“Don’t worry about it,” Neil said, trying to sound cool. “It’s a risk I take, right? So, what happened? I heard all that shooting and I was sure I was coming back here to find you like a piece of Swiss cheese.” Now his smile was more like his old one, however Deanna was still sufficiently freaked that the words “Swiss cheese” didn’t register as a joke.
“I… I…there were zombies all over the place. They saved me.” The very thought had her shaking her head in disbelief. “Yeah, they saved me, can you believe that? They saved me from those guys that had left us here to die. I think they came back for the guns and bullets.” She held up the gun in her hands to show him what she meant. “But one of them saw me and then, I don’t know. There was all this shooting.”
“And that brought the zombies,” Neil said, finishing her thought. He gazed southward for a moment and added, “If I had a guess, I’d say they’ll be back, and pretty soon, too. Right now all they’re doing is drawing the zombies away and then…”
“Yeah,” she said, understanding. “They’ll be back.” Quickly, she started frisking the bodies and found a total of three clips and one set of keys. There had been two trucks parked up at the house. Since their tires weren’t sagging and they weren’t covered in the ageless dust that marked the truly abandoned vehicles left over from the old world, it was clear these were the trucks that Jeb and his friends had used.
“Come on,” she said, holding up the keys for him to see. She started to rush off toward the house but Neil stopped her.
“Deanna, please. You’re scaring the hell out of me.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s the way you walk, it’s too…normal,” Neil explained. “You don’t look anything like a zombie. You look like, you know, a person.”
She looked down at herself and all she saw was muck and grime; in her eyes she didn’t see a person at all, certainly not a person she recognized, but that didn’t mean the zombies saw her in the same way. “Thanks. I didn’t know what I look like. How’s this?” She went into the same routine she’d been using since Jillybean had taught her how to be a “monster.”
“That’s much better,” Neil said, the relief obvious in his voice.
Though she now looked and acted like a zombie, Neil didn’t. He walked with his left hand holding his right arm in place—not at all zombie-like. And his face wasn’t slack and vacant as Jillybean had demonstrated. He went about with a grimace and a look that made it seem as though he was very close to tears. She decided against saying anything about his appearance however. The poor man was clearly in agony.
She walked in front, thinking she’d draw away any zombies that came in their direction. There were only a few, and perhaps because of the dark, none paid them the least attention and that was in spite of the fact that they hurried at a speed that was just on the cusp of being un-zombie like. They had to risk speed and it paid off because just as soon as they got to the trucks, the sound of an engine rumbled in the air.
“Oh, shit,” Deanna said, throwing off any zombie pretense and running for the passenger door. She opened it for Neil and then tried not to scream at him to hurry as he gingerly lifted himself into the truck. She helped him as best as she could but was afraid to do too much and hurt him.
Finally, he was inside and she shut his door just as a set of headlights breached a far hill and shone down on the farm. She froze in place, knowing that movement drew the eyes. Neil tapped on the window and asked, “What are you waiting for?”
“They’ll see me.”
Neil shook his head. “No they won’t. They’ll go to the barn first.” That was likely true, but she didn’t care. The only thing in question was how quickly they would see her. “Trust me,” Neil said.
After his plan to choose death among a horde of zombies, she wasn’t exactly keen to place much trust in the man, and yet, she was at a loss as to what to do next. They couldn’t just drive away; they’d be seen; and they couldn’t stay put because it wouldn’t be above a few minutes before the men would come and check out the trucks parked in front of the house.
“Start the truck,” he said when she had slid in.
“But…”
“No buts. Start it now before they get too close,” Neil demanded. “But whatever you do don’t turn on the lights.” The truck was diesel and thus when the engine rumbled into life both she and Neil cringed at the noise. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “They can’t hear us.”
How could they not, she wondered. The engine was ridiculously noisy. Still, the other trucks didn’t break or turn in their direction. They trundled on to the barn where their red tail lights flashed into the night.
“Okay, Deanna,” Neil said in a calm voice. “Don’t touch the gas or the brake. Just put it in gear and we’ll coast out of here, nice and easy.” She put the truck in drive and let it drift forward. Neil became agitated at this. “Not the driveway! Into the corn,” he said. “Try to run in the ruts.”
It wasn’t easy, especially as a number of slow moving zombies were standing like planted trees haphazardly here and there in her path. When they spotted the truck, they came plodding forward and she was forced to run them over at six miles per hour. Their groans and the crunching of their bones were bad enough, but every once in a while Deanna would hear a popping sound, followed by the awful squish noise of guts shooting out. When this happened, Neil and Deanna would cringe and glance at each other, uneasily.
Their slow getaway was horrible but it worked. They ghosted—if one could call 5000 pounds of metal driven by a V-8 diesel engine, ghosting—through the corn, until the field ran out. Neil pointed to the left. “Go up to the road and when you get close go to the left. Make sure it’s obvious.”
“We aren’t going to the left I take it?” She certainly didn’t want to go to the left because the River King’s men were in that direction, and yet to the right was Cape Girardeau and all sorts of trouble. It was a far way off, however the idea of getting even a little closer to the River King seemed crazy. Putting her fears on hold, she did as Neil suggested, turning hard to the left, digging fat ruts in the dirt of the incline and leaving muddy tracks on the blacktop. After a few minutes she braked. Far down the road, two miles or more was the farmhouse and the barn. The truck was still there with its lights on but now the lights were moving. They were searching.
“Okay, let’s turn around,” Neil said. “Just don’t show your taillights to them.” She turned around in a slow circle and drifted back north, gradually putting miles between her and the River King’s men. She drove with half her attention centered on the rearview mirror, afraid she’d see headlights suddenly blazing after them.
Neil held their speed and direction in check until they had driven for half an hour. Only then did he allow her to take a left, westward. A part of her wanted to stomp the gas, blaze out of there, and race to Colorado, but there was something stopping her and it wasn’t little Jillybean and really, it wasn’t the other ex-whores, either. There was someone else on her mind, though who, she didn’t even want to admit to herself, except there was definitely something in him that was more than just the safety he seemed to offer…if he was free, that is. But what it was about him she really didn’t know. She just knew that when the other renegades had come sliding down from the bridge and he had not been among them, she had been as heartbroken as Jillybean had been.
It made no sense to her. Nothing in this new world made any sense to her really.
She tried to cast Captain Grey’s face out of her mind but it remained right up until Neil pointed to the right at a turn; he wanted them to go north. “But that’s in the River King’s direction. Are you sure?”
Neil was pale and sat slack in his seat, holding his arm. He swallowed loudly before turning his eyes Deanna’s way. “This is my fault. You know, Big Bill and Jeb and all of them. I should have known better. I bet every farm and crossroad from here to the Mississippi state line, is being watched by the River King’s men. I was so stupid! I deserve thi
s,” he said, indicating his arm. It looked even uglier than it had; the fingers at the end were the color and the consistency of wax grapes. “The smart thing to do is to either try to cross in Louisiana or we try to slip by right under the nose of the River King.”
“What?” Deanna asked, confused. “What do you mean? You want to go to Cape Girardeau? That doesn’t make sense.”
“Actually it does,” Neil said, shaking his head wearily. “It’s the one place the River King won’t have people watching. I’m not saying we’ll cross right at the bridge, I’m just saying we need to get close.”
Deanna glanced down at the dashboard and then grimaced. “Maybe I can get you close but not that close. We’re almost out of gas.”
Neil groaned as he checked the gas indicator. “Okay, head west at your first opportunity. We can’t scrounge for supplies this close. It may seem counterintuitive but we need to get further away in order to get close.” The remaining diesel got them only another 30 miles until they reached a tiny, little no-named village. The pair checked themselves into a motel room off the side of the road, hiding the truck around back.
The night was hell on Neil. His pain was horrendous and he could find no position that was comfortable. At around two in the morning Deanna went out in search of some painkillers. Tylenol was easy to find, but she wasted another hour searching in vain for something stronger. At first light she left again, and despite going through every house, barn and shed, she struck out, finding neither meds nor fuel.
It seemed Neil had expected exactly that. “There’s a town twelve miles away where we might be able to get some supplies.”
“Twelve miles?” she asked in disbelief. He was white as a ghost and his lips trembled constantly. There was also an unhealthy pale dullness to his eyes and his skin was bathed in a constant light sweat. “I don’t think you can walk even one mile.”
“I won’t have you walk that far alone,” Neil said. “It’s out of the question.” He stood, tottered for a moment, and then went through the door. He adopted a modified zombie gait that was just on the edge of terrible. His moan on the other hand was sadly perfect, simply because he wasn’t faking. He took them cross-country, heading northwest across more farmland. They rested frequently and ate sparingly since the only food they possessed was the cheese and crackers from an MRE that had been in Neil’s pants pocket. It wasn’t enough food for a single person for a single meal. At least water wasn’t an issue as they passed stream after stream.
By noon, as Jillybean was emptying the armory at Fort Campbell and Captain Grey was worrying over his fight with Demarco, Neil was practically in a delirium of pain. Deanna had them stop at the first farmhouse they came across. The place had been ransacked from top to bottom. “I need just a little rest,” Neil said, as if stopping there had been his idea.
She laid him down on the couch in the front room and, even with the pain, he was snoring in seconds. Deanna then made a halfhearted search of the house; there was nothing of value. They were still four miles away from the town of Newberry; an hour’s walk both ways. She left, heading straight for it, forgoing any attempt at looking like a zombie. The undead were hiding from the blazing sun and she wanted to get as much mileage underfoot as fast as she could.
The hike took slightly more than an hour since she came across a number of zombies dozing in the corn. Most were too slow to catch on that she was a human and thus she only slowed down a little and moaned her way past them, but one chased her across a field of radishes where she wished she could have stopped to eat. The next field over was an overgrown acre of wheat. She scampered low and lost the zombie.
Then she came to the town of Newberry. It had been just about the prettiest little town Missouri offered back in the old days. Now it was a haven for zombies, but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. She went back to schlepping and moaning, and not a single zombie looked her way, not even when she leapt the chain-link fence of a boarded-over home. Someone had gone to great lengths to protect the place and had failed. Though the front door was still stout, the back door had been ripped off its hinges, and there were clear signs of a desperate fight.
In the kitchen there were four bodies, long dead. Another two were in the hall leading to the second floor and when Deanna went up the stairs to the master bedroom she found eight more, two of them were corpses of humans who had been too thoroughly ripped apart to ever be raised again.
Among the bodies she found a .45 caliber pistol and a sawed off shotgun. There were dozens of rounds for both. She kept the pistol, sticking it in the cargo pocket of her BDUs. When she went back down to the kitchen she found an interesting assortment of food: flour, nuts, raisins, canned vegetables, jarred peaches, and smoked meat of some sort. She dug into the meat first. It was salty and dry, but tasty.
With a prayer on her lips she went to the garage and found a fully gassed up Toyota 4-Runner. “Yes! Thank you God,” she cried as her fingers lightly touched the black hood. The battery was days away from being dead and only sluggishly turned the engine over. Deanna couldn’t be more happy. She went back to the house, grabbed the shotgun and all the rounds she could carry and hurried back to the garage. In all, it took her nine trips to load up all the food and weapons. There was also medicine. She grinned at the bottles as she placed them in a Tupperware container.
Minutes later, she was racing back to the farmhouse. She found Neil still sleeping. She decided to let him sleep and as she waited, she dozed off as well. Sometime around four in the afternoon, Neil let out a groan. “Hey there, sleepyhead,” he said. “We can’t sleep the day away. We still have to make it to Newberry before dark.”
Deanna felt a bit of giddy happiness as she held up the box of medicine in one hand and a jar of peaches in the other. At his amazed look, she let out a full throated laugh and said, “I’ve already gone and come back, and look, peaches.”
“Great,” he said, unenthusiastically, though he did try to smile as if the peaches would be his salvation.
“I also have these.” She held up the container of pill bottles and rattled them. “There’s better pain meds in here,” she said, opening the lid. She dug through them until she found a white bottle of oxycodone. She handed him five of the pills. He dry-swallowed the pills and then nibbled at the peaches and chewed on the meat, but couldn’t force himself to swallow more than a few mouthfuls.
A half-hour passed, during which time he gazed at the bottle, stupidly. He then asked for four more pills. She didn’t say anything to that but when twenty more minutes went by and he asked for two more, she tried to stop him but he grabbed the bottle. “No! You’re going to have to put my shoulder back in the socket if I start to moan or whatever, I know you’ll chicken out.”
It wasn’t a kind thing to say, yet it was fully accurate. Still, she feared that he might overdose on the pills but, before she could protest, he grabbed his stomach and looked queasy. “I think… I think I’m gonna puke,” he whispered in a voice made slow by the drugs. Standing, he went to the kitchen table and sat down. “You better do it quick.”
“I don’t know how. Do you?” She had no idea what she was doing; her greatest fear was that she would end up hurting him worse.
“No, not really.” He seemed unsure of his tongue, like it was new to his mouth and had been sized wrong. “Just stick it in the socket. It’ll fit unless, maybe there was swelling. You don’t think my joints swolled up, do you?” She certainly hoped not, because what would she do then? Again she was clueless.
Neil stared at her for a minute before smacking the table with his left hand. “What are you waiting for? Come on let’s get this over with for goodness sakes.” He tried pointing at his shoulder but ended up with his fingers gesturing at the wall.
Slowly, softly, she touched his arm and of course he winced making her pulled back.
“Just do it!” he ordered.
Gritting her teeth she grabbed his arm and tried to feed the head of it back in the shoulder socket. It wasn’t easy
. Neil screamed and tried to leap back; he fell out of his chair, with Deanna riding him to the ground. She was on top, pinning him down, working his right arm in ugly, grinding circles. He was going mad with the pain; he screamed so loudly that she almost didn’t hear the “clunk” as his arm went back into place.
Neil cried and held his arm. Deanna stood; she had tears in her own eyes and all she could say was, “Sorry, sorry,” over and over again. She was so worked up emotionally, that she didn’t see the first of the zombies until one walked into the kitchen almost as if it had once lived there.
Chapter 14
Neil Martin
The pain left him gasping and, coupled with the oxycodone, turned his brain to mush, he was unable to comprehend their danger. He was still cringing on the floor when Deanna started scrabbling the assault rifle from her back. For half a second, when she swung it in his general direction, he thought she was going to shoot him for being too loud.
She brought the gun up and fired three times over him, paused and then fired twice more. This brought Neil around long enough for him to turn and see what was coming for them: zombies were piling through the front door like a gray wave of corpses washing inward. Already three lay in a heap on the floor of the foyer; Deanna kept blazing away with the gun, firing into the mass. She wasn’t the best shot and more bullets went uselessly through necks and torsos or worse, into the frame around the door, sending splinters flying.
Behind the stiffs in the doorway were the shadows of many more coming for them. Grunting and grimacing, Neil climbed to his feet. “Come on, Dee. We’ll go out the back door!” He grabbed her pack with his good left hand and started racing through the house. The view out the windows was horrifying; he could see countless heads bobbing at the level of the windows, heading for the house, drawn by all the shooting.
Deanna charged after him. She ran with her body turned halfway around, shooting in the general direction of the front door, again, hitting the walls and ceiling with a greater frequency than she did the zombies. There was no time to criticize. Neil ran with his useless arm flapping and hope dwindling inside of him. From outside, the wail of the zombies was nearly as overpoweringly loud as Deanna’s gun; it meant he was running from danger, into worse danger.
The Undead World (Book 5): The Apocalypse Renegades Page 11