Jody thought. Why couldn’t they call things as they were? The women would cook and clean and the children would be brainwashed.
“And what do you require of me next, sir?”
“We want you to see to the separation and housing of the women and children,” Slider said.
Jody looked back and forth between the two men. He felt like he should be concerned. This was not the job you placed under the command of the leading NCO.
“Look, Sergeant Rafe, it is no secret that your…a bit more compassionate than Sergeant Monterro here,” the captain explained. “The men are going to need some convincing to do what we require. That is his forte. The women will need to be made to feel safe. I believe that is yours. Don’t read anything into this.”
Jody looked back and forth between the two men. Neither one gave away even the slightest hint of emotion.
“Will I be doing this alone, or will I be given support?” Jody asked.
“How many men do you think you will require?” the captain returned question for question.
Jody considered what he wanted versus what he felt might be granted him. He knew that, despite what they were saying, this assignment was not one that he was being given due to his compassion. They wanted him out of the way.
“Give me one man…and I want to handpick him.”
“Done,” the captain agreed.
“Just remember one thing, Rafe.” Slider moved away from the barrel and faced Jody with a blank, emotionless expression. “You are being given this job for a reason.”
Jody did not need the hidden meaning of that statement to be explained.
***
Hanover, Ohio—Major Wanda Beers looked back at the column marching alongside the few vehicles that they were still able to maintain. The fuel tanker would need to be topped off again very soon, she thought, if the gas was still even any good.
She turned her attention back to the front. The blue piece of cloth fluttered from the street sign indicating that they were still on the right track. That idiot Paul James better not screw this up; she grimaced at the idea that her entire outfit was at the mercy of possibly one of the stupidest men she had ever met in her life.
He had been one of the first to sell out his group during their last stop. He had been under some delusional state of mind that the military could help his wife. The only help for that snarling, drooling, walking sack of guts was a bullet in the head.
Once the appropriate arrangements were made for all the supplies to be loaded up and all the willing recruits had been conscripted, the rest of the citizens were forced outside of the walls of their little barricaded outpost.
Wanda had taken great pleasure in throwing this particular group out into the wild. This was one of those gated communities full of people who bitch and moan about the military, protest their actions, and elect politicians who don’t have a problem cutting defense spending so that little Johnny can go to school and be a juvenile delinquent. They all drove around in their Hybrid cars and chanted things like “No blood for oil!” What did they care? It wasn’t like those rich pricks or any of their children would ever serve. None of them would ever hold a dying friend in their arms that had just had his lower half blown off by an insurgent’s IED.
The day before they were set to leave, she had informed Paul James that his daughter would not be joining them on the journey. The girl was positively useless. She had failed in every task assigned and done nothing by cry and complain when they had placed her on kitchen duty. The only other choice was to put her with the whores who serviced the soldiers. He had absolutely refused.
Wanda had created the “Brothel Brigade” early on. As a student of history, she knew that it had been common in the ancient times for armies to have useable whores travel with them—usually in the rear, and they normally performed other menial tasks like laundry and such to earn their place. Apparently what was good enough for the father was too good for the daughter—Paul had been put in rotation with the men and women in the brothel tent after he had proven to be loyal but useless. Sadly, he wasn’t much better as a whore.
Paul had come to her tent the night before they were prepared to roll out. He said that he knew of another outpost. He admitted that his group was just getting ready to approach them with an offer of joining forces. Ironically, they were concerned with the possibilities of raiders coming along and trying to take over their happy little homes.
He went on to say that this other group had even fewer people, but that they seemed exceptionally well organized and supplied. He didn’t want to reveal the location unless he had assurances that his daughter would be allowed to remain with the group. He said that he would even take a second job to pick up her slack. She could have brought his useless daughter Mary in right then and held a knife to her throat to convince him to talk, but she was feeling generous that day.
“You will go, and your daughter will go with you,” Wanda decided. “A group might be hesitant to take in a lone man. She will help soften them up. You will leave blue strips of cloth as markers and an indicator that you have made contact.”
She could roll with the direct frontal assault, but she didn’t want to waste precious manpower if it was not necessary. Having a man on the inside was the perfect Trojan horse scenario. He would gain this new group’s trust, and then open the gates to allow their access.
Yesterday, one of her scouts returned and reported that blue banners had been spotted. She had slapped herself in the forehead with her palm when she looked on a map and determined the direction led straight to the Longaberger Golf Course. This little tidbit of information had put her on a higher state of alert. There was the possibility that this group might be better prepared and actually led by somebody who knew what they were doing.
When the next round of scouts returned to report that a military vehicle had been spotted, Major Wanda Beers actually considered cancelling the run. She decided to risk one scout who would attempt to get inside the wall and observe.
Four agonizing days passed, and her people were starting to run low on supplies—keeping a hundred and thirty-five people fed was no easy task these days—when the scout returned. Yes, they were very well fortified against the walking dead, but there were no signs of soldiers anywhere. In two days of observation, the only people seen coming and going besides Paul James and his useless daughter were a couple of young females and one male who was often seen using a set of crutches.
The sun was just coming up…somewhere. Here, it was a solid blanket of dark clouds that threatened snow. They stopped at the front entrance to the country club. There were several vehicles in place as a barricade. No sense adding to the chaos by allowing the possibility of zombies to come in during their assault.
Major Beers sent her men and women over the wall. Like any commander worth a damn, she climbed over with the first wave. All the concern turned out to be for nothing. Besides her Trojan horse, all they discovered were three young females between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five, one male with a severe leg injury that looked to have received expert attention, and a severely disturbed black girl with Down’s syndrome.
3
Hunker Down
“…and we hope that some way, somehow, Jamie found peace in the end.” The words tasted like ash on my tongue.
What I wanted to do was scream. I wanted to cry. Unfortunately, I don’t have that luxury. Every face seems to be numbed with grief and looking to me for something. I just wish that I knew what the blazes that could be.
“We will miss Jamie Blossington, and we will never forget him. Rest in peace, friend.”
I looked over to Billy in case he wanted to say anything. He was simply staring at the pyre with the same empty look that everybody else had plastered on their wind-chapped faces. A quick glance told me that nobody else was going to step forward. I truly believe that we have all had about as much as we could handle if we managed to live a dozen lifetimes.
I touched the torch to the base and stepped back as the flames began to devour everything. There would be little more than a pile of ash and bone in a few hours. Once the fire burned out, everything would be shoveled into a cart and taken to a burial site. A small monument was being fashioned by Melissa, Thalia, and Emily, and would be placed next to Teresa’s in our little graveyard.
One by one, everybody walked away until it was just me and Billy and Dr. Zahn. And that was my newest problem. Of all the people I’d met since this nightmare began, Dr. Francis Zahn was probably one of the most hard-nosed, nothing-can-bother-me person I’d ever met or would ever meet for the rest of my life. That woman had vanished in the past few days. She was replaced by a frail, feeble old lady, who looked like she might crumble in on herself at any minute.
The past several days had been her undoing. It started with Teresa’s death. Teresa, the teenaged GI Jane of the group—and pregnant with Jamie’s child—had come down with the zombie virus or whatever it was. The problem being, that she’d not been bitten or scratched by a zombie. The eventual answer to the mystery: sexually transmitted.
Jamie had been bitten several weeks earlier during a skirmish with a mob. The saving grace had been that he was one of the few who showed immunity to being turned. However, we had eventually discovered that, immune or not, once the virus is in your system, it remains there. A person who displays immunity will still turn if they die from other causes. Nobody made that connection until Teresa came down with the virus for no apparent reason. Dr. Zahn blamed herself for the girl’s death…and now it seemed she chose to shoulder Jamie’s suicide as well.
“Billy…” I went to stand beside the young man.
And then there was one, I thought. Billy had joined up with me shortly after this whole thing began during a crazy escape from a FEMA shelter that was overwhelmed from the inside. He was with three other high school friends who had all fallen one by one.
“He just gave up on me,” Billy whispered.
“No,” I corrected. “He just gave up.”
“I don’t understand.”
“And we probably never will.”
I stood in silence beside the young man. I just didn’t have any more words. The only thing that I was sure of at this very moment was that it was freezing, and I wanted to go inside. I glanced over at Dr. Zahn who stood shivering on the other side of the pyre. It was like being at the edge of the river while two friends were drowning. Which one do I jump in and save. I patted Billy on the shoulder and headed over to the doctor.
“Come on, Doc,” I said, and took her gently by the elbow.
She looked up at me with red, puffy eyes and tears streaming down her face. I truly thought I would never see this woman lose it like this over anything.
I took another look at Billy and hoped that he had the sense to eventually come in out of the weather. I’d made my selection so to speak and began guiding the doctor back to the huge, log cabin-style forestry building that we all called our home. In just the short time since we’d come out to send Jamie off to the heavens or wherever, the snow had already added a couple more inches.
The weather was not showing any signs of letting up, and the blanket of white that covered the ground was already past my knees. This area wasn’t too bad because we walked around enough to keep it tamped down. However, I seriously doubted that we would be leaving this camp very often anymore for anything except water. We had snowshoes and skis, but the weather was becoming so harsh that even suited up as warmly as we could, it was simply not a good idea to flirt with Mother Nature.
When I reached the long porch that ran the length of the front of the building, Jon Saunders was there waiting with Sunshine. Jon was and will probably always be a United States Marine, Sunshine is the kind of gal you imagine running around with flowers in her hair sticking daisies in the barrels of a soldier’s rifle. Lately, the two had become a secret couple. The only thing secret about it was that we all knew it before they did.
“We need to talk,” Jon said in lieu of a greeting.
“I don’t think I can take anything else right now,” I said with a sigh.
“I wish it could wait, but it really can’t,” Jon insisted.
“Fine.” I glanced at Dr. Zahn beside me. She seemed to be showing little more life than the walking dead. She stared straight ahead, tears still running down her cheeks made rosy by the wind and cold. I did notice that her lips were moving. It was as if she were talking to herself, but I didn’t hear so much as a peep.
“First, I am sorry as hell what you’ve been put through the past several days,” Jon apologized. “I am as big a part of the problem as anybody else. We all simply just got complacent…well…everybody but you. You need to know that you have all our support from here on out.”
I really didn’t care, but I let him continue because I could tell he was just building up to something.
“Also, I hate to be the one to add to what is already a huge burden on your shoulders, but Sunshine just finished a full inventory of the food pantry. We may not be as set up as we initially thought.”
“We weren’t really paying attention to a few of the things like flour, rice, and things of that nature,” Sunshine took over as she stepped out of the shadows. “Plus, I was not making notes on how much it took for each meal until recently. We have all been eating very well, but we are eating like people who can go to the grocery store anytime we want.”
“So how bad is it?” I asked. I didn’t really want the answer, but since I’d been elected as the so-called leader of this group, I guess it fell on me to listen.
“We are good for at least the next six weeks.”
I let that sink in and tried to figure out what the problem might be. Six weeks was plenty of time to remedy the situation. I guess they anticipated my response.
“You haven’t ever lived out this way, have you?” Sunshine asked.
“Seattle born and raised,” I replied with a shrug.
“This is just the start of winter, Steve,” Sunshine said with a leading edge to her voice like she thought I might figure out whatever secret code she was apparently speaking.
I looked at her and then at Jon. “Look, I imagine you have a point, I’m just too burned out to pick up on it so spill it.”
“This is just the start of things.” Sunshine used her arms to gesture at the heavy snowfall coming down behind me. “Unlike what you might be used to in the city where this sort of weather clears up in a few days or a week, this will go on for weeks if not months.”
“That is why the porch to this place is eight or so feet off the ground,” Jon cut in. “And those tall posts along the road the lead to this place? Those are snow markers. This place could realistically see enough snow to reach the windows…or worse. Back in the day, they used plows to keep this place cleared. And that little Snowcat they have here is probably operational, but we don’t have any fuel for it. This whole thing kicked off in the spring. They had probably just put her away for the season and hadn’t gotten around to stocking up on fuel and such.”
“So what’s the bad news,” I sighed. I guess I really had not planned on having to hunker down for three or four months. Once again I doubted my ability to lead this bunch of people effectively.
“I want to make one more run,” Jon said. “I will take my boys with me and we wi
ll gas the cat up using the truck fuel. I already checked and that baby had a big forty gallon tank as well as a twenty gallon spare. We should be able to get to La Grande and Enterprise fueling as we go. This will be a food only supply run using the list that Sunshine has given me.”
“You want to go out in this and then try and deal with zombies…possibly raiders…and then get back here alive?” I just didn’t see the likelihood of anybody—not even a Marine and a pair of soldiers—making a run like this.
“I think we are the only ones who can do it,” Jon stated matter-of-factly. “We have the training to deal with extremes and will have the best chance if it comes to a living enemy. That is why it has to be us three despite your previous decision that foraging runs were not to be gender exclusive. This has got to be more of a military operation.”
Everything he said made perfect sense. My only problem with it was the fact that if, like they were both saying, the bad weather was just getting started, then I could be sending my three best fighters to their death.
“I don’t like the idea any more than you do, Steve,” Sunshine said with a hitch in her voice. “But if they don’t do this, we might all die of starvation.”
“How long before I should worry?” I asked.
“My best estimate puts us out for three weeks tops.”
“So we hit the halfway point on our stores before we know if we will be surviving the season?”
“You can still hunt for game in the area, but if you have noticed, it has been scarce. It has either migrated, or it has been chased away by the herds of undead that have come through,” Jon said.
“When do you intend to leave?”
“First thing in the morning, I already told Jake and Jesus to prep…I didn’t want to go outside your wishes, but I had to assume you would see the necessity.”