by Adair, Bobby
The ground sloped up a little more steeply as I got near the pool, and I froze because I spotted something moving in the shadows on the other side: an alabaster Aphrodite with blazing red hair. Or Steph.
She moved gracefully along the far side of the pool, but didn’t give any indication that she saw me. I wanted to call to her, but there was a chance that the redhead wasn’t Steph at all, but just an infected monster, morphed by my imagination into Steph. There was a chance that other Whites were lurking in the shadows around me, ready to pounce if I risked a single syllable. With that thought, I looked into the shadows to my right to see if anything was over there among the thick oaken trunks.
Nothing moved.
I glanced to my left.
Oh, shit!
It all happened too fast. Something was moving at me with a well-timed attacked from my left side, taking advantage of the fact that I was transfixed by the pale, red-haired goddess across the pool.
It was a trap, and I’d foolishly stepped into it.
I spun hard to my left as I bent low, trying my best to roll through the knees of my attacker before his hands and teeth could clamp onto my flesh.
My attacker, not expecting my evasiveness, stumbled into me, but instead of going over my bent back and giving me a chance to sprint off to an escape, he came down on top of me, smothering me with his weight. My knife jammed into the dirt as I collapsed into the grass. I struggled, squirmed, and tried to push the heavy monster off.
My only luck was that he was still trying to recover from the fall, so he didn’t have his massive hands on me. But once that happened, I was dead.
I kicked and pushed and punched and wrestled and grunted and beat the beast with the butt of my gun. If I was going to live through the next seconds, I came to the realization that I was going to have to shoot it and pray to God that his White companions wouldn’t get to me before I got out from under him.
I felt a blow to the side of my head and saw stars. Too late!
Still I struggled and tried to raise my pistol to fire, but my wrist got pinned roughly to the ground just as the big man on top of me figured everything out enough to sit himself on my chest and raise an axe to cleave my skull.
Recognition!
“Murphy! Stop!”
Everything froze.
It was fucking Murphy on top of me!
It was Dalhover pinning my pistol hand to the ground and pointing a rifle barrel at my head!
“It’s me, Zed!”
Without pause, Murphy grinned wider than I’d ever seen. “Zed? Damn, you look like shit.”
Dalhover rasped. “I’ll be God damned.”
Footsteps came running across the grass and I suddenly saw Steph, leaning over Murphy’s shoulder, looking down at me, her face draped in her red hair. Through tears that were just starting to flow she said, “Wow! You’re still alive.”
As I bore the weight of my struggles, and thought every day about the moment when I’d finally find my friends again, it never occurred to me to see the situation through their eyes. They, very reasonably, assumed I was dead. Each of them in their own ways had been grieving, crying, perhaps missing me, and doing what they could to move past it, filing the memory of my face away in the mental scrapbook of all the dead they’d known or seen.
But suddenly, there I was. Alive.
Murphy jumped off my chest and in standing up himself, yanked me up to my feet and engulfed me in a smothering hug. “God damn, motherfucker, I thought you were dead.”
I tried to croak the same back to him, but the lump in my throat was too big to allow for speech.
When Murphy eventually let go, Steph draped her arms around my neck and buried a river of happy tears in my shoulder. I put my arms around her, squeezed back, and did my best to keep my own tears sealed up tight.
Dalhover laid an arm on my shoulder and joined the embrace as much as he could ever be expected to. “Good to have you back.”
I thought maybe his voice cracked just a little bit.
I was home.
When I went into the house through the familiar kitchen door, Mandi shrieked and smiled as she jumped into my arms. Russell, glued to Mandi’s side by then, seemed ready to explode with emotions that couldn’t be contained or expressed.
Having used the pillowcases to bring my food and reasonably cold beers and sodas into the house with us, we gathered around the dinning room table and for the moment, chose to let our guard down. The peninsula where the house had been built was remote and secure because of it. No one stood watch.
A celebration of my rebirth was called for and we all wanted to share in the joy of being together again.
We ate cookies, drank beer, and shared stories.
We drank to Freitag’s solitude upriver and laughed at Murphy’s impression of her scrambling across the lawn to get her rifle while fearing that the Whites would return and have her for lunch. Of course, I don’t know if it was funnier watching his impression, or watching his attempts to re-stick the bandage that kept coming loose from the side of his head as he goofed.
The frequency of good moments was trending positive. It was easy to be happy in the moment. Only thoughts of tomorrow darkened my moments between laughs.
The End
Well, it’s not quite the end. Book 5 in the series will be out in early summer of 2014. If you’d like to join the email list or any of your favorite social media sites to keep tabs on the progress or get alerted when the release date nears, click one below.
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Bobby
Text copyright © 2014, Bobby L. Adair
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the author/publisher.
This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, places, or events is purely coincidental.