“He can make them do whatever he wants!” Mark shouted.
“I think Gummo,” she said and fired the pistol into Steven’s head.
The blast of the gun did something to Mark’s hearing. For a while there was only the muted sounds of chaos in the room and a ringing in his ears. Hot tears poured down his cheeks as he watched Steven, still sitting his chair, dead as a doornail with a bleeding hole in his head. His eyes were open and he had the same dopey expression on his face he always had. Mark never really cared for Steven in the short time he’d known him.
But still.
The sound came back all at once. Daisy was sitting stock still. Rosie, Lanskey and Wilson were getting clubbed by the soldiers because they had went berserk. Steven had been knocked off his chair in the commotion and fallen on top of Wilbur who was softly whimpering under the body. Mark glanced around for his boys to find them both huddled at his feet embracing. He looked at Harrie. The beast of a woman was back at the front of the room with her arms crossed and a bored expression on her face. When she saw him looking she smiled.
From the corner of his eye he saw Randolph hustle over to lift Steven’s body off of Wilbur. From there things got deadly quiet again until Harrie broke the silence. “Who shall I kill next, Mr. Nestler?” she said with a grin.
“Please don’t kill anyone else. I’ll tell you everything I know,” Mark said. And so he did. From the very first moment he encountered George McCloud. He spared no detail no matter how small. All the while he kept seeing the expression on Steven’s dead face. When at last he had no more to tell he let out a deep breath, sat back in his chair and waited to see if Harrie believed him.
Harrie hopped off the edge of the desk and circled the row of chairs until she was behind him. Mark closed his eyes thinking she was going to shoot him but instead she rubbed his shoulders for a minute and then patted him on the head. “Thank you, Mr. Nestler. That was a very informative story. It was entertaining as well, almost like a movie. Take our guests back to their rooms if you would be so kind, gentlemen. And somebody do something with that body. Captain Morgan, I need a favor from you.”
“Anything you need, ma’am,” Morgan said.
As Mark and the others were led out of the room he heard Harrie’s puzzling request and had no idea what to make of it.
“How quickly can you bring me one live zombie?” she asked.
“A live one would take some time, ma’am.”
“Shut up, you idiot, you know what I meant.”
Then the door was shut behind them and Mark didn’t catch any more of their conversation. For the life of him, he couldn’t figure out what in the hell she could want with a zombie.
“Dad?” Jacob whispered as they were escorted down a hallway.
“Yes, Jake?”
“Why did that lady kill Steven?”
“Some people are just evil, son. That’s all there is to it.”
“Oh,” came the tiny reply.
Mark pulled his sons closer as they walked, grateful to still have them both alive and well.
Chapter 32: Dad
The Present
As the elevator climbed to the fourth floor I looked at Richard. “Are you ready for this?”
He chuckled, “This is your show, George. I’m just along for the ride.” He took his position to the right of the door and got the tommy-gun ready. I put the pistol against my temple and braced myself. The bell dinged as we arrived and the doors eased open.
There were a few things going through my mind prior to that door opening. I was scared I was probably going to die. I was really pissed at my dad for the whole thing. I wondered about the Syndicate and who this mysterious woman was. I thought about Daisy and how glad I would be to see her again if only for a moment.
The last thing I expected to see was an empty waiting room. Apparently we had just missed everybody. The lime green carpeting was soiled with muddy footprints. The flickering fluorescent lights highlighted small pieces of garbage strewn across the floor. Many of the chairs had been pushed together to form makeshift beds. Two of the large fake plants had been pushed over. But the room was empty of people.
I guess I didn’t expect to see my father waiting for me with his arms outstretched and a big grin on his face but I definitely thought we would be having a conversation. I certainly expected something more than an empty room. “No one here, Richard,” I said.
He followed me out and started investigating the room. I walked up to the empty reception desk. On top of the counter was an unsealed envelope with my name on it. I opened it and read the message inside.
George McCloud,
Proceed around this desk to your right and walk all the way down to the last office at the end of the hall.
Inside you will find some answers.
Tootles!
Harrie
Puzzling, that much was for sure. Where the hell was my father in all this? I knew I heard his voice on that call Tegan made. I knew he was behind everything. He was the person who changed me forever. He was the man who posted those fliers all over town and captured Daisy. So where was he now?
I kept the gun in front of me as I walked around the desk to the right and down the hall as the note instructed. There were empty offices on both sides. Most of the doors were open and the rooms showed signs of long-term human occupation. From the look and smell, a few of them had been used for holding prisoners.
In one such room I noticed a familiar object in the corner on the floor. I ran over and picked up Jacob’s Sparky Speaks toy. It was dirty and full of holes from the Tessa stabbing incident. It also had a few drops of what could have been blood on it. I felt my knees go weak. How in the hell Jacob had come to be in this room was baffling. Maybe it belonged to someone else. I shoved the toy into my pack and hustled out of the room.
Afraid of who or what else I might find, I no longer wanted to look in any of the other offices. I walked slowly towards the closed door that waited for me at the end of the hall.
There was someone inside. It was a man. That much I could tell from the distressful sounds coming through the door. He was grunting and banging on something like he was trying to move a heavy desk.
After a moment of internal debate I decided it was best if I took him by surprise. I put my hand on the knob and gently wiggled the handle. It wasn’t locked. All the while the grunting and banging from inside never stopped. When the knob was turned as far as it would go, I put my shoulder to the frame and threw the door open.
The man wasn’t moving a desk.
The man was tied to a chair.
He was grunting because he had a thick cloth tied around his mouth. He couldn’t move his hands or his feet because they were tied securely to the arms and legs of the chair. Still he raged like an animal at the ropes that held him down.
All of this made sense because the man was a zombie.
He had also been my father.
As I stared down at my dad with tear-filled eyes, pain blossomed in my chest and I found it a struggle to breathe.
“Oh, dad,” I whispered as I took a step closer to his agitated body. He had a beard like I did but his was gray and bloody. He’d been beaten pretty badly. He looked thin and ragged like every other survivor I’d encountered. I had been wrong about everything. Just looking at him I could tell he had never been the bad guy. I was a traitor for thinking he ever could’ve been.
He went still and sat up straight as he noticed me. That’s when I saw something had been pinned to his chest. I stood in front of him and gently touched his head. He didn’t move or make a sound. The paper hadn’t been pinned; it had been fixed to his chest with nails. My stomach lurched as I noticed how far they’d been driven in. I wondered if they’d done that before or after he had turned. The word play had been written on the paper along with a crudely drawn icon for the play button on a video recorder. As though my dad were a zombie version of a VCR.
“He was like that when I got here, George,” a sad deep voic
e said.
I froze for a moment but then I recognized that voice and turned toward a darker corner of the room where Derrick’s hulking form was barely visible. He was sitting on the floor with his arms around his knees.
“Why didn’t you stop them?” I asked, my voice cracking as I tried not cry.
“I should have. I tried. I was just too late. She fooled us both, George, but I should’ve known better. I thought something was wrong about her from the start but your old man wouldn’t have it. He loved her,” he replied.
“Who?” I asked.
“Vicki,” he said. “Or I guess Harrie is what she calls herself now.”
“Where is she?” I asked as my sadness started to give way to rage.
“She’s gone. She took the rest of her prisoners and the few men she had left and escaped from the roof via helicopter before my people and I could do anything about it.
“Why are you still here?” I asked.
“We were waiting to see if you showed up. I read the note out front and she clearly left that paper on Bill’s chest for you to find. I was hoping you could tell me what it means. I don’t have a helicopter on standby so we’re going to have to go after her a different way.
Before he could explain further there was a soft knock on the open door. “Everything okay in here, George?” Richard asked from the hall. He was still holding the tommy-gun and it was pointed in the general direction of Derrick’s feet.
“Who is this guy?” Derrick asked. “You might want to tell him to point his gun somewhere else before I shove it up his ass.”
“He is with me. Derrick this is Richard. Richard this is Derrick, he was a friend of my father’s. You can lose the gun.”
“Oh, yeah, okay. Nice to meet you, Derrick,” Richard said. He pointed the muzzle in the opposite direction but didn’t put it down. “What’s with the zombie?” Richard asked and nodded toward my father.
“That’s my dad. I think that woman did this to him. The one Brenden and Parker told us about.”
“George, I am sorry,” Richard said, “This really sucks.”
It did really suck but I thought it was an odd way to phrase it. More like something a person would say when a ballgame got rained out, not as a way to convey condolences to someone who had recently discovered their father had been murdered and turned into a zombie. But this was new territory for us and I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt. He probably didn’t know what else to say.
I sat down against the wall by my father and looked over at Derrick, “I’m assuming you were with my father for a while before this Harrie woman captured him?”
“Yes I was,” he said as he sat back down in his spot.
He brought Richard and me up to speed on what had happened since the time I’d last seen my father. It sounded so crazy. If I hadn’t been living through the zombie apocalypse with extraordinary powers flowing through my veins I would have never believed it. Richard squatted down on his haunches at one point in the story but never really relaxed.
“So she just turned on him?” I asked.
“I wasn’t there for that part but I assume so. She started off okay but then slowly she got her hooks in him and started taking control. He couldn’t see it and I got tired of arguing so I kept staying out in the city for longer periods of time hunting Syndicate soldiers, hiding resources and waiting for something to change. When it did change I wasn’t anywhere near this building.”
“That must have been when Rosie and Tegan made contact,” I said.
“Probably,” Derrick said. “I wouldn’t have even known anything had changed but suddenly I was a hot target. People we’d been running with for weeks suddenly tried to kill me. That’s how I knew something was wrong. By the time I got back here there were too many soldiers for me to get inside. They sent a guy out to talk to me, someone I knew. He told me Vicki said to turn myself in or she would execute Bill. She said she had the building wired to blow if I tried to take it. I had no choice but to believe her.
“What was the point of all her subterfuge?”
“I think she had one mission. Bring you in at all costs. I have no idea what they planned on doing to you but that was why she was here. We had been bleeding the Syndicate dry. Killing soldiers almost as fast as they could fly them in. She had to change tactics if she wanted to win. I have to hand it to her, we never saw her coming.”
“Sounds like you and George’s father made quite a showing for yourselves. From how you describe this woman you ought to be proud for holding out as long as you did,” Richard said.
“We held our own,” Derek said. He glanced at my father with a frown. “Until she got to you, Bill.”
My father didn’t respond. He hadn’t moved at all since he’d noticed me.
“Bitch didn’t know all our secrets,” Derek said. “If she had she would’ve tried to pluck Andrew out of the hidey hole I had him in.”
“I’m sorry, who is Andrew?” Richard asked.
Derrick didn’t answer. I glanced over at him to find that he had stood to his feet and was staring intently at Richard. In the nervous silence of the gloomy room I heard the ghost of a rustle like a footstep sliding across the floor.
A gun was cocked and nobody moved. “Don’t pretend you don’t know who I am, Dick,” a new voice said from behind Richard.
Richard let out a breath and slowly placed the tommy-gun on the floor. “I can’t believe you survived this long, Andy. Good for you,” Richard said as he straightened up.
“What the fuck is going on?” I asked.
Derrick glanced at me and said, “George, I think your travelling buddy has some explaining to do.”
Richard gave me a sheepish grin, “What can I say, George? I guess you shouldn’t be so quick to trust people. You never know who you are gonna run into out there.”
“And just whoare you,” I asked.
He chuckled, “I guess you could say I am one of people that made all this possible. But then so is Andrew. We can’t let him off the hook so easy now can we, Andy?”
“Shut the fuck up,” Andrew said.
I lunged for Richard but Derrick was on me in a flash. “Not yet, George, we will deal with him later. For now we’ve got to figure out what Harrie meant by that sign on your dad’s chest.”
“I know what she meant. Look, can you get Richard out of here? I need some time alone with my father. I will fill you in when I am done.”
Sure, George, whatever you need,” Derrick said. He didn’t seem happy about it but he slapped a pair of handcuffs around Richard’s wrists. Andrew, the man I’d only just met, got Richard turned around and shoved him out of the room. Derrick looked back at me before heading out, “We’ll be out front when you are ready.”
I looked around the room until I spotted another chair. I dragged it in front of my father and sat down. His eyes looked sad and imploring but I knew I was misreading things. He was a zombie now; emotion and rational thought were things of the past for my father. I sighed and closed my eyes. My father’s blue light was glowing strong right there in front of me. Another moment passed and I was in his memories. I thought of the woman’s name and array of choices came up. I choose the last and relived the final moments of my father’s life.
…
Bill had lost track of how many days he’d been locked in the decrepit room. The worst part had been the smell but he was long over that. The beard was out of control. He hardly felt the beatings. The hunger pains weren’t so bad anymore. His body had adjusted to his meager daily rations. The only thing he couldn’t get used to was the boredom. Hours and days with nothing to do but think about his mistakes. Vicki, and he refused to call her anything else, must not have captured George yet or he’d be dead. He was sure of that now. She was going to kill him eventually.
He was dozing when they came. At first he assumed it was to beat him as that had been one of their favorite ways to pass the time. But then he realized this time was different. It wasn’t three soldiers, it
was six. Then Vicki came strutting into the cell in a ridiculous blue chiffon cocktail dress with a big grin on her face. He wondered if he could reach his waste bucket and add his own mark to that dress before the guards stopped him, but some sounds from the hallway beyond his vision kept him still. It sounded like an animal being held at bay with chains. He thought he could hear children crying. This was odd.
“Hello, Vicki,” Bill said. That at least took the smile off her face.
“Hello, Bill,” she replied. “I’ve brought you a playmate. Bring it in boys,” she called over her shoulder before moving out of the way.
Four more soldiers entered the room and with them came one of the most pitiful creatures Bill had ever seen. It had been man once, nothing more than a teenage boy. But it was a person no more. Dressed in rags, its hands were chained behind its back and its feet were chained together like a death-row prisoner. One of the four soldiers was a stocky man with a buzz cut. He held the raging creature at bay with long pole looped around its neck.
“Take his shirt off and hold his arms out,” Vicki barked.
Before Bill could do anything the soldiers pinned him to the ground and ripped his shirt off. They yanked him to his feet. One man had him in a choke hold while two others held his feet in place and two more pulled his arms apart. He tried bucking them off but it was no use. He was too weak from the lack of food and dehydration.
“Vicki, what in the hell are you doing?” Bill wheezed. “Can’t you just put a bullet in my head, you inhuman bitch?”
“What fun would that be, Bill? Besides, George’s friends inadvertently revealed a cool way for me to pass him a message. Unfortunately, that’s bad news for you. Okay, Captain Morgan, enough foreplay, do it already.”
The stocky man handed the pole to another soldier. The he stepped in behind the beast and gripped it by its patchy scalp. When he had its head firmly under his control he steered the face toward Bill’s exposed arm. The creature didn’t need much encouragement as it snarled then lurched in and took a good sized chunk of Bill’s flesh.
Bill screamed and wrenched his arm away. The soldier who had been holding his arm outstretched lost his grip and gave the zombie a new target. Bill briefly fainted from the pain and sagged into the arms of the man holding him up. He came to a second later to the sound of gunfire and people screaming. The man Vicki had called Captain Morgan had killed the zombie and the other soldier it had bitten. Once again Bill thought he heard children crying.
Running with the Horde (Book 2): Delusions of Monsters Page 32