Ran (Book 1): Apocalyptica

by Joshua Guess

  A gun. A small .45 with a round in the chamber and a full magazine. Suddenly my survival prospects grew brighter.

  When I turned to walk away, I heard a thin, terrified voice.

  “Please help me,” it said.

  The voice belonged to a boy in a tree.

  I saw him tangled in a mess of branches ten feet above, nearly hidden by the greenery. Only his face was easily noticed, peering down through an opening he must have made himself. I knew the haunted look at once. It was the expression found on the face of a person whose entire world had ended right in front of them. Way back when, the mirror showed me that same look.

  “Untie the rope,” he said. “It’s how they got me up here.”

  My eyes picked it out immediately, secured to a lower branch. My brain followed the logic. His family had hoisted him up, using their precious remaining time to get their kid away from the pack of zombies. A sudden wave of guilt rolled over me that I hadn’t tried to kill those zombies when they passed by. With it came an irrational, powerful rage.

  It was the first time I ever felt true hate for the undead.

  I lowered the boy from the tree. The rope harness cut into his body cruelly, further evidence his family had been working with almost no time to spare. I hurried to him, trying to turn his head from the awful sight of his dead and devoured family, but he resisted.

  My first instinct was wrong. He wasn’t a boy, not really. Shadows of thin, patchy facial hair put him somewhere between sixteen and twenty. He was very small, in height and build.

  “They saved me,” he said, voice much more full and surprisingly deep without the rope compressing his rib cage. Tears rolled down his cheeks. “They were going to climb the tree after me. Dad went down f-first.”

  “You don’t have to talk about it now if you don’t want to,” I said as gently as I could. “I can get you somewhere safe, if you want.”

  Still on his belly, the young man shook his head. “You don’t…no. You don’t want me. I’ll get you killed.”

  “What’s your name?” I asked, putting a hand on his shoulder.

  He looked away from me. “Ellis. Ellis Graves.”

  “Hi, Ellis,” I said, folding my legs as I sat next to him, “I’m Ran. And I can tell you for sure you didn’t get them killed. This isn’t your fault. Trust me, I’m an expert on survivor’s guilt.”

  “You don’t understand,” Ellis said, slowly bringing a hand forward to wipe dirt from his dark skin. “I’ll slow you down. That’s why they had to put me in the tree. I have cerebral palsy. You know what that is?”

  I nodded. “How severe? Can you walk, or do you use a wheelchair? Canes? Because you don’t look much over a hundred pounds, kid. I’ll carry you if necessary.”

  I wouldn’t actually carry him, of course. Sure, over rough terrain or through particularly tough spots, but it would be much easier to fashion a travois of some kind and pull him that way. Ran Lawson: personal sled dog. That’s me.

  He grimaced. “No, I haven’t needed that stuff for a while. I can walk, I’m just slow. Stress makes it harder.”

  I looked around to make sure nothing was approaching. “Okay, we’ll take it slow. I was shot a few weeks ago, so I’m not exactly at the top of my game, either.”

  I’ll give this to the kid: he was tough as nails. He didn’t break down or freak out as we gathered his things and stripped the camp of stuff we could use. Ellis even helped me put his family’s remains onto the tarp from beneath their tent. Enough of them was missing that hoisting the bundled into the branches was doable.

  “We’ll come back for them,” I said. “Once we get to my place, the people there will help us bury them.”

  Ellis nodded but didn’t say anything. I sympathized with the mindset behind staying quiet.

  I hacked away a pair of long, green branches and threw together a travois with a doubled length of tent canvas and some extra rope. We didn’t use it. It was the only thing Ellis carried. Dragged, really. Just in case we needed it.

  We walked.

  For a while we stayed silent, him needing time to process the terrible things he’d seen and the losses suffered, and me recognizing the thousand-yard stare for what it was. Emotional space is sometimes as important as physical closeness when coping with grief.

  I used the silence to listen. Not just to the world around me—though I was always making sure no one and nothing was trying to sneak up on us—but also to him. Judging a person by the sounds they make isn’t as hard as you might think.

  Ellis didn’t breathe hard as we walked. The pace was slow but steady, and though he was skinny as a rail, what muscles he did have were surprisingly strong and coordinated for someone with his condition. I knew intellectually that cerebral palsy ran a wide spectrum, Ellis being on the very mild end of it, but everyone has their preconceived notions and ingrained stereotypes. I say this as a person with much more pigment in my skin than the majority of the population.

  “Do you need a break?” I asked after we’d traveled a mile.

  “I’m good,” Ellis said with a shortness and tight expression that said he thought I was patronizing him.

  “Okay, well, I was asking because I sort of need a break. I think my bullet wound started bleeding again, and I’d like to check it.”

  Ellis had the good grace to look sheepish. “Oh, okay. I gotta take a leak anyway.”

  “You do that first,” I said. “I’ll cover you.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Uh, lady, I don’t know you that well.”

  I gave him my best teenager-destroying look. “I’m pretty sure you aren’t packing anything I’d find impressive, son.” He stiffened, and the blush that shined through his chestnut skin was glorious. “I’m going to stay close so nothing can jump out and bite it off. We stay together. Period.”

  Ellis turned out to have a shy bladder. When he was done, I handed him the hatchet and made a little spinning motion with my hand, then followed suit.

  We took a little longer than I would have on my own, but I wanted to make sure he was ready for a long stretch. My wound had lost the worst of the redness around the edges. It didn’t seem infected. Whether that was thanks to skill or luck I couldn’t say.

  “What are those black lines?”

  I glanced up at him, armor removed and the top of my shirt cut away to show my neck and shoulder, and knew what he was seeing. Black veins creeping up my neck, others centered on my wound and radiating out. It looked like something from a horror movie.

  Unlike Robert, however, Ellis only looked curious instead of homicidal with fear.

  I explained about the Nero virus. “I have no idea why the black bits haven’t gone away, though. That’s new.”

  He shrugged. “Probably because you got hurt? You said you don’t feel any of the other symptoms those other people have.”

  “Nope, none at all. Which is weird, because before I got these rushes of euphoria. Now, nothing.”

  After cleaning and dressing the wound, I geared up and we set out again. Being so close to home was frustrating. I knew it would take us a relatively long time, especially compared to how fast a car would have done the job.

  Still, it was nice having someone to talk to.

  26

  It took us another full day to get home. This time included a long period of rest, unasked for, when we had to lay low in a drainage pipe thanks to a small swarm of zombies that decided to just hang out for six hours.

  We ambled down the road to my driveway and warring emotions filled me like the waters of a great dam. On the one hand I was excited to return. The thought of a comfortable bed or couch or really anything that wasn’t the ground was powerful. Of all the comforts of home, that one stuck out in my head. On the other, Robert might be there. I didn’t know what I was going to do about it if he was. My brain cycled through increasingly inventive ways to put the hurt on him, each less likely than the last. Especially considering my less than stellar condition.

  They knew we
were coming long before they could see us. A few hundred feet from the driveway, a deep, ringing bark filled the air.

  I started to cry.

  Stopping, I put my fingers between my lips and belted out a whistle that could wake the dead. Or at least get their attention.

  Ellis watched quizzically as a plume of dust grew, the shape of a massive, loping beast at its center.

  Nikola skidded to a stop in front of me, obediently resting on his laurels. It took all his self-control, however. He fairly vibrated with the restrained urge to go full dog on me, kisses and all.

  “Follow,” I said, and he followed.

  The walk down the driveway was surreal. There were people standing around staring at the stranger wrapped in mismatched clothes, her face covered. People I didn’t know. More people by far than I’d seen in one place since that first awful day. Concern was etched on the faces of some, confusion on others. One, however, was all incandescent joy.

  “Ran? Is that you?”

  Tony did bowl into me, but I braced myself.

  “Careful, man, can’t you see I’m covered in weapons? You’re gonna stab yourself right in the liver.”

  Tony grinned and hugged me tighter for a second, then let me go to back away. “We thought you were dead. Robert said…” He trailed off when he saw my reaction to the name. “Oh. Oh, shit. This is going to get ugly, isn’t it.”

  I raised a hand and see-sawed it. “Depends. Tony, this is Ellis. Would you please make sure he’s out of the line of fire?”

  I meant it as a joke, but Tony put a hand on Ellis’s back and led the young man away.

  Nikola kept pace with me as I moved toward the house. I took in the changes peripherally, though there were too many for me to catalog at once. The most obvious was the collection of shipping containers and truck trailers arranged in a neat perimeter. The trench I’d been digging was now filled with concrete and the first sections of fence had gone up.

  The commotion had drawn attention. I was aware of the bodies moving around me like a school of fish orbiting a large predator, staying far enough away to avoid being eaten but hyper aware of what the beast was doing.

  People walked out of the front door. I saw Carla and Jem, both looking on in disbelief. Tony and Ellis stopped about fifteen feet to my left. Gregory stood in the doorway, behind everyone else. His expression was all fear.

  Robert was in the yard, straightening up from where he’d been planting seeds of some kind. His olive skin had darkened, leaving his exposed arms, neck, and face a deep tan. I pulled down my headscarf to give him a good view of my face, hoping to get some kind of reaction from him.

  Nothing.

  Well, okay.

  I pulled the gun I’d taken from the body of Ellis’s father, aiming at Robert’s center mass. “Everyone else needs to step away from that man, please.”

  Everyone did, except Jem. He was wearing the uniform shirt of a Louis County cop. Might have been his own, though I couldn’t remember if he’d ever been a uniformed officer here. A badge was pinned to the chest, and though he wore a gun and carried cuffs, the rest of his outfit was pure comfort. Jeans, work boots, and a baseball cap.

  “Ran,” he said, a note of disbelief in his voice. “You’re supposed to be dead.”

  I nodded toward Robert. “Not for lack of trying. This asshole shot me in the chest. A bunch of times.”

  Robert tensed up, clearly ready to do something even if he wasn’t sure what it was. He was smart enough not to go on the attack while looking down the barrel of a pistol in the hands of someone who knew how to use it. At fifteen feet, even one-handed, I could easily put a round in his face.

  I saw the change in Jem as well. He was what I thought of as biggish; the sort of farm boy thickness that’s strong without the weightlifter muscles strength brings to mind. He was smaller than Robert, or at least shorter, but the fury radiating from him made him scarier than Robert had been even when pulling the trigger.

  “You told me Reavers got her,” Jem said, his voice dangerously flat. He glared hard at Gregory. “You backed him up.”

  Gregory, teeth clenched, nodded. “He said he’d kill me if I—”

  “Shut up,” Robert growled.

  “Don’t blame old Greg too much, Jem,” I said as flippantly as I could manage, solely because I knew it would piss off the big man. “He had pretty solid evidence Robert would carry out his threat. After all, he’d just seen him shoot me and watch me fall forty feet into a creek.”

  “She’s one of them!” Robert suddenly roared. “Look at her neck! She’s got the veins! And she kept it secret from all of us. When I saw her coming at me, I thought she’d turned.”

  “Bullshit,” Gregory spat, catching everyone by surprise. I didn’t know the guy had that much bravery in him. “She was talking to us when you shot her. You saw what she did to that wife-beater earlier and you got scared.”

  You could have heard a pin drop.

  Then Ellis, bless the man, ambled over toward me in his slow, deliberate way. He reached up and pulled the shemagh away, then pointed at my neck.

  “I don’t know any of you,” he said, facing the silent crowd. “But this woman saved my life after my family was killed. She got me here and kept me safe. She never even looked at me funny. She’s not a threat to anyone.” He glanced over his shoulder at the incensed Robert. “Except that guy.”

  Which was when Robert’s hand flashed like lightning for the front of his pants, where his untucked shirt had been hiding his weapon. I could have fired, but I’d let my aim wander slightly, and my first thought wasn’t for me.

  It was for Ellis. I spun and wrapped my arms around him, putting my back to the house and ducking my head as low as I could get it. Thankfully, Ellis was short enough that this was an easy move to make.

  Two bullets cracked into my back, staggering me from the force. I heard a scuffle and some meaty thwacks, a pair of screams, then the metallic zip of handcuffs.

  “He’s down,” Jem said.

  I let go of Ellis, who smiled up at me nervously. “You okay?”

  I grinned at him. “Are you?”

  “A beautiful woman was holding me tight,” he said, the smooth little fucker. “I’m good.”

  Hands touched my shoulders. Another brushed my back, though I could barely sense the pressure through the armor.

  “Doesn’t that hurt?” Carla asked from behind me.

  I turned and threw my arm around her, remembering to keep my finger out of the trigger guard as I did it. “I’m so happy to see you,” I said as I held her tight. Then I stepped back, a shit-eating grin on my face. “No, it doesn’t. This is the armor I modified, remember?”

  “Ah, you put plates in the back,” she said.

  Adding all the extra weight was meant to give me some protection from high velocity rounds. The stuff we’d taken from the police station included some heavy body armor, and I’d integrated it into my own. The fabric alone would have done fine against the pistol Robert shot me with—again—but my ribs and spine appreciated not being subjected to them.

  “So what the hell am I gonna do with him?” I asked her in a low voice. I was acutely aware of many, many sets of eyes watching my every move and listening to every word.

  A grim but satisfied look materialized on her face. “You don’t have to do a thing. We’ve changed some stuff since you went missing.”

  I opened my mouth to ask what she meant, but was interrupted by Jem. He stood with one boot on the small of Robert’s back, just below where his cuffed wrists rested. “Eight days ago we voted, and you agreed to make me your constable. Our first and most important rule was that anything that put others in danger, especially attacking people in the community, was never to be broken. You know the punishments.”

  The word hung in the air, heavy as lead.

  Beneath Jem’s boot, Robert froze. I could hear him muttering.

  “No, no, no…”

  “You heard from his own mouth,” Jem thundered.
“He tried to kill one of us. The woman whose home we share. Who brought the first of us here. He tried to kill her in cold blood. We don’t have many laws yet, but the punishment for attempted murder is death. We can’t afford to let someone like this out into the world. Exile means he might come back for revenge.”

  Jem raised his pistol, aimed it at the back of Robert’s head.

  “Do I get a say in this?” I asked, surprising myself. And, from the number of faces swiveling toward me, everyone else.

  Jem looked up at me and blinked. “What?”

  Suddenly very hot and very tired, I began unbuckling my gear. “I asked if I get to put in my opinion, or if you’re just going to execute that asshole right now.”

  “You can say whatever you want, obviously,” Jem said. “But we can’t waste resources on keeping a prisoner, and we can’t let him go.”

  I shrugged off the pack, dropped the belt, and undid my armor in a span of seconds. I’d practiced a lot before leaving the cowboy house. I stood there in my ragged shirt, wound dressing the only clean part of me. “You’re misunderstanding. I don’t care if he dies, but this motherfucker just took a shot at a kid, too.”

  “I’m nineteen,” Ellis said grumpily.

  “A kid,” I said, putting a little emphasis on the word just to wind him up, “that I spent the last day keeping safe. That really pisses me off. I want a piece of Robert for that.”

  Now there wasn’t silence, but murmurs. I couldn’t hear the words, but I didn’t need to; these people were—justifiably—asking each other if I was crazy.

  “What do you say, big fella?” I asked in my most sarcastic voice. And believe me, that’s saying something. “I’ve got a gunshot wound. I’m half your size. I’m exhausted. Wanna wrestle?”

  Robert was, perhaps wisely, silent for a long few seconds. “Why should I? It’s not like they’re going to let me go if I win.”

  “Probably not, no,” I said. “But you might get lucky and take me hostage. I don’t think Jem will try to shoot you if you’ve got me as a shield.”