Dead Man's Land

by R. J. Spears

  “Hub turned,” I said, feeling the weight of each word. “Travis put him down.”

  “What’s this I hear about this Jason-boy being bitten?”

  “News travels fast,” I said.

  “Is this a time for your smart remarks?” Brother Ed asked with one of his trademarked scowls.

  “He was bitten, but Doc said he should be fine.”

  “There’s no guarantee of that,” Brother Ed said.

  “What are you saying?” I asked.

  “Just like the Bible has rules, we have rules,” he said. “Rules to live by. Anyone bitten needs to be taken care of or else exiled.”

  “He’s immune to the effects of the virus,” Doc said.

  “Does that matter?” Brother Ed said. “The rules are the rules.”

  “If you hadn’t noticed, we allowed Hub to stay here after he was bitten,” I said.

  “But that was an experiment, and the leadership team approved that. It seems that the experiment has failed. There’s been no vote on letting this boy live.”

  “If you haven’t noticed, this just happened, and it is the middle of the night,” I said, trying not to sound irritated, but doing a bad job of it.

  “I’m going to take this to the team,” he said.

  “Not right now,” I said. He started to say something, but I leaned into his face. “We’ll meet about it in the morning. Okay?”

  “At least he needs quarantined,” Brother Ed said.

  I rubbed a hand across my face, hoping to wipe away the fatigue, but found it did nothing. I agreed, saying, “Okay, we’ll do that. Doc, can you take care of that?”

  Doc agreed and started making the arrangements to move Jason as Brother Ed and I stood in awkward silence, dancing around what was unsaid. I thought he was a total asshole, but since Brother Ed was a new member of the leadership team, tact seemed to be required, so I kept my thoughts to myself.

  I could tell Brother Ed wasn’t entirely satisfied, but accepted my compromise before walking away. I’m not sure what he really wanted, but it surely seemed as if he wanted a little more blood spilled. Nothing like a little bloodlust to end your day.

  Still, I wasn’t sure that he wouldn’t start rousing people right away, but it would be his problem if he did. I’m sure I had the votes to keep Jason safe and sound. Or, at least, I hoped I did.

  To ensure Jason’s safety, I decided to stay with him for the night. This, I did reluctantly because my body wanted the comfort of my own bed and my heart yearned for time with Kara.

  Before settling in for the night, I broke away from Jason, getting Doc Wilson to watch him while I was gone, then went to see Kara.

  When I entered her room, she was in bed, an arm over her eyes. Naveen and Madison hovered over her like hummingbirds, looking a little lost and anxious. These two young girls were our unofficially adopted zombie apocalypse orphans.

  “Oh, Joel, I’m so glad to see you here,” Naveen said. “She says her head is aching terribly. Can you get the doctor to give her anything?”

  “Already taken care of. Doc Wilson sent these up” I said, holding up two extra-strength painkillers.

  “I’ll get some water,” Madison said, grabbing a cup off the nightstand and heading off to the bathroom.

  “I think she might need some help,” I said to Naveen.

  “Really? Just to get water?” Naveen said; then, it hit her. “You want to kiss on Kara. I get it now.”

  “Am I that transparent?”

  Naveen laughed and headed off to the bathroom with Madison. I could swear I heard them giggling in there.

  “There’s not going to be any kissing on me,” Kara said.

  “Ahhh, man,” I said.

  “Not tonight, honey. I have a headache.”

  “You made a joke.”

  “I can be funny.”

  “Like when,” I said.

  “You’re pressing your luck, mister,” she said.

  “How about a single kiss,” I asked.

  “Okay,” she said, “but it goes here,” she said pointing to her forehead.

  I leaned over delicately and gave her a light kiss where she pointed. When I tried to pull away, she reached up, grabbed me and pulled me down to her.

  “I guess I could take one here,” she said, and our lips met. It wasn’t sloppy or wet; it just felt good. I only hoped she got as much out of it as I did.

  “That’s probably enough,” she said. “Besides, I’m sure there are things you have to be doing.”

  “Yeah, you got me there.”

  Ahhh, the sacrifices of leadership.

  Chapter 3

  Dreams and Dissension

  They were coming. It was a whole horde of the undead. In the near darkness, I recognized their telltale shamble against the dim horizon. Shrouded in the early morning fog, they moved like dark and demented toy soldiers, marching toward us soundlessly.

  Some external force pushed them along as they stumbled down the gently sloping hill that led to the Manor. It was him, the puppet master of the undead, and he was bringing an army of zombies down on us. It was his revenge for our incursion into his city.

  But he was dead, wasn’t he? He was on that bus when it burned. Surely, no one could have survived that?

  With just zombies, I felt that we could possibly defend the Manor, but this time, the zombies had human confederates. These human allies brought a degree of control to the chaos that was the undead. These living, breathing humans also brought new weapons to the party.

  A small splash of light appeared like a camera flash at the top of the hill, just in front of the Manor. Two seconds later, I heard a whistling sound that was followed by an explosion which ripped a large hole in one of the fences, and the brilliance of the blast seared into my eyes. The zombies, their puppet strings pulled by their Lord of the Dead, streamed through the breach in the fence and flowed toward us like a slow river of death.

  And this time the zombies were different. Less vulnerable to our snipers than they should be, but in the darkness, I couldn’t determine why.

  It was my role as our leader to defend the people, and I was failing. Two more explosions filled the night and tore away another section of fencing, and another platoon of the undead trod over the fallen barriers. The zombies came on, relentless and without mercy.

  There would be no surrendering. It was winner take all. The Lord of the Dead was out for blood, our blood, and I feared he was going to start spilling it soon.

  A whistling sound cut through the cool night air, and a millisecond later, my world exploded with a light so intense that it burned through my eyelids, filling my world with a supernova intensity.

  I bolted awake in a cold sweat, my heart pounding in my ears. So much for catching up on my sleep. At least I had been warned. How grateful I was for the warning was doubtful.

  If only someone had warned me about the shit storm Brother Ed was stirring up for our community meeting, I might have stayed in bed for the next century. In just the short amount of time from our impromptu meeting in the infirmary the night before, he had been able to work people into “quite a lather.” Now, that’s what I call, “working it.”

  I only learned how much he had worked it when I made my way downstairs.

  “Why aren’t we putting that boy out?” Mrs. Hatcher, our chief cheerleader of negativity, shouted across the crowd. “He has been bitten. He needs to go.”

  Brother Ed had been able to stir up the interest of a good number of the people in our community. As usual, this ad hoc meeting was held in our dining area.

  “That’s my point,” Brother Ed said, his arms spread dramatically wide, imploring the audience to follow his lead. In my opinion, he was enjoying his elevation to a seat at the “Adult Table” way too much.

  As usual, the leadership team sat behind a table in the dining room in front of most of the people of our happy little community. The spectrum of expressions in the crowd ran from frustration to irritation, to fear. There were
no fence sitters in this crowd.

  “Please, please,” Doc Wilson said, raising his arms, hoping to calm the crowd. “We have already talked about this. The boy is not a threat. We have proven through the treatment of Hub Underhill that this boy has an immunity to the zombie virus.”

  “But didn’t Hub turn?” Steve Hampton asked from the crowd. While he wasn’t in Brother Ed’s camp, he did seem to bring his own cloud of doubt wherever he went.

  “Yes, he did,” Doc said, “but not until after days and days of transfusions from the boy that held the virus at bay.”

  Sally Jeffers stood and said, “I was down there several times and saw it myself. Those transfusions worked.” She stayed on her feet, looking around the room as if challenging anyone to contradict her, then finally sat back down, but kept an eye on Steve Hampton. Although I barely knew her, it made me like her even more. She reminded me of my mom.

  “What does that really prove?” Mrs. Hatcher asked. “In my book, nothing. The boy has to go. We have rules for a reason.”

  My head pounded from fatigue as her voice bore into my brain like a wasp’s stinger, but I held my composure as I stood. “Can we call him by his name? His name is Jason.” The room quieted some, but Mrs. Hatcher locked me in a death stare. I didn’t melt, so her evil powers must have been at a low ebb.

  “We have isolated him to a room, and he is under constant monitoring,” I said. Jo was down there because I knew I could count on her, but the real reason I had someone there was more for his protection than ours. I would rate her shooting skills with Kara’s, and she was a pretty cool customer. No one was getting by her, at least, not without a fight.

  “Is that supposed to make us feel safe?” Brother Ed asked. “He’s still in here with us, and who knows if he can carry the virus without being affected by it. Maybe he can still infect us!”

  “Yes, like Typhoid Mary,” Mrs. Hatcher said with as much indignation and outrage as she could muster. This whole act was sounding just a little too rehearsed for me.

  “There’s clearly no evidence of that,” Doc Wilson said. “He’s been with us for weeks, and there’s been no one who’s come in contact with him who has shown any symptoms.”

  “But who has been with him?” Brother Ed asked. “Only a few of us have even seen him. He’s been sequestered down in your infirmary all this time.”

  “I’ve seen him,” Sally said, this time from her seat. “If there were something wrong, I surely would have seen it.”

  “You’re the only witness outside Joel’s clan,” Mrs. Hatcher said, snubbing her nose in Sally’s direction.

  I started to speak, but Doc beat me to the punch with a less emotional and more politically correct answer than I had been planning. “We’ve needed to keep him down there to treat Hub. Plus he was in fairly bad shape himself when he came in.”

  “So, when we will get to see him?” Steve Hampton asked.

  “As soon as he’s well enough to be seen,” Doc Wilson said with a slight edge of exasperation in his voice. There were times when Doc would bring his medical authority to the table and take control, and this was one of them.

  “And what about these visions he’s been having?” Brother Ed asked. “This whole thing is sounding like some kind of heresy.”

  “First Joel, and now this strange boy,” Mrs. Hatcher said, picking up where Brother Ed left off as if they were a tag team. A tag team from hell, in my book, but I kept it to myself. “There’s just something about it that seems unnatural.”

  I tried to think about how Greg would respond, but words failed me as I opened my mouth with nothing coherent to say.

  “These visions are true,” Kara said beating me to the punch. “These are extraordinary days. Some might think this whole rise of the undead is something evil. I really don’t know. I do know these are dark times. With this much darkness in our world, I can’t help but think that God might try to send us some light. I think these visions are evidence of that.”

  “Well, that’s crazy,” Mrs. Hatcher said. “Joel is no more a conduit of God than are the zombies.”

  “Joel had a vision of the attack on the church,” Kara said.

  I jerked my head in her direction.

  “Sorry, Joel,” she said. “He told me and Greg about it. Plus, he had a vision of this boy coming into our company.”

  “What else does he see?” Mrs. Hatcher asked, “Aladdin on his flying carpet?”

  “You think this is a joke?” Travis said, jerking to his feet and knocking his chair over. It clattered against the ground loudly. The room went quiet as all eyes went to him. His emotions churned just under the surface. “I’ve seen some serious things come down since the Outbreak. But I’ve been with Joel. I’ve seen what he talks about come true. You can try to make light of it or even dismiss it, but you’d be doing yourself and the people here a grave disservice. Yes, we are surrounded by darkness, but we are being guided. There is some light left; we just have to open our eyes to see it.”

  I could see the gears working behind Brother Ed’s eyes, but he knew better than to try to counter the argument from a grieving son. Mrs. Hatcher must have taken her cue from Brother Ed because she clammed up, too. This was far from over, but the air was out of their argument for the time being.

  If they had asked about my latest dream, I’m sure that would have re-opened the floodgates of dissension, and I’m not sure we would have ever made it out of the meeting that day. At least not without some bloodshed.

  Even though the meeting ended, there was always the informal meeting afterward with people wanting to get in a word “Off the Record,” and others who wanted to complain about something. Politics was never a part of my plan before the apocalypse, and I never imagined I’d be a part of the political process after it. In fact, I never thought there’d be a political process after the end of the world as we knew it. I saw one of two paths for humanity in the case of a world-changing event; we would either tear ourselves apart or would come together in oneness and harmony. I readily acknowledge the second prediction was pure fantasy, and in reality, we got the worst of both alternatives: a continuation of the petty politics that had existed in the world prior to it going down the drain.

  The last person to file out of the room was old man Schultzy, who was a crotchety old guy, complaining his room was too cold. No matter how many times we told him about the limited fuel supply we had to run the generators that powered the fans which moved the limited heat the geothermal system generated, he just didn’t get it. He insisted that there had to be some way to get his toes warm. I was almost certain his next complaint would be that his cable was out or his daily paper was late. That or those damn kids wouldn’t keep off his lawn.

  He left the room, muttering under his breath about the “damn government” failing him again. I think all of us felt the same disillusionment, but for different reasons.

  The leadership stuck around for a few minutes, going over some of the issues of the day and mulling over what we had to do the next day with me doling out tasks.

  Everybody left, leaving Kara and me to do the straightening up. After a few minutes of arranging chairs, I looked to her and said, “I don’t think I’m cut out for this.”

  “For what?” she asked.

  “I don’t see why Greg picked me or why people ratified me into leadership with a vote.”

  She stopped and held me in a quizzical stare. “You don’t get it, do you?”

  “What?” I asked, feeling my defenses go up.

  She came to me with a hand out and touched my cheek. “You’re so hard on yourself. You can’t lead; you can’t shoot; you can’t...blah, blah. You’re the only one in the place,” she said as she stopped and tilted her head a little and then continued, “Well, besides Brother Ed and Mrs. Hatcher, who don’t know the truth.” She paused and put both of her hands on my face, locked her eyes on mine and then continued, “You’re the best person to lead us, you and no one else. Sure before the Outbreak, you were pro
bably the biggest underachiever in town, but you’ve changed. You’ve grown up and become the man you need to be. The man we need you to be.”

  “I still don’t see it,” I said. “I want a recount.”

  “Greg saw it,” she said, dropping her hands from my face. “Didn’t you ever notice that he had you by his side whenever the worst came down on us? You were his go-to-guy when something needed to be done. It was no accident that he picked you. I think, most of all, he picked you because you didn’t always follow, but led. Sure, in unconventional ways, but he needed someone like you to get things done when others couldn’t.”

  “But he surely saw that I lack a certain amount of discipline?” I asked.

  “And that’s where I come in,” she said, pulling me close and laying a big kiss on me. It caused me to shiver all the way down to my toes.

  “Discipline me, mistress,” I said. “Show me the way.”

  She palmed my face in her hand and pushed me away. “Like Greg said, you think outside the box, you big dork.”

  I reached out, grabbed one of her hands and tugged her close. “And that’s what you like most about me, right?”

  She didn’t say anything, and this time I initiated the kiss. It was long and hard, full of pent-up passion. I was a little late for the final rounds that night.

  Chapter 4

  Clandestine Meeting

  “These are people you know and care about,” Paige said, her voice rising in pitch with each word. “Some of them could have survived, like me. We owe it to them to go and check it out.”

  Russell felt an icy pit grow in his stomach. She was on the warpath again. While she had been relatively calm for the first few days after their arrival at the Manor, it didn’t take long for her to start beating the drum again for a rescue party. The leadership team listened patiently, but after hearing Russell’s account of what had happened to the church, the team decided they didn’t have the resources available for any immediate action. Especially since the chances of survivors were extremely limited after the church had burned to the ground. Greg’s death and the subsequent death of Hub Underhill took center stage as the community reeled from the twin tragedies. Any possible action had been tabled until a more prudent time. That was something Paige couldn’t accept, so she was on the search for allies.