by TW Brown
“It’s not a bite,” Cynthia said between clenched teeth. “Somebody shot me.”
***
“Ronni!” Chad called from up in the loft of the barn.
“Coming!” his daughter’s voice came from just below. A moment later, her head popped up through the square opening in the floor.
The sounds of activity from below still seemed loud to Chad. He didn’t remember Yosemite Village being this noisy. Folks here just did not seem to care about how much noise they made. With twenty-foot high fences and manned watch towers surrounding the enormous plot of land, not to mention the fact that every citizen deemed old enough and mature enough was heavily armed—he’d seen a girl that could not be any older than ten with a .22 pistol on her hip—and this place was the most secure environment he’d been in since the dead began to walk.
“Dustin wants us to be out on tower six today,” Chad informed his daughter.
She huffed and blew a strand of her blond hair from her eyes as she rolled them in that typical teenage girl fashion. It had taken him some time to learn that it wasn’t necessarily him; she reacted that way to pretty much everything.
“Some of the girls asked me if I was going to attend the teachers’ indoctrination.”
Chad was caught by surprise. Thus far, his daughter had shown no interest in doing anything. This indoctrination was a pretty big deal from what he’d been hearing. This place actually had two former school teachers who were getting things organized so that a school program could get started. There had been a call for volunteers, but he never once considered that Ronni would have any interest.
“You sure that is what you want to do?” Chad sat down on the bale of hay. “It is a pretty serious commitment.”
“It beats being on the tower or having to go out and clear the corpses,” Ronni replied with a shrug.
She folded her arms across her body and cocked her left hip out. Chad recognized that as her “ready to argue” pose. The thing was, he did not have a single thing to say against this decision. In fact, it would be a relief.
While there was usually not any problems associated with being on tower watch, that was also the place trouble would come first if outsiders tried to assault the compound. Corpse detail was nasty duty, and sometimes a few walkers might show up while the crews gathered the downed bodies for the burn pile. Relatively low risk compared to where they had been, but there was still a lot more risk than, say, sitting in a classroom teaching the “ABC’s” and “1-2-3’s” to a bunch of children.
“Then I guess I will see you at dinner.” Chad got up and went to hug his daughter…but she had already turned and was heading down the ladder.
He tried not to feel hurt, but that was an exercise in futility. There had been so much in the past year, and none of it had done anything to help bring them any closer. It certainly was not how he had dreamed of their reunion happening when he came home from prison.
Between the loss of her mother basically before her eyes, being on the run, losing all of her friends to the undead, and then the assault, it was no wonder that she was building a rather hard shell. Worse still, it was not like he had any sort of parenting skills. He’d never been around children much before prison…much less after.
“Chad?” a voice from below called.
“Up in the loft, Dustin!”
A moment later the big, barrel-chested man squeezed through the square hole in the loft floor. He was wearing a black bandana on his head; curly ringlets of blond hair escaping from all sides. His blue eyes sparkled and his smile was genuine.
“Saw your daughter on the way in…everything okay?” The concern in his voice was real.
“As much as it can be,” Chad answered with a shrug.
“Sons would be much easier.”
“Amen, brother.” Immediately Chad wished he could yank that word out of the air and stuff it back down his throat with the foot that was currently residing in his mouth.
Dustin Miller was a self-proclaimed man of God. He refused to claim a denomination, stating that the Bible was the only religion he followed and all his doctrine came from there, not some label. He did not force his religion on anybody who came to live inside the fences of his sprawling compound. He told each new arrival that the decision was theirs and God’s.
“Sorry,” Chad said with a blush.
“Just give me five ‘Our Fathers’ and ten ‘Hail Marys’ while kneeling on a pack of pencils and we’ll call it good,” the man said with a stern expression that quickly melted back to the easy going smile. He gave a deep laugh and clapped Chad on the shoulder. “I’m not that thin-skinned, my friend. I don’t know how many times I have to tell you. Anyways, I was looking for you with a purpose.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Got two new arrivals on the late watch last night. They said that there is a truck stop about twenty miles from here. All the trucks are still shut up and secure. They went to a few and peeked inside. Lots of goods worth taking. I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind leading a dozen or so folks on a run. From what they say, the wagons should not have any trouble making the trip.”
The wagons in question were basically replicas of the old Prairie Schooners from the pioneer days. The difference was that they had better suspension, and the wheels were the heavy duty all-terrain sort.
“I figure the most you would be gone is a week,” Dustin continued when Chad stayed quiet.
“Ronni…” He left that word out there. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to do his share, it was just that things were already a bit strained between them.
“I asked Tina Curry if she wouldn’t mind keeping her over for a few days,” Dustin said, and then wiped at his face. “I’m not trying to pressure you into something you are not comfortable doing. But honestly, you have the most experience out there. A majority of the folks living here have been doing so since the beginning.”
“I’ll do it,” Chad agreed. Although it wasn’t for the reasons Dustin might assume. The reality was that Chad felt the need to get away for a bit and clear his head. The idea of how he’d anticipated the reunion with his daughter going was not quite matching up to the reality. Maybe if he were gone for a while, she would come to miss him; at least that was the hope.
He headed back to the cabin he shared with his daughter and another family—more units were being built and he was three away on the list from getting a place for just the two of them. It took him about twenty minutes to suit up and gather his gear. Part of him hoped that Ronni would come barging through that door any minute and tell him not to go.
A half hour later he was walking through the gates with a dozen other people to find this potential stash of goods. He looked back once to see if she might be up in one of the towers waving. He felt an unpleasant squeeze at his heart when there was no sign of anybody other than the guard on watch.
***
“George, you and Danny move down this side of the street and check house by house,” Jody instructed.
His group had been tasked to check out the exclusive neighborhood known as the Ridgepoint Estates. All of the houses looked like mansions. It seemed that the rich must have believed that their money would save them.
On the plus side, there were some great things to scavenge. Top of the line tools and gardening equipment that Danny had joked were probably only ever touched by the actual residents when they handed them to their hired groundskeeper along with a variety of standard tools like wrenches, screwdrivers, hammers and the like. On the down side, it seemed that the zombies had indeed stayed away for quite a while because there was almost no food to be found.
This first run was just sort of supposed to help break the rust off of them in preparation for the future ventures into the actual city of Jonesboro, Arkansas. Selina was technically the leader since she had been the one to do all of the organizing, but as soon as they got out of the tiny pencil dot town of Cash, she had turned things over to Jody.
Remar Jenks and his group were
supposed to be hitting another housing development called Beaver Run. This was one of those sorts of places with postage stamp sized yards and every house looked like it was a clone of the ones on either side.
Truth be told, Jody felt that Remar’s group had a much tougher mission. For one, there were many more homes than the area he and his group were now scouring. That meant more possible bad things could happen. Entering a home was always risky since it was gloomy despite the sun and you were not familiar with the layout. That allowed for surprises, and surprises were not a good thing…at least in this case.
He glanced over at Selina and smiled. Her back was to him and she couldn’t see it, but he’d had one plastered on his face for the past week since she had shared the news of her pregnancy with him; it wasn’t like she was missing anything.
Jody Rafe was proud of how he’d handled that news. His instant gut reaction was to cut her out of the expedition, but he knew her well enough to know that such a move was a good way to ensure that the actions involved leading to her current condition would come to an immediate halt if he tried something like that. Besides, he knew enough about pregnancy to know that there was really no extreme danger to her condition in that first trimester.
His mind drifted back to the way she’d sprung the news. They were in bed and she was snuggled up against his side tracing designs on his chest.
“I know what you’re getting for Christmas,” she sing-songed.
“Huh?” he mumbled, doing his best not to just fall asleep.
“Well, I don’t know exactly…it might be a few days early or late, but it will be pretty close. Also…I am not sure what model you will be getting.”
“Okay, I’ll bite,” Jody rolled onto his side to face her and kissed her on the nose. As an added bonus, he nipped the tip of it playfully.
“I’m pregnant,” she said with a smile that lit the dark room with its brilliance.
“Hey…Sergeant Rafe!” a voice hissed in his ear, snapping him out of his pleasant memories with a mental slap to the face.
Danny Sullivan had been part of Jody’s original military unit. Together, they had been through a lot. Now that they were settled in the small town of Cash, Arkansas, the two had seemed to drift apart. Sometimes Jody felt really bad. It wasn’t like there was an abundance of women. In fact, the ratio was about eight or ten to one against at the moment.
“Sorry,” Jody whispered.
He didn’t need Danny to tell him what the problem was as a dozen zombies all staggered around the corner a short distance away. So far, that had been the largest number that they had encountered. It wasn’t anything to be concerned about…unless it was the leading edge of a much larger group.
“When you gonna tell me why you keep grinning like a friggin’ idiot,” Danny shot back in his thick New Englander accent. “I know it can’t be strictly because you’re getting laid on the regular. So what’s the haps, man?”
Jody groaned inwardly. One of the things that Selina had insisted on after telling him was that he keep it a secret for a while. “It’s bad luck to tell before the second trimester,” she insisted.
Jody could hardly be the one to tell her that superstitions were stupid. Every time they went out into the field, he’d had a ritual about biting down on his dog tags before tucking them into his shirt. The thing is, he couldn’t actually remember why any more. It could have been something as silly as being a scene that he’d seen in a movie once and thought it was cool.
“Just feeling good about where we are compared to where we were a few short months ago,” Jody lied.
“When you two are finished yapping,” George interrupted, “you mind figuring out how you want to take down those damn zombies?”
“I still want you to move down that side of the street,” Jody said, thankful for the distraction from Danny’s line of questioning. “Selina and I will head down this side. That will put us in their field of vision. When they move for us, you come in from behind. We should be able to put them down in no time.”
“That’s not possible,” George said with a snort.
“Why not?” Jody asked with genuine concern. Had the big man seen something else that he’d missed?
“Because, you idiot, everything takes time. You can’t do an action that takes no time.”
“Nice one,” Danny quipped.
“Maybe I shouldn’t keep putting you two together.” Jody feigned a sigh. “Pretty soon you’ll be telling really awful dirty jokes and laughing before you even get to the punch line.”
“C’mon, George,” Danny urged. “Let’s go someplace where we are appreciated.”
Jody watched as George Rosamilia and Danny Sullivan locked arms like Laverne and Shirley before scurrying away and behind a large SUV that had come to its final resting spot half on and half off the curb across the street. He glanced over at Selina who was smiling at him with a twinkle in her eye.
“What?” He was still a bit uncomfortable being in a serious relationship and never really knew how to read this woman who was now the most important thing in his life.
“I bet that was hard, the not telling Danny,” she said. “If you want, you can let him know. But just tell him he can’t tell anybody else.”
“Have you met Danny?” Jody said with a chuckle. “Anyways, we got more things to worry about than that right now. Let’s move.” Jody didn’t wait. He knew instinctively that Selina would be right behind him as he stood up and walked out in front of the approaching cluster of zombies.
“Damn!” was all he could manage when he reached the intersection and could look back the way the zombies had come.
3
Geek Ain’t Afraid of No Ghosts
Kevin Dreon climbed up into the dangerously unstable looking cell tower. He brought the crossbow up and peered through the scope. Just as he suspected, there were at least fifty people inside the big circle of RVs. Another thirty or more were on the roofs doing the best they could to take down the hundreds of zombies that had them trapped and surrounded.
“We have to choose another way,” Kevin called down to Aleah Brock, Heather Godwin and Catie Rose.
“Isn’t there anything we can do?” Heather asked as he made his way back down to them.
“Other than get eaten? Not really.” Kevin shook his head. He had to do his best not to sound relieved. Truthfully, the last thing he wanted was to hook up or try and introduce himself to new people.
Things had gone both ways since the four of them set out for South Dakota. They had met some very nice people in the couple of weeks that they had been on the road. But they had also met and seen signs of some really bad ones. In fact, they had seen more living souls than undead ones until now. This was the first real concentrated group they had encountered.
Fortunately, up to this point they had not been required to really run for their lives. While the prosthetic foot was becoming something he was getting used to, he still did not possess the dexterity to manage anything more than a brisk walk. Also, there was the fact that, while it was a decent fit, there had been limitations to what could be done.
He wasn’t the only one to have felt the effects of an extended period exposed to the elements. Heather and Aleah were both missing a finger or two. Also, Aleah, who was still a vision of beauty in Kevin’s eyes, had suffered some nasty facial frostbite that left considerable scarring as well as a lumpy reshaping of her nose.
“So we just let those people die?” Catie asked. She did not seem angry or even annoyed; it appeared as if she understood the gravity of their situation. He chalked that up to her military experience.
“I wish there was another way,” Kevin lied.
It wasn’t that he wished ill on these strangers. It was the simple fact that his mind worked more pragmatically than emotionally—in most cases. He was still haunted by the thought that he had sent his mother and little sister to their deaths while he made his big escape when the zombie rising had first begun. There were other things that haunted his
sleep, but that was the biggest and most frequent.
“So what is our next big landmark?” Catie asked as Kevin began to move down the mostly empty highway.
“Believe it or not, we should start seeing the outlying areas of Chicago in the next few days. Valparaiso is six miles ahead.” Kevin pointed at the road sign that looked as if it were ready to topple over the next time a good breeze came through.
“Never heard of it,” Heather mumbled as she skirted a car with three active occupants inside that pressed their faces against the glass in a vain attempt to get at her.
The foursome continued along US 30, the Lincoln Highway. Their standard mode was for Aleah and Kevin to walk in the westbound lanes while Heather and Catie walked in the eastbound lanes. Kevin insisted that staying spread out was the way to go in case of emergency. That way it was less likely that all four of them might be in danger in the event of an attack—living or undead.
Heather was still not on the best of terms with Catie after being taken prisoner at finger point. She was not a fan of being the butt of the joke. That slight estrangement made the days seem endless since she was not much for making small talk with somebody that got under her skin.
Her mind drifted back over the past year. Part of her almost wished that it were just she and Kevin like in the beginning. It wasn’t as if she would revisit the crush she’d first had on him; it was just that she felt like she was unnecessary now. Kevin had Aleah and she had…nobody.
Immediately, her mind began throwing up walls. It wasn’t that she had not once started to have a relationship since this nightmare began; it was just that he had not made it after that fateful night when so much had gone wrong. She glanced at her hand. Every time she looked at where the middle and index finger of her right hand should be, she thought of Matt. He had saved them that night as they ran for their lives…but at the cost of his own.