by R. J. Spears
The best I could do was shrug.
A scene from the movie Ghostbusters came to mind. Ernie Hudson’s character gave Dan Aykroyd's character some sage advice, “When someone asks if you are a god, you say YES!”
I wondered if this was one of the moments, but decided to reserve judgment and action, waiting for some other cue from our hosts. Something other than crazy screwed up smiles and proclamations that I was a prophet.
Billie Sue turned her attention from me to someone behind me and said, “Jason, I’ve seen you, too.” She went to Jason and embraced him with the same gusto she had with me. Instead of looking quantumly uncomfortable, he surrendered to it, basking in her genuine warmth and acceptance.
“You have such an important role to play,” she said releasing him, but she still beamed into his face with her expression like headlights set on bright. “Maybe the most important.”
She slid past Jason and moved next to Naveen and knelt beside her, taking Naveen’s hand in her own. “And little Naveen, I’ve heard about you. You are a brave one.” She squeezed Naveen’s hands and then pulled her into a hug. Naveen melted into it fully, her eyes closed, soaking in all the compassion surging from Billie Sue. Billie Sue rocked the two them slightly back and forth, the way a mother might to soothe a child. When she broke the embrace, I could see Naveen’s eyes brimming with tears.
Brother Ed stood back with a dour expression, looking left out. Billie Sue must have sensed this and stood and gave him a quick hug. I noticed she held him for a moment and whispered something in his ear. His eyes went wide, but he quickly tried to hide the surprise he obviously felt.
“Brother Ed,” she said, “so glad to meet you.”
I stood caught in an ocean of bewilderment, swaying back and forth, ready to swoon, but Kara bolstered me by holding my hand tightly, and I stayed upright.
Doubt swirled in my mind as I wondered if this might be some sort of parlor trick like a carnival magician’s used? They’d secretly eavesdropped on a conversation and then sprung these facts like surprises on the unsuspecting audience. Could they have been spying on us at the Manor? Could someone have fed them this information?
I didn’t see how it was possible, but this apocalypse was getting stranger and stranger the more time I spent in it.
Billie Sue stepped away from Brother Ed and turned back to the crowd, her face shining with a self-assured delight. I half-expected her to jump into the air and click her heels together, saying something magical and then start flying around the room.
She stayed earthbound.
“Let’s sit and eat,” Billie Sue said as if declarations of prophecy were so commonplace that it led off every meal. The servers continued to load the table with mounds of food, the overpowering smells wafted their way to my nose, nearly staggering me. The succulent aroma of food reminded me that I hadn’t eaten in over a day and my mouth started to water.
Donovan’s group numbered just around thirty people. Most were adults, but there were some kids in the crowd. All of the children looked at me cautiously but took seats at the tables next to what I assumed were their parents. I did notice that all the adults had on holsters with side arms.
I glanced back to my group, and they all looked at me for some sort of cue on what to do next. I also noticed how filthy we really were. After trekking through the woods in the middle of the night in a driving rain, our shoes and pants were coated with mud. Other than a quick wash-up at the old farm, I couldn’t remember the last time I had taken a shower or even had a sponge bath.
In contrast, with exception of the men who brought us in, Donovan’s people looked clean and dry. Maybe these underground preppers had an idea.
Donovan stepped back to me and said, “Please have a seat at the head of the table. You’re our guests of honor.”
I wasn’t sure what we really were. We could be honored guests, or this could be an elaborate ruse for them to lull us into complacency, wherein they were a cannibalistic cult ready to dispatch us and turn us into their next meal. When it came down to it, neither of these ideas really mattered. I didn’t feel an overt threat from them, but they did have us outnumbered, and we were defenseless. If they were a cult of cannibals, then at least, we would have a good meal before we died.
I motioned for our group to take seats as I moved toward the table. Kara stayed at my side as I sat down while Naveen and Jason circled around to take seats across the table from us. Brother Ed held back for a few moments, but must have come to the same conclusion that I had; if they were getting ready to kill us, we might as well go out with a full belly. He sat a few seats to our left between two of Donovan’s men.
Murmurs and whispers filtered around the room and a couple of the children pointed directly at me before their parents could slap their hands down. It made me feel quite conspicuous and uncomfortable. I wondered if this is how a celebrity felt, but there were no more celebrities because the zombie apocalypse had ended our culture enraptured with the cult of celebrity. Maybe that was the only upside of an apocalypse. We were all just survivors now.
Donovan sat next to Kara who was on my right, and Billie Sue sat next to me. It took nearly a minute for everyone to sit down and the mild commotion to stop and the room went silent as if on cue.
A young girl of around twelve came around to each one of my group and handed us warm, moist towels. We didn’t need much encouragement and used them over the next minute to wipe away the collection of grime and dirt we had collected on our wild escape through the woods.
Most of the people’s eyes went to Billie Sue, but some lingered over my group and me. Billie Sue lifted her hands into the air, leaving them at shoulder level, and the other people in Donovan’s group did the same, letting them pause there. A moment later, each of Donovan’s people at our table and the others reached out to the person next to them and joined hands.
Billie Sue turned to me with the same beatific expression from before and nodded slightly. I’m usually graceless and clueless, but this was clearly a cue for me to hold her hand.
I still wasn’t sure what to do. Should I be a total dofus and ignore the invitation? Something told me that it was best to go with the flow and I reached up to take her hand in mine. I glanced to the other people in my group. Jason had already made the move, and his expression was in league with Billie Sue’s. What did he know that I didn’t?
Brother Ed was the last holdout, but he conceded and gingerly grabbed the hands of the people on either side of him. The circles were complete.
Billie Sue must have been watching, too, because she said, “Let us pray.” She took a brief pause and said, “Lord, we are glad that you have finally sent Joel and his friends to us. You foretold of their presence and asked that we be patient and vigilant. And God be praised, we were. For that, we are thankful.”
She went onto ask for God’s continued blessings on their group and even got specific asking for divine assistance in healing someone’s cold and another person’s sprained ankle.
She concluded with, “We ask these things in your name,” and the rest of the group chimed in with, “Amen.”
The meal started like every other meal before the apocalypse with people filling their plates and passing bowls to the person next to them. Quiet conversation passed among Donovan’s people while my folk were largely silent. Jason couldn’t talk, but he still wore a cheerful expression.
I couldn’t tell what the meat was, but Donovan leaned over and said, “It’s venison, and it’s fresh. There are plenty of deer in these woods.” I took a couple of pieces and put them on my plate before passing on the serving bowl. Two new bowls appeared in front of me and my heart about stopped. In one of them was mashed potatoes. They didn’t look real and proved to be processed, but it didn’t matter because it was the second bowl that held my full and raptured attention.
It was brimming with gravy. Gravy. If there was something ever to be praised it was gravy. Gravy made everything better, even in the face of a zombie apocalypse.
&
nbsp; If my mouth had been watering before, I was sure a river a drool flowed out now. These people were either truly angelic, or the greatest and most devilish Svengali’s ever to walk to the earth. Gravy! There certainly could be no greater temptation.
Any resolve I had melted and I heaped my plate full of mashed potatoes and slathered them with gravy. Kara did the same as did all the others. I got a feeling that they had decided to go the extra special mile with the gravy and it was not an ordinary treat.
I was about to dig in when it hit me that these people could be some sort of Jim Jones cult and that the gravy could be laced with deadly poison. I really didn’t know these people.
So, I dug deep and held out, watching as Donovan’s people ate without reservation. There were no final dour and resigned looks on their faces. They didn’t pitch over with foam spewing from their mouths in death spasms. This was just another meal for them, only with gravy.
My iron will collapsed and I filled my mouth a delicious spoonful of mashed potatoes and gravy. If God took me then and there, I think I would have gone happily, ignoring any other obligation or mission.
I ate until my stomach was about to burst but then stuffed a couple more bites in just because. The deliciousness of this meal surpassed the banquet we had back at the Manor after our first harvest. It was that good. (And we hadn’t had gravy.)
A wave of lassitude swept over me, and that brought out my paranoia again, causing my adrenaline to start to flow. Had these people just drugged us? I looked around the table and saw numerous people with the same sleepy expressions, though, so I went with it and relaxed.
After an epic and near-fatal battle and then being chased through the night by attack helicopters, I was feeling every bit of the fatigue I had been holding back by sheer will. I closed my eyes for a few seconds, and that shifted into a full-on nap with me sitting at the table.
They told me that they felt bad about interrupting my nap, but Billie Sue woke me and the others up and led us all off to quiet, dimly lighted chambers with soft and inviting beds. This could be the best and most insidious trap ever laid by humankind, but I gave into it -- hook, line, and sinker. If they wanted to kill me in my sleep, then so be it. At least I’d be sleeping when I died.
It was the last real rest I would get for days.
Chapter 15
A One-Fall Match
Aaron held his ground. It was shaky ground, but it was one on a built of mile high tower of anger and a ‘I don’t give a shit’ attitude. Nothing much had mattered to Aaron since Brandon had been killed. It was only the momentum of what had happened since the soldiers had arrived that had kept him going at all, moving one foot after the other, living in automatic mode with no real forethought.
His mind drifted back to his apartment in the city before the world had turned upside down. Before he met Brandon.
The dead were thick in the streets and the living were on the run. He had watched in horror as a swarm of the undead filled the streets in front of his view from the third floor of a well-worn, brick building. His apartment was on the front of the building giving a panoramic, front-row seat on the horror show below.
A small group of his fellow apartment dwellers had decided to make a panicked run for it, but their escape plan had been ill-thought out. Some had made it to their cars, but most had been trapped in a no-man’s land between the building and the cars parked along the street. He watched as a man tried to batter his way through a group of zombies using only a golf club. The club only lasted three good whacks before the shaft broke in two. The man desperately stabbed at the zombies with what was left of the club, but it proved wholly inadequate. His only luck was a jab into the eye socket of one of the deaders, taking it down, but then all his luck turned bad. Two of the zombies grabbed him by the shoulders and knocked him off balance. Another zombie rammed into him and he was swamped by two others.
The next thing Aaron saw was blood and the next thing he heard was screaming. That was when Aaron about filled his tighty-whities.
Fear had paralyzed him throughout the whole ordeal, leaving him frozen in his apartment, thinking and hoping the virus and undead rising would blow over like a storm. But it didn’t. Things had only gotten worse as the storm of the undead only worsened.
His mom had called him, pleading with him to leave the city and come back to their home in the country, but he had ignored her. He had a life and a good job in the city. Zombies taking over the world was something that only happened in the movies. By the time he had decided to make a run for it, the tide had turned badly with a tsunami of dead filling the city. There was no way to escape, so he hunkered down, hoping he could ride it out.
The doors to the front of his building shattered inward and he looked downward as the undead pressed inside, seeming to be more frenetic from the fresh kill in the street and looking for more meat. He listened as a woman screamed, then as her yells were reduced to strangled gurgles. He felt like he might throw up. Then there was nothing but the groans and shuffling footsteps of the undead sounding in the front stairwell.
He knew then that he had to get out, but he feared that he had waited too long. He should have listened to his mom, but his pride and stubbornness had made him hold out, and now he was screwed.
In a panic, he looked around his tiny apartment for anything to defend himself. There was the guitar that he had never learned to play, but he knew that was useless. He went on to check off the souvenir Reds mini-baseball bat that hung, off-kilter, on his wall, but discarded that idea quickly.
The undead’s footfalls pounded down the hallway on the second floor. He heard a man yell and that was followed by a scuffling sound. Aaron heard two hard thuds and something hit the floor hard enough below him that he felt it.
A man cried out, “No, no.” Then for the first time in his life, Aaron heard a man bay like a wounded animal. It sent a ripple of chills throughout his body. As it turned out, it wasn’t the last time he heard a man cry out like that, but each time he still had the same reaction.
The panic raced through his body like electricity, making him feel like running in place. He finally broke through the fear and rushed into the kitchen and snatched up the only two weapons he could think of -- a large butcher’s knife and frying pan. Holding the frying pan like a club made him feel sort of stupid, but he shook it off. Desperate measures for desperate times, he told himself.
The man’s cries ended and Aaron took that as his cue to get the hell out of there. It took a gallon of courage to turn the knob on his door, but he dug deep and did it. The hallway was empty, but he could hear the zombies moaning on the second floor. He headed to the stairwell that was situated halfway down the hall, hoping that the stairwell might be clear.
It wasn’t. Two deaders held positions at the bottom of the stairs. Fortunately, they didn’t see him, but he knew he didn’t have a lot of time before the press of zombies headed upward and onward.
With the frying pan and the butcher’s knife in hand, he started back to his apartment, but then stopped, knowing that wasn’t a long-term solution. He had to get out of the building.
Think, think, think, he told himself, but his mind was so overcome with terror, it seemed nearly impossible. With nothing else to do, he moved toward the back of the building and it finally hit him that there was a fire escape there. He sped up, but did so cautiously, not wanting the zombies below to hear him.
He made it to the windows at the back end of the hall and, while it took some effort, he slid the window up where it made a loud banging noise. He cringed at the sound, but what was done was done. He stepped out onto the old and rusted fire escape, feeling it give just a little under his bulk. Aaron wasn’t small by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, he was quite large. Conservatively, he carried an extra eighty pounds around on his six foot one frame. Maybe closer to a hundred.
The fire escape steadied and he started down, thinking it would be better to die in a fall from a collapsing fire escape, rather than being
eaten by the zombies. But then he figured it would be his dumb luck to have it fall and he would break his legs, leaving him defenseless when the zombies came to have him for dinner.
He was about to descend to the ground level when the back doors on the ground floor swung open below him and three zombies pushed into the alley behind the building. They moaned and walked aimlessly, unaware that a tasty treat was just above their heads. They didn’t stray far, though, seeming to want to stick close to the horde inside the building.
Aaron, stood on the fire escape, caught in the indecision of whether to wait, go back up, or to attempt to release the ladder and let it fall to the ground. The next part of the plan would be him climbing down and making a run for it. That is if he could muster the courage to do it, and that was a big if.
He knew the old heavy, rusted metal ladder would make a hell of a racket when it released. He envisioned himself making a hasty climb down, but saw the zombies grabbing onto his legs and one of them sinking their teeth deep into his thighs. The vision was so vivid, he almost felt the sting of their teeth breaking the flesh.
With nothing else to do, he started back up the fire escape when a voice said, “You don’t want to do that.”
Aaron jerked his head down and saw a smallish man with straight hair and severely cut bangs standing at the back corner of the building, holding a shotgun and wearing a bandolier of shotgun shells across his chest. He stood with his legs spread in a confident stance. Aaron wondered why the man wasn’t pissing his pants or running? Or both?
The man switched his attention from Aaron to the three zombies at the back of the building, holding the shotgun lightly in his hands.
“You need to come down and do it fast,” the man said.
“But they’ll get me if I come down,” Aaron said, his voice small, like a child.
“No, they won’t,” the small man said, racking a shell into the shotgun and getting the three zombies full attention. Taking notice the three zombies advanced on the man and Aaron used the distraction to let the ladder down and half-jumped and half-climbed down the ladder.