It all happened in the blink of an eye. Jerry didn’t have time to think, he just took aim and pulled the trigger. Time seemed to freeze, and then suddenly a hole appeared in the would be executioner’s face, blooming like a black hole in the space where his nose had been. The bullet bounced around inside his head, scrambling what few brains he had, before exiting the rear side of his head. Blood misted the air, while chunks of bone and brain matter rained down on the ground.
The body hit the floor, and just before everything sped back up again, Jerry saw the hidden figure emerge. He held a pistol aimed at the group. Squeezing off another shot, Jerry winged the man on his shoulder, causing him to drop the gun. Fire was returned by the second fat man and the group from inside the cars.
Jerry ducked down, moved to the next window, and fired a sustained burst at the cars, not hitting anybody, but doing enough to scatter the group, including the young woman who had been with them. He could make out that her hands were tied and her face looked a bruised mess. He wanted to yell at her to run, to try to escape, but there was no time. Looking back at his group, he saw them jump to their knees and charge down their captors. Maddie took out the second fat man, throwing a swift jab into his throat, before an elbow split open his eyebrow, painting his face a dark crimson. A shot to his nuts brought the man to his knees. Another gunshot cracked out. Maddie turned, giving her foe the chance he needed to half run, half stumble, out of the way, his top-heavy physique barreling him forward while preventing him from achieving a full vertical base.
Maddie disappeared from view, along with Lou and Benny. Cursing, but sure the three of them could handle themselves, Jerry retrained his rifle on the cars. The young girl had indeed tried to run but was being hauled back to the car by her hair. Checking his sights, Jerry did not have the angle to make the shot as they disappeared behind the panel van.
All three vehicles started up, and while a burst from his rifle peppered the panel siding with holes, he did little to halt their escape.
The cars sped away, the panel van side door opening further down the street, to allow a shorter, bulky-looking man the chance to leap in.
Jerry reasoned he was the owner of the unidentified voice, which meant one man remained from his initial count, not including the fat fuck who was bleeding out all over the lawn.
Hurrying back downstairs, Jerry found himself unusually worried about Maddie. He knew he shouldn’t have been so afraid, for Maddie was probably tougher than all of them. As he got downstairs, the group was manhandling the young man unfortunate enough to be left behind.
Unlike the rest of his crew, he was a gangly, weak man who lacked the intestinal fortitude to play the role of villain, even in the new world. This was further evidenced by the stream of vomit that covered the front of his shirt. His stomach unable to accept the facts he had witnessed, and the combined knowledge of the role he played in it.
“Listen, son,” Lou began, as Benny and Maddie stood beside their captive, holding him in place. “Your buddy out there is bleeding all over the place, and the rest left you. They abandoned you. That’s how little you mean to them. You don’t leave a team member behind.”
On the chair, the man, who Jerry, on closer inspection noticed was really not much more than a kid, squirmed and tried not to cry.
“You can’t kill me. The New Outlaws will be back, and they will have an army with them.” His words were tough, but the break and squeak in his voice told more about his fear than his bravado.
“Well, you got balls, kid. Shame you’re never going to get to use them.” Lou lowered his hand to his gun, and the kid screamed, pissing himself at the same time.
“Oh, Jesus Christ, would you look at that. He made a mess on the fucking floor. Ugh.” Lou sighed in an over-exaggerated motion. “What’s your name, son?”
“Lucas,” the kid replied, sniveling.
“Well, I’ll tell you what, Lucas.” Lou crouched down as he spoke. “You tell me where your buddies are, and I’ll let you live long enough to get your dick wet with something other than the grease of your own palm. What do you say?”
“I can’t give them up. They saved my life,” Luas answered, coughing and sniffing.
“That may be, but they also sacrificed it at the first sign of trouble. So what’s it going to be? Will you help us, or do I turn your face inside out and leave you for the bugs?” The anger in Lou’s voice had Jerry believing that their lieutenant actually would pull the trigger.
“I can’t,” Lucas wept.
“It’s all right, Lucas, you tell us where they went, and we will take care of the rest. You can disappear in the other direction, and nobody will be any the wiser.” Lou’s tone changed now that he had Lucas on the ropes.
“They … they have a place, like a farm or something, a few miles from here. It’s off the highway, down some dirt road. They never shared the address with me, and I’m not from around here.” Lucas’ voice steadied. Whether it was because he believed that Lou would ensure his safety, or because he had accepted death as the ultimate inevitable, he couldn’t say.
“Thank you, Lucas, you made the right choice here.” Lou rose from the squat he had fallen into and clapped a hand on the kid’s shoulder.
“You can have the house if you want, we were done with it anyway. Hit the road when you are ready and don’t look back,” Lou said as both Benny and Maddie walked away.
As expected, Lucas didn’t move. He remained sitting the entire time, weeping and muttering to himself as they loaded up their van with the rest of the supplies from the basement store. Even as they drove away, they saw his shadow still sitting in the same chair, as if they had forgotten to untie him.
With the four of them, their weapons, and all the supplies, the luxury edition minivan seemed a lot smaller than it was. They pulled away from the house, driving out of the warren of suburban life, and onto the main road into the city. In that time, nobody spoke. It was only when Benny pulled the vehicle over to the side and slammed his arm into the side of the door, releasing a pent-up roar of animalistic brutality that the silence was broken.
“What are we going to do, LT?” Maddie asked, looking at Lou.
Lou turned in his seat and looked at what remained of his team. “Any luck getting the base on the radio?” he asked, looking at Benny, acting as if he nothing was wrong.
“No, there’s no answer. The channel is open, but if anybody can hear us, they’re not answering.” Benny calmed his rage, and his words sounded, all things considered, to be calm and serene.
“We have a job to do. We were sent here to scout out survivors, check out the cities.” Lou paused for a moment, focusing himself. “The way I see it, we found some survivors already. It’s only fair that we go pay them a visit.”
It took a second for the words to sink through the fog-like haze that had wrapped itself around the group.
“Fuck yeah,” Benny spoke, as soon as the penny dropped.
“Just drop in and see how they are coping, it’s the right thing to do,” Maddie offered, her eyes glinting with the wind of the devil behind them. She turned her head and looked at Jerry, smiling.
“I agree, I mean there could be all kinds of crazy folk out there. We need to make sure they are safe.” Jerry grinned.
“That settles it then,” Lou spoke. “We have new orders. Benny, you remember those directions?”
“Like they were tattooed on my eyelids, Lieutenant,” Benny answered.
“Great, then we head that way. But we are not rushing in all gung-ho. We do this properly. We recon first, check them out, see what they are doing. Who knows how many they have at this compound. We are doing this for Sanjay, but that doesn’t mean we lose our heads.” Lou stared at each of them in turn.
He knew all too well how the red mist could descend and dislodge all concepts of reason and consequence. They had to be smart, because Lou understood, that even though those asshats were crazy, they had been right about one very simple thing. “The world isn’t h
ow it used to be. We don’t know what lies down the road, or around the next bend. We are a team, and we will function that way until the end. Got it?”
“Yes, sir,” the three of them answered in unison.
They pulled away from the curb and drove back through the empty suburban homes. The dead were scattered around the gardens, wandering aimlessly, but they had lost interest in taking potshots from the passenger seat.
Maddie watched the houses go by, her mind a whirling storm of thoughts and emotions. She saw the dead inside their homes, staring out of the window, as if some part of their brains still remembered, or longed for better days. For a moment, she felt sad for them. The dead didn’t ask for this. Nobody did. But that did not change the fact that they were killers and needed to be stopped.
Beside her, Jerry sat staring out of his window. His eyes scanned the wandering zeds, still unable to get his head around the beginning of it all. Nobody seemed to know where it started, or what had caused it. They simply went to bed one night and when the morning broke, so rose the dead.
He stared in cold fascination as they drove past an expansive garden, where a ride-on lawn mower stood abandoned. Protruding from beneath it, was a dead man, his legs hidden by the machine, but the splatter of blood and meat over the neatly maintained lawn told Jerry all he needed to know.
How many people were gone? He had no idea, but judging by what they had seen so far, there were not that many folks left around. He hoped he was wrong. They had not been inside many real metropolitan areas. He hoped, beyond all reason, that people had found a way to escape the new world.
People like Mark Cavanaugh, his oldest friend, pre-dating his military career by almost a full decade. Mark was a good, decent, hardworking guy, who had no luck with women. When he finally found Mrs. Right, he married her within months, and quickly expanded his family with two children. Then tragedy struck, and his wife, Denise, died suddenly in her sleep. She wasn’t sick, she didn’t smoke, but her body just gave up one night.
The idea of Mark being dead didn’t sit with Jerry.
What about his kids? he thought, before answering himself just as quickly.
Shut up. Don’t start thinking like that.
Shaking his head, Jerry was glad to leave the suburbs behind. Looking over at Maddie, he smiled. Whatever was going on between them, he liked and wanted more. Not just the sex, while that had been amazing thus far, it was something deeper; a connection they shared. He wanted to explore it more, but at the same time, understood that the timing sucked, and something as complicated as a relationship needed far more consideration now than ever before.
Chapter Eight
Climbing down from the factory roof had been easy until they realized that the bottom section of the ladder had been torn away. Somebody had clearly made the attempt to stop the zeds from climbing after them. A feat that nobody had seen the dead achieve, and which everybody believed to be impossible.
“That has to be at least ten feet,” Samantha said, as she peered down over Dwayne’s back.
“Yeah, but I don’t think it’s as bad as we think,” he answered, as he continued to climb down.
His feet left the ladder, and with body strength alone, he descended, moving one rung at a time.
At six feet two inches tall, by the time Dwayne reached the bottom rung and allowed his arms to extend, he only had a marginal distance still to fall before he touched the ground. Dropping down, he landed and immediately moved to check that there were no zeds lying in wait, or trapped, ready to catch anybody unsuspecting.
“It’s all clear,” he spoke, keeping his voice as quiet as possible, for fear of alerting anything nearby as to their presence.
Samantha followed Dwayne’s lead and nimbly made her way down, the muscles sprouting from her normally slender forearms.
Dropping down to the floor, the distance a good foot further for her, she landed gracefully and silently, moving straight into a crouch. She looked up at Dwayne and smiled. “That was fun.”
One by one, the others made it down. Jared and Ian came next, with Abby moving behind. Her pace was slow and robotic. She stared ahead, not looking down, moving after the others, like a machine on a pre-programmed setting.
It was as though she didn’t notice the loss of support for her legs as she climbed, nor the drop that came when she ran out of ladder. Landing hard, Abby bent her knees to absorb some of the impact, but not enough to stop what must have been a jarring impact otherwise. The pain registered on her face, but it soon fell away, replaced again by the neutral, expressionless look.
Dwayne shuddered. There was something about the blankness of her stare. It made her look hollow on the inside, and more like the dead they were trying to avoid, than one of them.
Julie came down behind Abby, and the moment she touched the ground, she sought her out and pulled her close. Julie had taken charge of Abby’s wellbeing, and nobody was going to hang around and argue the point.
Jared had pointed out the best choices for transport, and while the dead appeared to have been taken care of, there was no way of knowing for sure that more were not lurking close by.
“Hurry up,” Dwayne called up to Ronnie and Jack who were moving down the ladder.
“Pump your brakes, dude,” Ronnie said, as he climbed down the final few rungs, even hanging on one hand for a second, showing off for the group.
“Yeah, very good, you’re a regular chimpanzee,” Dwayne laughed, clapping Ronnie on the back once he landed on the ground.
“Just leaves you, big man,” Dwayne called up to Jack.
He had also fallen silent since Kate’s abduction. Nobody understood the nature of their friendships, but it was clear that the three shared a bond and deeper connection than the rest of them.
“You can do it,” Julie called up to Jack, taking the place of both Abby and Kate as his cheerleader.
“Yeah, come on, buddy, you got this,” Ronnie spoke up, appearing beneath the ladder, watching Jack move down. “Just take your feet off, hang a second and drop. It’s not that far.”
Julie turned her head to look at Ronnie, who smiled at her. “Hey, I’m not always an asshole,” he said, with a wink.
Leah moved beside Ronnie, putting her arm around him. She kissed his cheek and whispered something to him. From the look on her face, Julie assumed it to have something to do with dropping his macho image and being the nice guy she knew him to be.
Julie never understood why guys needed that outer shell. Women were bitchy, sure, but at least you knew if someone didn’t like you, or was a stuck-up bitch by default. Guys made it so freaking hard to tell.
Jack’s feet left the ladder. He caught his body weight for a second and looked down. He stared at the ground but was more concerned with the three dead men that were approaching them all.
“Guys,” he said, struggling to hold himself and speak at the same time.
“You’ve got it, dude. The hard part is done,” Ronnie called again.
“Behind you,” Jack managed to squeeze the words out before he dropped to the ground.
The impact was hard, but he crouched down to absorb as much as he could. Ronnie’s hand appeared to help him back to his feet. “Nice one, bro,” Ronnie said, clapping him on the back.
“Thanks,” Jack answered, a little confused, but not objecting to the new niceties.
“There are zeds coming,” Jack spoke, just as he heard Jared grunt.
“Yeah, our resident psycho is on the case.” Ronnie pointed over his shoulder, where Jared was pulling his knife from the first post-human’s skull and moving on to the second.
Dwayne moved in also, coming around from the side, swinging a lump of wood that he had ripped from a nearby pallet.
The weapon cleaved a hole in the side of the dead man’s head, and while thick black pus leaked from the wound, it did not stop its advance. Another strike broke the wood and sent the creature to the floor. Dropping down, Dwayne raised the wood and struck downward. He missed the t
arget as the dead man was far stronger than he looked and almost managed to buck Dwayne off completely. The wooden shard pierced the zed’s chest, with a wet rip, much to the creature’s annoyance.
Jared was on hand to catch the creature on the side of the head, shattering its jaw, before he dropped to one knee and drove his blade through the dead man’s temple, ending its suffering once and for all.
“Dude, they’re not fucking vampires, you don’t need to stake them,” Jared said, forcing a joke.
“Sorry, he moved,” Dwayne answered back, getting to his feet.
“Sure thing, Buffy,” Jared replied, wiping his blade on the dead man’s shirt. Dwayne did the same to his hands, trying to wipe away the foul-smelling zed juices.
“Is everybody here?” Dwayne asked, looking around the gathered audience.
“All present and accounted for, Chief,” Samantha answered, with a flirty smile and a devilish glint in her eyes.
“I say we take two cars, that way if anything happens to one, the others can get away, or we pile in together and make a break for it. Try to take something hardwearing, and with a full tank. I have no idea if the fuel stations are still working, and I’m keen to get as far away from things as we possibly can before we have to change up again.” Dwayne had moved into the leadership role without a hitch, and as he gave the orders, he understood the pressure that was suddenly on his shoulders. Their lives were in his hands, so long as he was calling the shots.
Suddenly, the world seemed that much more aggressive. Danger lay everywhere, not just behind the snarling teeth of the post-human apocalypse, but in the heads of the other survivors. Everybody was a threat, and they could not afford to think differently. Every first contact needed to assume the worst because he would be damned if another one of their group would die because of his actions, or lack of them.
The parking lot out the front of the factory had several options, and after quick discussion they chose a Grand Cherokee and a large Chrysler; partly because of the size, but also due to the fact they both had keys, a full tank of gas and, most importantly, they were automatics, because nobody in the group knew how to drive a stick.
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