by R. J. Spears
There was a click, and that was it. The connection was gone. Russell pressed the talk button and called out to Del three times, but he knew there was no use.
“What are we going to do?” Madison asked, her voice full of concern for the others.
Russell didn’t know. That cautious voice inside him wasn’t quiet but screamed at him to run. Your friends are lost. There is no saving them. Save yourself.
He didn’t want to listen to it, but then it said, save the girl.
Now, that was a more convincing argument, he thought.
Chapter 49
Roadside Chat
“Come on, arms, move!” My mind shouted, and they did respond a little but not enough to roll me out of my face-down position.
This wasn’t uncommon after one of my visions. I sometimes came out of them as weak as a kitten. It took a while for my body to adjust itself to the harshness of reality. Things like gravity, breathing, and approaching zombies.
The two town greeters had made their way onto the roadway, shambling away and making steady progress toward me. They seemed a little spryer than most, but it could have been awhile since walking and talking food had come to town, and that made them a little more eager to get to the buffet of Joel.
To the victor go the spoils, and I was the spoils in this case. A warm and juicy human just lying beside the road, waiting to be eaten. In my current state, I wouldn’t even be much of a fight. Not that it mattered to the zombies. Fight or not, they just wanted a bite of me.
I closed my eyes and willed my limbs to move, sending positive mental energy throughout my body. Had I been into yoga, I might have repeated an uplifting mantra several times.
After twenty seconds of this, I opened my eyes and shoved against the ground. Or, better put, tried to shove off the ground. Instead, I tilted a little and then collapsed back down into the gravel. It was as if all systems had gone off-line, and it was going to be that way until someone sent a team to fix it. In my mind’s eye, I envisioned a person pressing a button on their phone and hearing a voice that said, “If you want to talk to maintenance, press 1. If you want to talk to customer assistance, press 2. If you want to…”
This went on for a bit, and it wasn’t helping. Those zombies were on their way, and I was completely defenseless.
This impending ending seemed all so anticlimactic.
Why did God just send me a vision when I was going to be dead in mere seconds? Wasn’t He all-knowing and all-seeing?
And why waste a vision call on me when I was getting ready to be zombie food? Why not spend those long distance minutes on someone who counted?
Fred and Ethel crossed the center line. That’s what I had named them since I couldn’t do anything else. And calling them zombie one and zombie two was so impersonal. If they were going to eat me, then they might as well have names. Right?
Fred was a broad-shouldered stout man in what used to be a spiffy three-piece suit, but all that eating people and living among the dead had done a number that no dry cleaner was ever going to be able to fix. Ethel, on the other hand, was much more casual in a tracksuit. It was worse for the wear, too, with large hunks missing, exposing gray and mottled skin. They didn’t look that great, but, to their credit, they still had all their teeth.
The better to eat you with, some morbid voice said in the back of my mind.
I tried one last push, and this time, I had enough strength to tilt my body up onto my side, allowing me to face them. I’m not sure if that was preferable. It gave me a straight on view of them, albeit turned ninety degrees, but who really wants to watch death coming at them? Then again, I didn’t want to close my eyes.
What I did know was that I wasn’t going to make it easy on them. My body might, in its listless state, but my mind was ready to fight.
I focused all my energy on my right hand and willed it to move. And it did, but only a little. It scrambled into my pants pockets were I had a Swiss Army knife I had picked up while ransacking houses looking for drugs for Kara. The mere act of pushing my hand into my pocket was a Herculean effort. Sweat popped out on my forehead from the exertion and started to drain into my eyes. Great, now they were really stinging. Not it mattered. Once the zombies got to me, a little stinging sensation in my eyes was the least of my worries.
Grunting from the effort, my hand pushed into my pocket and grasped onto the knife. A small bit of strength pulsed into my hand, and I took some encouragement from that.
Fred and Ethel were at the side of the road by then, only a few feet away. If I was going to do something to defend myself, then it had to be right then.
I concentrated so hard that I swear my head might crack open at any second. With a giant tug, I pulled my hand free from my pocket, and once it got past the threshold of the fabric of the pocket, the knife popped free of my hand and spilled onto the gravel.
I desperately clutched at it, but my hand felt like it was really a mitten-shaped club and pushed it out of reach.
Fred and Ethel’s feet were in the gravel, and I decided to close my eyes and brace myself for those first bites. I wasn’t able to move, but I certainly felt every piece of flesh on my body tingling, not knowing where these undead assholes were going to sink their teeth.
This was really going to suck.
That’s when I heard the first gunshot. It had come from behind me. From persons unknown.
When I flapped my eyes open, I saw Fred splayed out on the pavement, most of his head and brains splashed across the roadway. Another shot sounded, and Ethel’s head exploded, and she went down like a bag of concrete.
Neither of the zombies moved again, but that left me on my side facing away from my rescuer. I decided to walk in the sunshine and call them my savior, but it could just as well have been Kilgore, who wanted to keep me alive long enough to find out where Jason was.
In reflection, if that was the case, I’m not so sure that the zombies weren’t the better option.
I made one more attempt at moving but came up empty again.
Footsteps came at me from behind, and I couldn’t do anything but wait for them. The sound of feet on gravel sounded behind me, and the next thing I felt was a hand grab my arm and flip me over onto my back.
“Joel, what are you doing just lying there?” Brother Ed said, partially in astonishment and partially in frustration.
I moved my mouth, but the only things that came out were raspy croaks.
“You had another vision?” he asked, as he bent down at the knees and leaned over me.
Not being able to nod, I just blinked at him.
He let out a big sigh and said, “Kara made me come back to town to check on you. If it had just been me, I would be headed north. Sometimes I don’t know what that girl sees in you.” He paused for a moment, staring southward.
“Did you find Brent?”
Since I couldn’t speak, I tried to shake my head and succeeded. That was progress.
“I figure you didn’t find him alive.”
I closed my eyes and shook my head. I could communicate with nods and shakes. Hallelujah.
He didn’t say anything, but I saw an intense sadness pass over his face. He nodded, and his expression changed to his de facto set - resolute and dour.
“Linda wouldn’t come with you, would she?” he asked.
I tried to talk but had nothing. So, I shook my head again. This was getting old.
“I didn’t think so. She wouldn’t come with us neither.”
Again, he paused and looked southward again.
“I’m sure nothing but trouble is coming from that direction, so we need to get you up and headed off with me.” He stopped and slung his rifle over his shoulder and then said, “I need to get the truck. It’s off in among the corn plants. Don’t you go anywhere?”
He chuckled a little, and I think that was the first joke I had ever heard Brother Ed make. Would miracles never cease?
Chapter 50
Dark Maneuvers
Oh
shit, oh shit, oh shit, Del thought.
They were boxing him in, and he saw no way out of it. The rumble of the MAV drifted his way through the trees. When he gophered up like a periscope, he could see the soldiers in the woods starting to narrow down their focus to where he was hiding. He had snuggled himself up to the root ball of a downed, extra-large sycamore tree, leaving him three to four feet below ground level. It was a tight fit, and he was somewhat hidden from view, but he knew if the soldiers came with lights or waited him out until dawn, he was cooked.
His choices were to hunker down and hope they passed by him or to stand up and fight his way out. Neither were appealing, and neither seemed like good bets.
His interim decision was to wait and see what happened in the next five minutes, then he would make a decision. He knew he was just punting off the inevitable, but after the night had gone south, he conceded that waiting five more minutes wouldn’t kill him. Or it would, and that would be that.
For some, sitting and waiting for an eventual death might be terrifying, but Del found peace with it, as a sense of resignation came over him. He figured, if they came on him, he’d put up a hell of a fight and maybe give Jo a chance. He could live with that.
So, he waited and listened. The MAV seemed to stop, the steady low growl of its engine sounding in the distance. He figured it had come to the edge of the tree line and stopped there with nowhere to go. The trees were too tightly packed to allow it to get too far into the woods. Del took some small consolation in that. At least his body wouldn’t be torn apart by .30 caliber bullets.
The nearly inaudible chatter of a walkie-talkie or some type of communication device filtered his way, but he couldn’t make out any of what was being said. These sounds came from some distance away. He decided that the soldiers in the woods searching for him were smart enough to leave off any type of communication device, so it must be their commanders monitoring the progress at the MAV.
A twig snapped off to his right, and his body tensed up as he tried to spy upwards out of his hidey hole. He pressed his back into the uneven mud and dirt of the root ball of the tree. Roots jabbed him in the back, but he shook off the pain. He brought the aim of his rifle up to the opening. He waited, listening more intently than he had ever done in his life. Crickets chirped and frogs croaked along with the other nocturnal creatures droning away.
A dull slapping sound came from the direction of the twig snap earlier, and Del swiveled his aim in that direction. He thought he heard an exhalation, like someone breathing out in disgust just a few feet away.
Del brought his senses down to focus only on sound and sight as he locked in on the narrow opening at the top of the hole. He saw only slight glimpses of the night sky and the stars above through the thick canopy of the leaves. His eyes played tricks on him as they tried to make sense of slight shifts of blackness in the shadows. More than once, he was convinced that he saw a figure move into his very targeted frame of reference. Each time, he found himself putting slightly more pressure on the trigger of his gun.
Each of these phantoms had only been conjurings of his imagination and vision. When the mind couldn’t make sense of the dark, it played tricks on you and created things you could make sense of, much like a child seeing animals in the clouds on a breezy summer day. Only these were dangerous killers, and not fluffy bunnies.
He heard another noise, a mixture of impact and a sliding noise, and a phantom appeared into view. A silhouette really. The figure looked human, but so had the other ones. He blinked twice, and the phantom remained. In fact, it stood in front of him, looking in one direction and then the other as if caught in indecision.
It came down to pulling the trigger and starting what would most likely be his final battle or to waiting the phantom out, hoping it walked on past him. He did everything he could to control his breathing, but his chest felt tight, like a wooden barrel with metal bands tightening down on it.
Something told him to wait. Maybe it was self-preservation, maybe something else, but he held his finger on the trigger, just a few P.S.I. of pressure until he fired.
A breeze swept a hole in the canopy above the forest floor and a dim beam of moonlight fell upon the figure, giving Del the only detail he needed to know he should relax his finger on the trigger. The figure was a woman.
The figure swayed back and forth, and Del could tell it was getting ready to move, so he took a chance, leaned forward and said in a sharp whisper, “Jo.”
The figure literally jumped a foot in the air and aimed its rifle in several different directions but not settling on one.
“Jo,” Del said again, only a little louder. “Down here.”
The body language coming off the figure still told of confusion, but it settled down and didn’t move. Then it leaned forward toward the root ball and asked, “Del?”
“Yes,” he whispered. “Down here.” He paused and listened for a moment, then added, “Come down here with me.”
Del watched as Jo took a tentative step into the depression that led down into the hole that he was hiding in. To get her out of view more quickly, he leaned forward and grasped her shoulder and gave her a firm, but gentle, tug toward him.
Once the momentum was started, she was on her way down, and he used his hands to position her beside him. As soon as she was settled, he practices proper gun safety and clicked on the safety on his gun.
“I’m glad you’re still alive,” she whispered, leaning in close to his ear.
“Me too,” he said.
She pushed a fist into his shoulder in a mock punch and said, “You’re supposed to tell me you’re glad that I’m still alive.”
He paused before replying, listening for any noises, then said, “Let’s move past that, shall we? What did you see out there?”
“We are pretty much surrounded,” she whispered back. “Somehow, I threaded the needle to where you were by luck.”
In the back of his mind, Del thought it might be more than luck, but he was more reserved when it came to buying into Joel’s visions or Brother Ed’s more fiery proclamations that God’s hand was at work in what they did. But this -- having Jo find him in the near pitch-black in the middle of acres of woods and not getting discovered by soldiers was stretching the odds past what would be considered natural and into the supernatural. Was it a God-thing? Maybe, but he didn’t have the headspace to consider theological or philosophical matters in that moment. He had to survive.
“What about the soldiers?” he asked.
“About that. They are everywhere. A bunch came out with the MAV, and they went toward Jones. The ones that flanked us are starting to fill in the woods behind us.”
“So, we’re getting ready to be sandwiched,” he said. “Any chance we can move laterally past them?”
“Slim to none.”
“That’s encouraging,” he said, slipping into a morose mood.
“Have you heard from Russell and Madison?” she asked.
“Yeah, but he’s in the truck on a logging road on the other side of the complex. I told him not to do anything and get out of here with the kid.”
“In his state and with all these soldiers, there’s nothing he can do.”
“So, that leaves us screwed,” he said.
“What are our options?” she asked.
He quickly spelled out his thoughts, which distilled down to holding their position and hoping not to be discovered or shooting their way out. Neither showed much promise to Jo. She knew they had little chance of making it out of the woods alive, but she didn’t want to go down without a fight.
“I’m against waiting,” she said. “They’ll find us and do it with enough men to take us out. If we shoot our way out and make a run for it, we have a chance. Not much of one but a chance.”
“When do you want to make our move?” he asked.
“There’s no time like the present,” she said.
He sighed deeply then said, “Well, okay. Give me a minute to say my final prayers.”
Russell worked to silence the cautious voice inside his head. The one that said he should run and live to fight another day. It spoke to him in the most rational tones, calming him, but he knew it was a liar. Inaction had trapped him in that house on the hill back in town, leaving him alone and isolated.
But alive, the voice said. Look where action got you, it said. You can barely walk and see straight.
But was I really alive up on that hill? He asked himself.
It was a bottom-feeder existence at best. He survived, and while that was good, the bar was set pretty low. Being with all the people at the Manor had brought him back to life and made him human again. But could he risk his life for them? Then again, what kind of life did he have? He was barely half a human. He couldn’t walk straight and saw double most of the time. Back in the old world, that might have gotten him by, but in a world full of the undead and even more ruthless humans, it would get him dead. And it made him a liability to the others if he did survive.
A line from some movie echoed out of the past inside his head, “Better to live on your feet than to die on your knees.” For whatever that was worth. All he knew was the Del and Jo were out there risking their lives, while he let the voice of caution paralyze him.
Madison fidgeted in the seat beside him, and he could easily tell that she was anxious to do something. Too bad he wouldn’t let her.
“Madison, we need to do something,” he said. “Create some sort of distraction.”
Her body language told him that she was more than willing to act, and this increased his resolve. If a thirteen-year-old girl was ready to risk her life, then certainly he could.
“What’s the plan?” she asked.
“First, I need you to get some extra ammo out of the back of the truck.”