by Greg Dragon
“I’ve heard some pretty terrible ideas, Tracy, but that one tops them all,” Alysia said before she could stop herself from saying it. “With all due respect, of course,” she added. Tracy gave her the middle finger in reply, and then forced herself onto the bench between Jaime and James.
“It may be a crap idea, but it’s better than what any of you have. Which is a whole lot of nothing.”
“Why don’t we go back to the place where they originated from?” Jaime chimed in, and everyone grew quiet as if they had all considered it but didn’t want to mention it.
“So travel back to my school and see what is there,” Alysia said, and then put her face into her hands. “Didn’t they pop up from all over the eastern shore? We don’t really know the origin of it all.”
“It’s a good idea, CeeCee. Better than sitting here waiting for them to attack us,” Jaime said. “We know that the whole bunker thing was a panicked move and we aren’t even sure if that was really the president that ordered it. There will be a lot of groups traveling around, just like us, and they may have more insight that we can share and get educated from.”
“Bingo!” Tracy said.
“So when do we head out?” Alysia asked and Tracy looked at James to see if he had any ideas.
“Why not tomorrow?” he said after a while. “We can wait around to see if things will magically change, but I think we should keep moving. That way, we don’t get a lot of time to start having doubts.”
~ * ~ * ~
The small party trudged through the woods, bearing east beneath a sky that looked like an abstract work of art. It was all dark purple, splashed with hints of blue, and it would soon change to something wonderful when the sun came up. They didn’t speak, most of them tired and sleepy from a night of uncomfortable rest, but they had to leave, according to Jaime. Staying would only delay the inevitable.
Out of everyone who marched along through the well-preserved forest, James Knight was the most composed. He had been in places where the woods were wild and untamed, when the soldiers in his company stayed up 72 hours at a time and uncomfortable rest was all they knew. Compared to the missions he had undergone as a U.S. Navy Seal, this was literally a walk in the park—pun intended. He pulled them up short at what appeared to be a clearing, and got down on a knee. He then used the detachable scope from his pulse rifle to see what was in front of them.
“Don’t make a move!” he whispered and they all complied, too frightened to move an inch.
A slow rumbling sound caught them as a giant pushed past the trees, walking in a southwestern direction. He was small, about the height of a two-story building, and he walked so close to them that it took everything within Tracy not to react. When he was gone, James exhaled, and they all looked at one another with a mixture of fear and relief. The light from the dawning sun cut through the darkness and as they recovered their march, James spoke again.
“I think that the demons become giants,” he said, and they all looked at him.
“How did you come up with that one?” Tracy asked.
“Did you not look at the one that just passed us?” he said. “It had the red and black texture on its legs. We keep wondering where they come from… well, that is my theory. Some of them grow into giant men while the others just stay red.”
“That makes no sense,” Tracy said. “I think they are a different species altogether.”
But James didn’t want to argue, so he shrugged and kept them moving.
“You notice something?” Jaime asked. He hadn’t spoken since they set out, so everyone was curious as to what was going on inside his mind.
“No, what?” Tracy replied.
“It’s quiet; like, too quiet. I don’t hear the helicopters and jets in the air shooting anymore, or any guns or things blowing up. It sounds as if we gave up, or we lost the fight and all our soldiers are dead.”
“Not all of them,” James shouted back at him, but they knew he was right. Since the day when the monsters first attacked, they had heard the sounds of war going on all around them. Now it was quiet, and once the giant’s stomping had passed on into the distance, it had become very peaceful. It was a cruel illusion that masked the reality of their lives, and it begged to question where the U.S. military was.
“I bet they left us,” Jaime said to Alysia as they walked behind James and Tracy, who had sped up their own pace in order to have a private conversation.
“Who, my dad?” Alysia asked, looking at him to see if he was joking.
“No, I mean the government, the elite few with all the money in the world. The world goes to hell, they tell the military to get us into bunkers, and they rush to their escape boats and ship off to a safe house of some kind. Like maybe Antarctica.”
Alysia rolled her eyes and sped up to get away from him, but he caught up to her without saying anything.
“Is your stomach okay, Jaime?” she asked.
He frowned. “Yeah, I’m a little hungry, but I’m good. Why do you ask?”
“Because of the diarrhea of the mouth you have going on. Your imagination is immense; I’ll give you that, but safe houses in Antarctica? That just about says it all.”
“Okay, but when you find out that everything I’m saying is true, I’ll have a big fat ‘I told you so’ waiting for you,” he said.
They exited the park a little past midday and were on the street, moving toward the city. There was an old, rusty water storage tank sitting behind a fence, and old broken-down trucks and cars from the age of gasoline. The tank brought back memories of a childhood spent in the country for Tracy, and she wanted to run up to it and climb it to the top to play queen of the mountain. James Knight stopped and observed the area, using the scope from his gun to get a closer view. He held his hand up to tell them to stop, and then he pocketed the scope and led them across to the short fence.
They jumped the fence and entered the junkyard, each person holding a gun at the ready as they cleared the area and worked themselves back to the tank. There was nothing but silence, and the air was humid, causing them to sweat. Tracy ran ahead when she saw something, but pulled up short and looked around frantically when she got there. Jaime ran up next to her and then James, and Alysia could see that they both had the same reaction.
She wondered what they were looking at, and as she got closer, she could see there was a corpse on the ground. It was an older woman in a flowery dress, and there were human remains next to her.
“Why do they kill some of us and turn others?” Tracy asked. “I just don’t get it.”
“It may have to do with the age,” Alysia said.
“What do you mean, the age?” Jaime asked.
“I mean our age. The people we saw turned inside the bunker were all young people. The oldest one I saw was the blonde-haired woman, and she looked to be about thirty, thirty-one. These people are older; they probably owned this junkyard and didn’t get the memo about getting to a bunker.”
“Or, they just had no means of getting to one,” James said. “I don’t see a functioning car or bike around here.”
“That or they got left,” Tracy said. “What is this place? I can’t even call it a junkyard since there is nothing here to indicate that this crap was being sold. It’s a dump. How did the city allow them to get away with this? Rust everywhere, the grass is all tall and out of control, and just look at the water tank. This place looks as if nobody has lived here in years.”
James brought his rifle up to eye-level and then started to move towards the small house that sat several yards behind the junkyard. He motioned for Tracy to move to his rear and she did so quietly, staying a bit behind him with her own rifle pointed at the door. Alysia and Jaime sat back, watching. It had been explained to them that during infiltrations they were to cover the flank, never to rush in ahead of their trained teammates.
James crossed the entrance of the door until he was on the right side, and Tracy checked the windows. Alysia and Jaime inched up to get closer, and
then James kicked the door in and moved inside quickly, checking the corners while Tracy did the same. Alysia heard several quick bursts from the pulse rifle, and several demons burst from the backdoor, running across the yard to gain the street. Jaime took aim and began firing at them, but Tracy walked out and calmly lifted her rifle and put them down with precision shots.
“CLEAR!” James yelled, and Tracy lowered her weapon and sighed. She brought out a bit of cloth from her pants pocket and wiped the sweat from her brow.
“Jesus,” she said under her breath, “that whole sequence frightened the hell out of me.”
“I can’t freaking tell,” Alysia said to her as she ran up to the house to check on her father.
He was kneeling down over the corpse of a large man, and from the red veins running the length of his legs, Alysia knew he had turned and had tried to attack her father.
“Good job, Trace. For someone who hasn’t done this before, you were all right,” James said. “So what do you say, CeeCee? I bet you all are tired and hungry. The folks that own this place just got attacked. We can set up here and rest, and catch our breath before we head out again.”
Nobody wanted to argue against the idea. It had been a long time since any of them had slept in a real bed, under a real roof that wasn’t an apartment underground. Jaime and Alysia dragged the corpses out to the backyard and set them on fire, and then they went back inside to clean up the mess.
Their new shelter was a cozy home that had all the amenities you would expect: black leather couches that surrounded a mid-sized curved flat-panel ABE television. There were random paintings on the wall, the refrigerator held photos of the extended family, and there were three bedrooms, two connected to their own bathroom.
They decided that Alysia and Tracy would get their own bedroom, and James would do the couch, but Jaime insisted that they trade. A solar-powered generator powered the electricity, and with the Film-Jet 3.0 movie player beneath the television, Jaime wanted the luxury of falling asleep to a movie.
They cleaned the blood from the walls and floor, and then checked the refrigerator and cupboards for food. The owners had stocked it full prior to their passing, and they had enough to last them for a couple of months. James went outside to secure the perimeter. A short, chain-link fence bordered the house, so he tied a number of bells to it, bells he found in the couple’s Christmas storage that sat in boxes in the garage.
“Okay, a few ground rules since we’re going to be here for a while,” James announced once they had all picked out their rooms and had gotten time to catch their breath.
“Rule number one: Do not ever leave without letting the rest of us know. We want to shoot demons, not civilians, and if you are missing and come back to us unannounced, you may accidentally catch a bullet from a friendly.
“Rule number two: No fighting. We need to get along; we are like a little family in this thing. Any beefs we talk them out, and if you need to consult someone else about me, or whomever… talk to that someone. I’m serious.
“Last rule: We need full transparency with food and supplies. If we’re running short on something, speak up. There’s a whole city over there that we can go scavenge if we need it.”
Everyone agreed to James’s rules and set about doing their own thing. Tracy started to tidy up the place, and Alysia took to the backyard with her sword, practicing old katas that she hadn’t done since her childhood. Jaime flipped on the television and put on a movie, a classic action film where zombies were swarming a city.
“You’re such a sucker for irony, aren’t you?” Tracy said to him, and he nodded with a big smile on his face. “Well, you enjoy your terrible movie. I would so take zombies over the monsters we’re dealing with.”
~ * ~ * ~
It was late afternoon on a Saturday; the clouds were few, and the sun was out in all its glory. The irony of a beautiful day during such a dark hour was not lost on the inhabitants of the junkers’ home, but it lifted the moods and Alysia decided that she and Jaime should go scavenging. James turned down his daughter’s offer to join them on their hike; he had made himself busy, looking at the engine of one of the old vehicles that sat in the yard.
“What you doing?” Tracy said to him as she walked up to the car. He was bent over, looking inside the hood, and didn’t hear her come up on him.
“Damn woman, you’re gonna get yourself shot messing around like that,” he whined to her, a bit annoyed, and she stuck her tongue out at him playfully.
She was wearing some overalls she had found inside the house, and the sun shone on her exposed skin, revealing her muscular arms and shoulders, along with a number of scars that crisscrossed all over them. She was barefooted and her hair was up, and he wondered why she was so comfortable.
“Where are the kids?” she asked, and he lifted his head to point with his chin as he always did.
“Gone scavenging,” he said.
“Do you think those two are—” she began.
“Oh, hell no,” he said to her. “Don’t you even say it. He’s not her type, I’ll tell you that, and he ain’t confident enough to try it either way.” He was about to say more when Tracy walked up really close to him and put her hand on his arm. He tilted his head and looked at her with a question mirrored across his face. She bit her lip, looked off to the side, and then shrugged her shoulders ever so slightly.
It was obvious what she wanted, and numerous things ran through his head: his protective daughter and this beautiful woman he had been trying to keep out of his mind since the day he met her. His physical urges made it hard, and he placed his large hands on her hips and brought her in for a kiss. Their lips touched and time froze in that sudden “finally” gust of surrender that comes when lovers that have held out from one another finally meet.
Tracy parted those lips to allow their kiss to deepen, and he took her in as if his life depended on it. She tasted like silvery strawberries with a hint of almonds, and as their tongues touched and their hands roamed the mountains and valleys of sinew and flesh, they both silently begged fate to let them be; let them have the time to realize the things they had always wanted since that first bike ride they’d shared together.
It was a beautiful, dirty, and lengthy union between them, and as the sun dimmed a bit from a sole grey cloud, they found themselves on the grass in front of the car, wrapped in each other’s arms and afraid to utter a word out of fear they would wake up from their beautiful dream.
“What do we tell, Alysia?” Tracy finally said as she felt James’s large bicep flex beneath her head. She rolled into him to be more comfortable and propped herself up on her arm to look at him.
“I’ll tell her in time, Trace. Don’t worry about it.”
“You think she’s gonna be mad? Well, I know she will be, at me … but she loves you; you’re like her life. I think she will hate me for … I don’t know. I just don’t want there to be any problems between us. And I don’t want this to be our only time.”
James took her head with his hand and gently brought her in to kiss her. He let it linger for a bit before they separated and then he simply answered. “It won’t.”
When they had grown tired of lying in the tall grass, Tracy retreated into the house and James went back to working on the car’s engine. He noticed that the world felt different to him now that he had been with her, and where he had once only cared about his daughter’s wellbeing, he was now looking into a future where Tracy was always by his side.
Why don’t I feel guilty? he wondered as he worked, thinking he should be consumed with the memory of his wife. He didn’t feel anything but the light-headedness of a man in love, and while he wanted to be upset about it, he could do nothing but focus on what had happened.
A few hours later Alysia and Jaime returned, toting a large bag of supplies they had looted from the neighboring homes.
“See any action out there?” James said to them when they came through the gate and saw him.
“Just a kreple w
ith an attitude,” Jaime said, and James looked at his daughter, trying to read in her silence if she had noticed what had happened in her absence.
“Yeah, he was a feisty one,” she said, and then dropped the sack near the car. “How are the repairs coming along, Dad?” she asked, and he saw her look down at the depression in the grass and then glance back at the house.
“To be honest, I can’t tell you,” he said. “Everything is right where it needs to be, and it really isn’t that old. I’m just trying to pick up where the old man left off and see if I can get us some wheels to get us to the coast.”
She smiled at him and slapped him on the back before picking up the sack and walking back to the house. Jaime followed behind her, but when he turned around and winked at James, he knew something had given him away. James looked around to see what it could have been and when he glanced down at the area near his feet, he saw that Tracy had left something behind when she hurriedly dressed to go back inside.
The embarrassment was too much to take, and James feigned working on the car for another hour before picking up Tracy’s forgotten item and placing it in his pocket. He went inside and Tracy was in the kitchen making a sandwich. He could hear music coming from the garage and Alysia had her bedroom door closed, so he quickly crossed the threshold towards the kitchen.
“What are they up to?” he asked when Tracy noticed him walking towards her.
“CeeCee is taking a shower and Jaime found a carton of cigarettes so he’s in the garage listening to music and doing damage to his lungs. Did you see what they found?” Tracy said to him, and she looked genuinely happy as she held up a bag of fresh Granny Smith apples.
“That’s one helluva haul,” he said with a grin. “But it’s probably nothing compared to this,” he said and he handed her a silky undergarment. She quickly tucked it away and stared at him with her eyes large and her face turning red. She smacked him hard on the chest and then scurried away into the master bedroom. He picked up the sandwich she was making, and then shook his head at the entire situation. If Alysia knew and wasn’t saying anything, why bother to hide it from her? he thought.