Both of the fighters were on their feet now. Zach regained his composure and turned to face the intruder. "Look amigo," he chuckled. "We got us a new contender!"
Mark aimed his rifle, ready to fire, but Aidan put his hand out and lowered the barrel. "It's just one. They can handle him."
"I'll take him," Diego said, stepping closer.
"He's mine!" Zach spun around with a roundhouse kick, landing square in the Eater's chest.
The ghoul flew backwards, landing on his rump.
As he rose up again, Diego squatted low. He lunged forward just as the walking corpse stumbled, doing a quick jig three steps to the right and managed to evade his grasp.
Zach attacked with a front kick. His foot connected with the monster's chin, snapping its head up and back, but failing to knock him down.
Diego threw a hard punch to his head, but again…he stayed on his feet.
"You're a pussy," Zach taunted. "My grandma could take on more dead meat than that."
"Yeah? Where's your abuela now, hombre? I bet one of them got her. Even the worms are done with her now. The Eaters are probably using pieces of her ribs to pick their teeth."
Cheryl elbowed Edmond in the ribs, whispering, "You could learn something from him. He knows how to toss Zach's grandma jokes right back at him."
"Yes, but he's got fifty pounds on me and a wicked left hook. If he ever decided to use me as a punching bag, I'd be curled up in a ball crying for my grandmother."
Instead of responding to Diego with another retort, Zach took his fury out on the wobbling corpse. He used the same kick, but with more power. The ghoul fell to the ground, where his head smashed onto a protruding rock. When he lifted back up, his advanced state of decay was more apparent as there was a softball-sized depression on the side of his scalp, giving his head an awkward, concave shape.
Before he got back up, Diego smashed his head in with the heel of his boot. His limbs twitched for a few seconds before he went still. Then, the two men forgot about him and faced each other, prepared to continue their fight. The clash was aborted when a couple more Eaters wandered into camp. Zach and Diego took turns showing their bravado and taking them down. When three more stumbling, hungry corpses replaced them, several of the onlookers raised their guns, but Aidan motioned for them to stand down.
"They're outnumbered," Cheryl said, keeping her gun raised. "Don't you think we should help?"
Aidan shrugged. "I've seen Diego take out more than that. He could do it blindfolded with one arm tied behind his back. Besides, if he doesn't get them all, Zach will do it, just to one up him."
Then, he turned to Earl and the other man next to him and told them to go check the perimeter. They hopped up and ran in the direction that the zombies came from, guns at the ready.
"We didn't hear the cans jingle. Somehow they got past the rope netting. Looks like we're going to have some repairs to do."
Guns were lowered as it became obvious that the two fighters had things under control. Zach moved with lightning speed, delivering a flurry of bone-smacking blows with his fists and feet that hit their mark every time. With each receipt of his fury, decrepit heads spun around on their necks and knee sockets cracked and buckled. Diego turned head stomping into a game, putting each Eater out of commission then dancing around them like he was doing a touchdown celebration.
Cheryl was sure that if anyone had the balls suggest that the two of them were working as a synchronized team, they would have been insulted.
There was one final intruder that wouldn't go down as easily as the others. He wasn't a large man, but he was stocky with a large, sturdy head. He was also fresher than the others, looking like he'd only been turned within the last couple of days. Each time he was knocked to the ground, his snarls seemed to get angrier. By the time Zach and Diego finished with him, they both looked punch-drunk and so weary that their arms were hanging limply by their sides. They were both bloodied and bruised with heaving chests, and flecks of blood and spittle frothing at their mouths, but they were still ready to go at each other. Aidan and Jake finally broke them up, pinning the exhausted arms of their respective man behind his back.
"Can we call a truce now?" Aidan asked in an exasperated voice. "You're both good men, and there's no point in making this a death match. We need both of you."
Neither of them spoke. Their heads hung low, chins touching their breastbones as if too fatigued to lift them any higher. Aidan released Diego's arms and nodded to Jake to release Zach's.
"Shake."
The sulking forms defiantly kept to themselves.
"Come on…shake. Damnit!"
After a few seconds of hesitation, they finally complied with a brief, angry thrust of their sweaty palms.
Cheryl suspected they only agreed to call it quits, because of their exhaustion. When daybreak came, it was possible that one would wake with the other's hands around his throat.
Then, she remembered that Jake and Mark planned to leave before then. She considered approaching them about holding off for one more day to give Zach a chance to recuperate.
As the audience began to disperse, Aidan looked alarmed. "Where's Earl and Al?"
"The guys you sent to check on the perimeter?" Mark asked.
"Shit. We forgot about them!" Jade said.
"Rifle in hand, Aidan hopped over the fire pit and ran in the direction they'd gone. Mark, Jake, and several of the others joined them."
A man from Aidan's group watched them go and said with a nervous voice, "They should have been back long ago."
"Maybe they've just been working on repairing the ropes," Kai said, optimistically.
"Maybe...maybe not," the man replied. "Get to the trees!"
The campers scrambled skyward. Cheryl joined them, climbing up a rope ladder then pulling it up after everyone was off the ground.
They waited and grew more nervous as they heard the sound of gunfire dozens of yards beyond the camp perimeter.
About fifteen minutes later, after the shots stopped, Cheryl considered hopping down to go look for the men who hadn't returned. Her thoughts were interrupted when she saw motion in the distance.
"There they are…" Edmond said, pointing towards the top of a head appearing above a rustling shrub a few yards outside the camp.
Blond hair. Was it Mark?
The rest of the head emerged.
Not Mark. Not any of the others from her tribe…
Instead of oozing, jelly like orbs, this creature had black holes where its eyes should have been. He wore a ripped t-shirt that said, Arizona State University (though some of the letters were blacked out by bloodstains, so it read, "…izona …ate…sity")
Jade took him down with his crossbow, a crack shot between the eye sockets.
Cheryl kept an eye on him, making sure he didn't stand back up. "Maybe the bodies down by the road are attracting them. We should—"
"There's another one!" Kai yelled.
She aimed her gun. The hit would have been direct if the woman in a bloodstained peasant top and shorts hadn't wobbled on an apparently broken ankle just before she pulled trigger. Instead of hitting her in the head, the bullet grazed her ear, knocking a chunk to the ground.
"I'll take her," Jasmine said, aiming the pistol in her hand. Her first two shots missed altogether, but the third pierced her temple. Jasmine whooped as the Eater fell to the ground.
"Why aren't they back?" Patrick asked as he continued to scan for any more signs of movement. "They should all be back by now."
Before anyone could answer him, the forest around them seemed to uproot itself and come alive with dozens more of the undead.
"Oh crap!" he yelled. His shaking hands were unable to hold steady as he aimed and fired, missing as many times as he hit.
Cheryl took down five in quick succession, but like a hydra, every head that was put down just produced numerous more to replace it. The group in the trees shot as many as they could with their guns and crossbows. Still…more of them c
ame. No longer at the perimeter of the camp, they were encroaching on the center and surrounding the trees where they were perched.
"There's too many!" Cheryl yelled. "What do we do?"
Patrick screamed, "You're asking me? How the fuck should I know?"
He stopped firing, and she thought it was possible that he was trying to save a bullet for himself. There was no time for her concern, because there were three Eaters shaking the base of her tree. She aimed at the one with the nearly skinless skull that seemed neither male nor female, but the violent motion of the tree trunk made her lose her balance. She gave up her mark and clung to the branch instead. The next earthquake caused her gun to tumble the ground.
"I'm…not going…to be able to hold on…much longer!" she shouted, trying to get Jade's attention from the other side of the camp.
He picked off the teenaged girl who only had one arm. Once she was down, the remaining two kept at it, trying to shake Cheryl down. Jade managed to shoot them before attending to his own problem, a growing crowd below him that clawed at the trunk of his tree like they were going to shred it with their bony fingers, splinter by splinter.
Patrick screamed again. Somehow, he'd lost his balance, and one of his feet had slipped through the slats on the bridge next to his perch. His foot was tangled in a snarl of rope, and he couldn't pull it back through. Like hungry guppies, the group below him had wide open mouths as they reached up, grabbing for a hold on his ankle.
"Help him! Help him!" Cheryl cried as she jumped over the heads of two more attackers and down to the ground to retrieve her gun. She shot both of them. Then, she ran a few yards away to draw others away from the tree before doubling back and scrambling back up.
When she turned her attention back to Patrick, it was too late.
One of the hungry creatures below him had pulled off his hiking boot and sunk his teeth into Patrick's foot as others dove for the meat on his calf, tearing off shreds with their teeth and fingers. He was still screaming as they pulled him down, and fell upon him like a cloak of writhing flesh.
Cheryl glanced towards Jasmine. Her head was hung low, and she'd fallen eerily quiet. She wasn't even trying to shoot any more.
She bowed her head too, seeing the imminence of defeat as dozens more Eaters streamed into the camp. Maybe this was it. After more than half a year of running…maybe it was going to end right here. Knowing she was going to die made her feel strangely calm. Would it be so bad if it was finally over? If her dreams of living a normal life could just be resigned to failure and she could find eternal rest? Unfortunately, the passage to that peace was going to be bloody and painful.
Her self-pity was aborted as Jasmine found her voice again. She screamed bloody murder, kicking at the array of dead fingers reaching towards her.
That sight goaded Cheryl back into action. They might all be doomed, but she couldn’t go down without doing everything in her power to save someone else.
Before she could assess Jasmine's situation, one of the Eaters below her, a spindly man with mushroom gray skin and a shock of black hair that was slicked back with blood, found a foothold on a knobby protrusion of the pine and used his withered arms to lift his body up.
Oh God…he's climbing!
His efforts were clumsy, but coordinated, and had potential to succeed if he kept at it, because every time he fell, he popped right back up and started up again. Cheryl managed to put a few bullet holes in the tree, but missed the man's head because of his jerky movements and—she hated to admit—her wobbling hand that wouldn’t stay steady no matter how much she tried to force it to.
When her clip was empty, she started a frantic search in her pockets for another. As her hands fumbled, the sound of gunfire around the camp increased. She looked up and saw Aidan, Mark and the others returning, guns ablaze. Their furious assault was a welcome sight that emboldened her, and with steadier hands, she managed to pick off a few more figures stumbling into the camp in their wake.
Seconds later, the gunfire ceased. Bodies littered the camp, and the only sound came from Kai and Edmond, sobbing.
Cheryl climbed down from her perch as she realized that Jasmine's screaming had stopped. She looked up in the tree where the girl had been and was ready to coax her down, but she saw nothing but empty branches.
"Where's Jasmine?" She asked, hoping that Ben had gotten her down and helped her into one of the tents or teepees to help her recover.
She followed Mark's sorrowful gaze to the group of Eaters piled into a heap at the base of the tree where Jasmine had been perched. He averted his eyes then looked at her and shook his head.
Cheryl collapsed to her knees.
She'd let them down. Being one of the most experienced Eater killers, she should have protected them…but she hadn't. She'd failed them.
Mark kneeled and put his arms around her. "I'm sorry, Cheryl. We shouldn't have left…"
Not his fault. Hers.
The guilt felt like heavy weights on her shoulders, forcing her down to mourn on the earth where she felt her body belonged with the dead.
"Earl and the other guy are dead too. They were attacked before we got there. We were trying to drag their bodies away for a burial when we were surrounded. We ran in the other direction, trying to lure them away, but it was too late. They seemed to catch the scent from the camp and diverted off in your direction."
They were prompted to their feet as Jake came running up. His eyes were wide, nearly popping out of his head, and there were long patches of sweat underneath his armpits. "We can't stay," he gasped. "There's another herd coming. 'Bout a quarter mile from here. At the rate they're moving, I'd say we have six or seven minutes."
With a holler, Aidan gave the official order to abandon camp. "Grab what you can and get to the bikes!"
Cheryl looked back towards Patrick's remains and the heap of bodies where Jasmine met her end. There was nothing they could do but leave them along with the other corpses.
It's just wrong. It's not fair. This has to end…
"Come on," Mark said, snapping her out of her lamentations.
Since Earl and the other Vulture had bitten the dust, there were two extra motorcycles. Cheryl hopped on one of them, a Harley Fatboy, and motioned for Mark to join her on the seat behind. He paused, looking unsure.
"Trust me!" she said. "I can drive it."
"Fine," he said, hopping on behind her. "I guess I'll have to. I haven't touched one of these since I was a teenager, and that was only once."
Zach commanded Earl's XL Sportster. As Kai made a beeline for his back seat, Edmond elbowed him away, jumped on, and wrapped his arms around Zach like it was his God given right to be there. Instead of tossing him off by his collar, Zach turned around and gave him a scowl that seemed to mean: No funny business you annoying fairy or I'll kick your ass.
"The rest of you…hop on behind someone," Aidan said. Jake, Ben, Chip, Jordan, and Kai didn't waste time trying to pick the least awkward person to straddle and hug. They manned up behind the closet rider to them. Seconds later, just as they heard the sounds of moans coming closer to the camp, they took off, following the path down the hillside towards the road.
Aidan was in the lead, and they all had to trust that he was taking them to a safer area, but it was dark, and Cheryl had no idea where they were headed. After navigating through a number of winding, perilous roads that were little more than dirt paths, she concluded that he was just driving with no specific destination in mind. The best she could tell, he was headed north, at least once they hit Highway 77. When they reached it, Aidan raised an index finger in the air, signaling for them all to ride single file. Each rider repeated the signal, so those behind could see it. Once they fell into formation, they were a long line winding through the darkness in a manner that would look like a single bike to anyone who might see them from the front or the rear.
A few minutes later, there was a green sign that said, Sabre—9 miles. When they reached a short hill overlooking the exit, Aida
n raised a hand in the air then swung it down, signaling the rest to pull off. He slowed to a stop and the other bikers gathered around him.
Cheryl and the others saw why he had stopped. There was a shop on the road below. In the front lot, the wind kicked at a metal sign, knocking it to the ground, making a repetitive CLANG as it beat against the concrete.
Diego spoke first. "I've been through here once before. It's a small town. We're not likely to find much in the way of shelter or supplies."
As if it had been cued to emphasize his point, a ball of tumbleweed rolled through the lot.
"It looks deserted," Edmond said with more than a tinge of disappointment in his voice.
"Why wouldn't it be?" Zach growled back to him.
"Maybe it's not," Cheryl said, pointing. "Look…"
She'd noticed it first—a flicker of fluorescent light in one of the front windows. It was unusual for there to be power anywhere unless it was coming from a generator.
Mark wasn't optimistic. "That doesn't mean anything. There could still be isolated spots with electricity and nothing but corpses inside."
"Only one way to find out," Aidan said. Without signaling, he took off down the hill.
Whether they were willing or not, everyone followed. As they neared the building, Cheryl nervously watched the building and its surroundings for any sign of movement. Seeing none, her eyes went to the ice cream-shaped sign out front where a patch of moonlight illuminated the words, Divine Sundaes.
Even more curious than the flickering fluorescent light, there was a neon OPEN sign on the front door lit up bright red.
Chapter 14
Eaters (Book 2): The Resistance Page 16