“What is that?” he asked Molly, who took his side as though waiting for him to reach some realization.
“Those are the drivers licenses of everyone the Wardens killed or let die.”
Metzger tried mentally assessing a rough estimate, seeing more than three dozen licenses easily lining the wall. A single month had passed, a single month, and these evil fuckers had snuffed out that many human lives needlessly to protect themselves and hold out in their makeshift fortress.
“Bastards,” he muttered, shaking his head. “Which one of those pricks was the ringleader? Please tell me he’s already dead.”
“We’re still trying to sort that out,” Molly answered. “I already found my loved one on that back wall, but I’m trying to get answers for the others.”
Metzger admired her restraint, looking behind him to see people from all of the groups finding one another in the hallway, embracing with joy. He wanted that for everyone, including himself when he reached Virginia, but as his gaze returned to the back wall he knew some people were destined for heartache very soon.
Unable to help himself, Metzger walked to the back wall, wanting to study the faces of the men and women who were needlessly sacrificed. He couldn’t help but wonder if children were murdered or left to die as well, having no memorial because they weren’t old enough to ever drive. Of course this was no memorial he stared at, knowing it was more like a trophy case in the eyes of the people who created it.
“Oh my,” Luke said as he and Albert laid eyes on the everyday normal people pictured on the dozens of licenses. “That could’ve been us.”
Metzger studied each of the faces, unable to help wondering what they did in their normal lives before they spent every day scrambling to survive, only to succumb to a group that treated them as disposable slaves. He wondered if these were the same people who knocked him off his bike, and if they planned to use him for labor or simply kill him for his goods.
Examining each of them individually quickly became too painful, so he looked at the pictures in a more general sense, trying to honor the people he wished he could have saved. It wasn’t until he reached the middle of the licenses toward the right side of the board that he stopped and stared, feeling numbness overtake his body when he saw a familiar face.
And then a second face he knew and loved.
He remembered visiting Donald and Connie Metzger in August, just before the school year started for him in the Cincinnati area. Spending a week back home, he visited old friends, drank at a few familiar bars, attended a local Triple-A baseball game, and returned home, feeling certain he would see them again soon.
Now he stared at their state issued licenses where they both provided the same neutral stares that practically everyone did for passports and licenses. He gave an audible gasp that turned into a groan, unsure of what to think or believe. Falling to his knees and giving up on life sounded like a perfectly viable option for a few fleeting seconds, but in the back of his mind the montage might have contained some mistakes. Perhaps, just perhaps, not everyone on the wall was already dead. Maybe they were held somewhere awaiting execution, or Molly made a grievous error when she assumed what the licenses meant.
“What’s wrong?” Albert asked before his eyes fell to the exact same spot Metzger found.
He asked nothing more, immediately understanding the find, what it meant, and how devastated Metzger suddenly felt.
Needing certainty, but hoping for a miracle, Metzger darted past the laboratory tables into the hall to find a few of the freed prisoners, asking them who’d been there the longest.
“Amy has been here since the beginning,” one of them answered. “They made her do a lot of their cooking.”
“Where is she?”
They pointed just behind Metzger to a woman in her thirties who appeared ever so slightly better off than most of the prisoners because she hadn’t been subjected to the outside labor quite as often.
“Can you help me with something?” he asked as he ran over to her, catching her by surprise, unable to mask the desperation in his eyes.
“Sure,” she answered. “What do you need?”
Metzger barely heard voices asking what was going on, or Albert explaining to a confused Molly what they had just spotted on the wall as he led the girl by the hand through the former science lab.
“You’ve been here since the beginning?” Metzger asked as they weaved through the tables to the back.
“Nearly. What’s the matter?”
When he reached the back of the room he felt a little vomit reach his throat from trepidation of the truth about to strike him.
“These people,” he said, pointing to the licenses of his parents. “What happened to them?”
Amy looked down to the stained tile floor without a word, immediately realizing exactly what he asked of her.
“Oh my God, I didn’t even know his last name,” Metzger heard Molly whisper to Albert as he realized everyone else was leaving the room.
Suddenly he felt all alone in the room with poor Amy, who carried the burden of seeing so many people needlessly die in a month’s time. Even worse, Metzger felt alone in the world again, experiencing the crushing realization that his parents were no longer among the living. He felt content to think, even hope that they made it to safety and only the complete lack of communication kept them from reaching him or his brother.
Amy helped Metzger sit down on the floor before his knees completely gave out on him, sitting Indian style across from him. She waited a few seconds as the door to the room audibly closed, giving them complete privacy.
“Are they your parents?” she asked.
Metzger nodded, creating a few seconds of awkward silence between them.
“They were brought here a few days after I arrived,” she began. “We didn’t get to talk very much, but your mother told me she was on the phone with her son when three men barged into their home and took them away. She thought they had spotted your father when he was scouting the railroad yard, hoping to get them out of town safely that way.”
Never suspecting that hearing the truth might hurt so much, Metzger found the details matching his timeline perfectly, feeling numb because he wanted to block his mind from reaching the end of the story.
“From the beginning your parents fought these people,” Amy said, trying to be compassionate, though each loss obviously took a toll on her psyche. “They wouldn’t cooperate with the Wardens, and your father started formulating plans to escape this place and overtake them. I think they got word of this, so they worked him harder and kept an eye on him all the time.”
“How did they die?” Metzger asked, not sure he wanted to hear every single detail just yet.
Part of him just wanted the horrible ordeal over with so he could begin to process life without the people who raised him.
“Towards the end they threatened Connie to get Donald to comply,” Amy said slowly. “They thought that would keep your father in line.”
“But it didn’t,” Metzger said, knowing the strong will of his parents, particularly his father.
“No. It didn’t.”
She looked away, almost vacantly at a wall before gathering the courage to continue with the story.
“We all knew that life in here was no life at all, which is why the Wardens’ plan could never ultimately work. There was no light at the end of the tunnel for us that contained food and safety, with all of us singing Kumbaya. They wanted everything to themselves, and when the time drew near for your father to attempt to overthrow them with some help, the Wardens made an example of him.”
Amy hesitated, as though indicating Metzger might want to avoid hearing the details. Metzger gave her a somber look without blinking before he nodded for her to continue.
“Your dad wanted one of the work groups to attack a guard outside and take a gun, knowing none of the guards could probably shoot everyone before they got to him. I think most everyone was onboard, but somehow the Wardens got wind of
his plan. One morning they called all of us into the gym before the work began. It was the first time I ever saw all of us, and all of them, gathered in one place at the same time.”
A tear began to form in Amy’s eyes as the images of that morning came more vividly to her after weeks of trying to suppress them.
“Your mother was in the center of the gym, tied to a chair, unable to move. The Wardens warned us that they’d heard of an uprising, and what was about to happen was a warning to the rest of us not to defy their commands.”
Metzger closed his eyes momentarily, knowing his mother meant the world to his father. Their marriage lasted almost four decades with good reason, and both of them were contemplating full retirement and enjoying the good life together. They owned a smaller home with good neighbors like Charles Garvey, took vacations in warm locations, and minded their own business. He envisioned their sanctuary being invaded, and them being stolen from an already altered, worsening life with the undead roaming free, and he saw red.
“Who leads this group?” he asked Amy. “The Wardens.”
“They all did,” she answered, “but the one named Xavier was their mouthpiece. He was the one who addressed us the day your parents died.”
Although he utterly feared knowing the details, Metzger asked his next question with hesitation.
“How exactly did they die?”
“Your mother was tied to a chair in the center of the gymnasium,” Amy answered, picking up where she left off. “The chair was chained to some metal pull tabs on the bleachers in both directions, so she couldn’t move more than a few inches in any direction. Xavier ordered some of his people to bring your father out to the center of the floor where he carefully explained that both of them were troublemakers, and to ensure none of the rest of us got any ideas in the future, he was going to make an example out of them. I think if he’d simply shot them it would’ve gotten the point across, but most of us would have considered an uprising somewhere down the road.”
Metzger hated that his father couldn’t have held out for a few more weeks and simply endured the shitty treatment the Wardens dished out. He also knew his father wasn’t one to take orders from bullies or buffoons, so the outcome played out the only way it could have, he supposed.
“Your father was bound when they dragged him out. His hands were tied behind his back, but he struggled the entire way, knowing they planned something terrible for him and Connie. Xavier ordered them to cut him loose, but as they slit the rope, Xavier drew a knife and stabbed your father in the stomach.”
Amy’s expression grew pained as she hated spilling the details, remembering one of the most painful events of her stay at the school. Being imprisoned was horrific, but seeing the one glimmer of hope brutally murdered crushed any notions of escape or a better life.
“I need to hear it,” Metzger encouraged her, just in case she wanted to skim over the gorier parts of the tale.
“Your father fell to the ground, and he didn’t die right away,” Amy said, obviously transported to the time when it happened. “He bled, and he struggled to breathe, and he even tried to attack Xavier once, but he couldn’t get to his feet. They weren’t certain if he’d turn or not once he died, so they got a syringe full of blood from some zombie and injected it into your father’s arm while they pinned him down. They wanted him to know that he would become a monster when he died, because he didn’t want to hurt innocent people, or have them see him like that.”
Amy found it difficult to suppress her sobs at this point, forced to wipe her eyes just to see past the tears. She sniffled to keep from crying outright.
“Your father fought to the very end, maybe as a way to inspire us to never give up,” she added. “And while all of this was happening, Xavier gave Donald this speech about how he brought this upon himself, and soon he was going to die. And not only was he going to die, but he was going to take Connie, and only Connie with him as he tore her apart piece by piece, when he finally turned.”
“Dear God,” Metzger muttered, knowing his father died with the knowledge that he was destined to mindlessly murder the one person who’d stayed by his side since their late teenage years.
“Xavier could have let us out of there,” Amy continued. “He could have done a lot of things, but he made all of us stay to watch your father pass away. It took about twenty minutes for him to bleed out, and Donald suffered the entire time. Your mother started crying, not for what she knew was coming, but for him. They really loved one another, didn’t they?”
Metzger nodded, fighting back tears and emotions as well.
His parents weren’t the kind of people who simply stayed together because divorce was too expensive, they wanted to keep the kids happy, or they were just set in their ways. Although they didn’t spend every waking moment together, Donald and Connie Metzger shared the same bed and made their time with one another count.
“I’m not sure I can finish,” Amy said, dipping her head into her hands, trying to remain composed despite telling a stranger the gruesome details of his parents’ demise.
Metzger felt an anger beginning to boil inside of him, unlike anything he recalled feeling since the world ended. Desperate times forced people to carry out some heinous acts, but nothing like killing a man, leaving him with the knowledge that he was going to rip the flesh from his wife and, in essence, murder her as well.
“They made you watch all of it?” he inquired, gently taking hold of her hands to pry them from her covered face.
“Yes.”
“Please continue,” he virtually pleaded. “Please.”
“It took about another hour for your father to turn,” Amy said, tears beginning to slide down her cheeks. “Your mother already knew better, but she tried to reason with him when he stood up from the floor. No one in the room said a word, and I think Connie was trying to deflect any harm from us, but she begged your father to come back to her like things were before.”
“But he was a monster now,” Metzger said quietly, envisioning his father with lifeless eyes and a gnarly scowl as he slowly stood from the gym floor, clotted blood lining his stomach from the knife wound.
“Yes,” Amy confirmed with a simple word. “Until the day I die I’ll remember the look in your mother’s eyes as he went for her throat. She went from wide-eyed surprise to a look of relief when his teeth sunk in, as though she knew they would be together. I think she was ready to escape this hell, but felt bad for leaving the rest of us behind.”
Metzger took a breath through his nose, not saying another word because he now felt a sense of closure.
“They’re buried in the football field with the others,” Amy said. “The Wardens have always burned those who turned as a precaution before burial.”
Painfully closing his eyes, Metzger shoved the pain and anger further down to the point that it was about to explode like a jack-in-the-box. The final indignity of his folks being burned like concentration camp prisoners sent him over the edge as he stood without a word, snatched up the automatic rifle, and stormed into the hallway.
By now the halls had thinned out, and no one dared speak to or approach a man walking with a purpose to the cafeteria where none of them wanted to be anyway. Most of them viewed him as the hero who rescued them, likely fine with whatever actions he took in the near future. A set of footsteps quickened behind him, and Metzger suspected that Albert, who was still talking to Molly when he departed the science lab, wanted a word with him.
“Don’t do anything rash,” Albert encouraged, obviously taking note of the rage building within Metzger as Amy’s story unfolded.
“Not the time, Albert,” Metzger warned, continuing to trudge forward without slowing.
“You’re not a murderer, Dan. Think before you do something you can’t take back.”
Now Metzger stopped to point a finger directly at the man he respected, but didn’t want advice from at the moment.
“You were here less than a day, Albert,” he said heatedly. “They k
idnapped my parents and murdered both of them. And for what? So they could live in a fucking school the rest of their lives? None of these motherfuckers deserve to live.”
At a loss for words, accepting that he wasn’t going to sway Metzger’s opinion, Albert simply sighed through his nose and stood in the center of the hallway as Metzger turned to finish what he started.
Less than a minute later Metzger reached the cafeteria, finding it completely empty as most of the prisoners never wanted to see the confining octagon again. Reaching into his pocket, he produced the key as he slowly walked toward the door, trying to find a speck of rationality in a mind consumed with wrath. He wanted to lock up the surviving Wardens within the octagon, kill one of them, and let it attack the others. A group could survive and take down one zombie, however, so he knew his ideal plan was already flawed.
He stopped at the manmade prison’s door momentarily, looking between the key in his left hand, the firearm in his right hand, and the door. The realization that the Wardens were complete monsters washed over him, causing him to rethink his earlier mercy and the following justification to Molly. He believed Amy’s account of what happened to his parents, he knew why Molly hated the group so vehemently, and Metzger knew he wasn’t going to see the people who raised him ever again.
Still, he needed to see the man locked inside the octagon to understand if the Wardens were truly evil, or brainwashed by Xavier, the mouthpiece.
When he unlocked the door and stepped inside holding the automatic rifle in front of him, he found the man smiling on the other side of the cage, thinking he’d been rescued. His look quickly soured when he saw the man responsible for putting him there standing on the other side.
“Do you recognize me?” Metzger asked, using the strap attached to the automatic weapon to sling it over his shoulder.
“Should I?” the man asked, his expression stopping just short of a sneer.
“I’m related to some of the people you brutally murdered a few weeks back,” Metzger elaborated as he undid the leather strap holding the .357 security in its holster.
The Undead Chronicles_Book 1_Home and Back Again Page 14