by Alexa Dare
Sloppy tears washed pink trails down Uncle Merv’s bloodstained cheeks.
Brody let out the breath oddly stuck in his lungs. He studied his Uncle’s wide animated face. Memorized for the umpteenth time the lines of a face of a man who lived and loved life.
He noted the way Irene’s hair wafted gold and bronze in the falling bits of straw and floating ash embers.
Light flickered from the hayloft overhead.
Brody squeaked out, “Fire.”
“Must’ve been sparks from the burning zombie so I messed up again.” Angry-faced, Abe helped to gather the bags. “You plan to let the horses pack our supplies and Junior?”
“My leg’s healing fast.” Junior braced his back against the door and scooted to stand on one foot.
“We’ll not leave them for the zombies.” Irene drew near a stall. She hummed a tune and sang a low-pitched song.
Unable to hear the lyrics, Brody clung to the melody until his eyelids drooped and he sort of swayed on his feet.
The three remaining horses calmed and allowed the group to lead them out into the barn like ponies for a guided joy ride.
Unsure of what just happened, Brody scooped up a small duffle along with Darcy Lynn. “You get any heavier, and you’ll have to tote me.”
Darcy Lynn’s gaze faltered. Somewhere along the line she stopped screaming and had gone somewhere in her head. Arms wrapped around his neck, she stared into the distance.
Where had her thoughts taken her? Was she back on the farm with her family alive and well? Or maybe she’d gone fishing and was again a happy carefree little girl who played with the wind?
Brody carried her through the yard, away from the shuffling and growling on the barn’s front side.
On foot, Abe guided one of the horses, a brown and white paint, with duffels and supplies strapped across the back and Junior wedged amongst the bags.
While, Merv led one of the other horses, a dappled gray, with Irene astride, and Hannah tugged the third, a black gelding with white feet and a blaze on its nose, with her suitcase and other bags piled on its back.
Abe wrapped a chain to bar the backdoors from the outside.
The sound of the front door breaking apart crashed.
“Let ‘em fry,” Abe stared hard at the roof.
Slashing wind whipped and stirred burning-hay smoke billowing from the loft.
The concerned, caring look Uncle Merv shared with Irene twisted a strange longing in Brody’s chest.
In a world filled with not-so-natural disasters and the walking dead, what his uncle and she shared might be something Brody would never find and might not ever get to experience for himself.
Chapter 20
At around noon, Brody cringed when Uncle Merv led a bound biker-looking zombie, wrapped in baling twine into their makeshift camp. Stomach bile buffeted the entire clearing taking the cozy campfire experience to a whole new level.
While Irene, Hannah, Junior, and Darcy Lynn fixed a quick lunch of bread and sliced turkey, Merv and Abe had hunted for a zombie for Brody to test.
With a shrug, Brody stuffed a half-eaten, bland, pseudo-berryish protein bar into his pant pocket.
A red, white, and blue bandana wrapped their prisoner’s dented skull to turn the patriotic colors rusty brown, while a leather jacket failed to shield the ruined half the man’s lower abdomen.
For now, with the bad weather and after tremors concentrated on a few miles away at the edge of the valley, Brody tinkered with a new device.
Brainwaves were electricity—the design of the upgraded control collars that balanced Nora and the kids EMF proved that—so it stood to reason there must be some sort of activity in the zombie’s brains, possibly only in the lower brainstem.
If so, Brody could design a kind of blast to take them all out and not harm everyone else.
A bit of a challenge.
He used a low-beam headlamp on top of an old tree stump to solder wires and alter the function of one of the old-timey, hand-held radio he salvaged from his shop. Out of range of the EMF blast back at the militiamen camp, the gear he got from his trailer functioned okay. Man, they were lucky Abe brought along the duffle of Brody’s gear.
“Your uncle’s really good at this tracking stuff.” Abe stared with open fascination at the soldering sparks.
“Bet he never thought he’d use his woodsman skills to wrangle zombies.” Brody chuckled.
The growling snarling zombie pulled at Merv’s lead rope and lunged his upper body toward Brody and Abe. The smaller rope trapped the thing’s arms against its torso so that the wrists bent and fingers clawed into its own thighs.
“Come on, Hannah. Help me search for some rocks to build a warming pile. Junior, if you’re able, I can tell you what kind of rocks work best and maybe you can help find some carry-sized stones.”
“Got a small pit cleared. With the ground banked, the heat should last the night.”
“Wait up, you guys.” Brody nudged a stubborn string of beef from between two of his lower teeth. “My tests will only take a minute.”
“Will it hurt?” asked Darcy Lynn.
“Not a bit.” The cramp in his chest loosened as she spoke.
With his upper arm bandaged, Merv tightened his grip on the rope. “This biker dude, though he reeks to high heaven, is going to be what you need?”
“Hope so. Miss Irene, you able to provide a baseline? Since you’re the most normal of our group.”
“Excuse me, ladies.” Irene squeezed out from between the girls. “I truly hope you find all the answers you need, young man.”
“By the way, there’s nothing normal about Miss Irene,” Merv said with a sly grin. He dipped his head, “Meant in the best possible way, dear lady.”
Neither Irene nor Brody’s Uncle showed any signs of illness since the zombie bite and their kiss.
Brody fitted the molded body of the hand-held device together and screwed the front and back in place. Turned on, the radio emitted a low whisper of a static white noise.
“No gauges or readouts, but we’ve got sound.” When Brody approached Irene near the fire pit, the small speaker hummed like a radio not quite on a station.
“So you’re going to try to rig something to kill the zombies, right?” A snarky-toned Hannah peered from beneath her brows. “Just like the collars, this is never going to work.”
“The collars worked, Hannah. Probably too well.” Brody used the device’s antenna sort of like an energy probe to pick up EMF signals. “That’s the sound of our normal EMF field range, so help me listen for changes in volume and pitch.”
“Sounds like gibberish to me.” Junior used a flat rock to dig from a half-foot-deep pit.
Brody waved the plastic-encased antenna nub near Merv.
A shrieking tone, similar to Irene’s, issued from the speaker.
“A little higher pitched.” Abe stepped close. “Maybe.”
“No, they’re basically the same.” Hannah crossed her arms and smirked.
Darcy Lynn nodded.
“Either of you feeling, er, um, changed?” Brody asked, fiddling with the tuning knob.
“No sign of zombie symptoms, either of us, you have our words. We’d not put you and the children in danger by letting you believe or telling you otherwise.” Merv wrangled the zombie, mouth chomping, over to a sparse-branched pine. In winding wraps, he tied the thing’s torso to the trunk.
“Can’t figure out what’s wrong.” Brody scratched his head. “The design’s solid. Man, I hope this isn’t back to the drawing board.”
“Any way I can help.” Abe strode over.
With Abe in the direct line of the antenna, the rigged EMF detector blared a high-pitched squawk.
“Sorry.” Abe backed away.
“No, wait.” Brody took a forward step.
For Abe, the extra high-pitched, ear-stabbing shrill tone sounded again. The same noise buzzed when he wanded Darcy Lynn.
Stranger than strange.
Next,
he took readings from the zombie.
The snarling, going-to-rot dude snapped at and tried to eat the extended antenna tip with sliver- and gold-filled teeth.
For his reading, the tone dropped bass and weak.
“We should have gotten a base reading. Four different tones, not just three. Normal, Enhanced, Elemental, and Zombified.” Brody turned the hand-held and pointed the antenna nub toward his forehead. “Hold on.”
A medium tone, close to Irene’s and Merv’s, in both loudness and pitch, blared.
“What the heck’s happening here?” Wariness crept over Brody scalp as he eyed a softly smiling Irene. “You’re enhanced. Just like me and Merv.”
“Despite your uncle’s misgivings about telling all of you, my sharing with you is long overdue.”
“Irene’s, well, Irene.” Hannah led with her chin in a smooth sway. “What are you talking about?”
“Sing for them Irene.” Merv held out his palms face up and shrugged. “With so much going on, there just didn’t seem to be a right time. I guess you sharing a song is the best way for them to understand.”
A cautious Irene stepped near the snarling zombie.
The creature shifted side to side to free itself from the ropes, then lunged and clacked its teeth as if air were an appetizer.
“Watch out,” Hannah warned.
Irene inhaled and perfect notes flowed from her throat. In the cobwebbed crevices of Brody’s mind, he recognized the song she sang as a long-ago folk sonnet his mother had sung as a lullaby, yet the words blurred and flowed into the purest, most melodious sound ever to touch Brody’s eardrums.
A sudden sense of carefree ease filled Brody.
Like laying his head on a feather pillow, he came close to succumbing to the comforting warmth of sleep while standing on his feet.
As she crooned her final note of the chorus, Brody blinked as if the harshness of the reality of the open clearing in the middle of the woods slapped him. “What the heck just happened?”
“Irene sang a lullaby that felt like watching lightning bugs and smelling honeysuckle.” Darcy Lynn blinked heavy lids and lifted her mouth into a sleepy grin. “Made me want to dream of chocolate syrup gravy and biscuits.”
“Look at the thing.” Merv inclined his forehead in the direction of the tree.
The zombie’s missing lips revealed long, stained teeth and strings of fleshy drool, while its bobbing head lolled on its neck as if the thing been mesmerized.
“Irene is a Siren. With her voice, she’s able to sooth the savage beast. Even a rough old codger like me.” Merv chuckled.
“Oh, Merv.” Irene’s alabaster cheeks pinked.
“Isn’t that the most beautiful sound you’ve ever heard?” Uncle Merv handed her a canteen and cupped her throat with both hands. “The smoke damaged her throat, but as you can hear, she’s healing just fine.”
“How many more?” The mere thought of numerous untold enhanced people ballooned in his skull and pressed like a fist behind the back of Brody’s eyes.
“I reckon the same ones you know about—Doc, Yates, Cantrell, Nora, Irene, me, and you—are the only ones I’m aware of. Could be more like us or the kids. We’ve no way of knowing.”
“Doc was enhanced?” Brody shook his head to attempt to rev his thinking.
“I thought you knew. Best test the dead, while it’s enthralled.”
Brody longed for more of Irene’s forlorn heart wrenching song. “I need to check to confirm which the areas of the thing’s brain might be sending out signals.”
He adjusted the knob from AM to FM setting the antenna for more direct reception. With unsteady hands, he aimed the thin extended rod at different parts of the zombie’s head.
Only at the base of the skull at the back, where the spine came into the neck, elicited deep-pitched hums.
“Barely any EMFs to register.”
Merv poked the drooling zombie with a branch.
The zombie growled and chomped at the stick.
The hum increased a decibel or two, but no more.
Tossing aside the branch, Merv pressed his healing hands to Irene’s slender neck.
A neck he could and would snap like a twig if he turned.
Brody shut off the power of the simplified EMF detector. His own supposedly enhanced gears turning in his brain, he formulated a plan. Knock out brainwaves, and those with low brain function, i.e. zombies, wouldn’t reboot. Yeah, he could pull it off. “Get saddled up. The Rocky Top Observatory’s waiting.”
***
While Abe seemed to have no problem riding barebacked, Brody, reached around Abe, to grip the black horse’s coarse mane.
He pressed his knees into the steed’s side tight enough to mold himself into a second skin.
Their lone steed loped beside the winding, paved road leading up to Rocky Top.
“What if Merv and Irene, you know, change?” Abe clicked, and their mount trotted past outcroppings of granite and limestone jutting like natural barriers out of the ground. As they rode farther up the ridge, the trees branches sprouted lower on the trunks and the height of the trees shortened.
The heaviness in Brody’s chest most likely didn’t have anything to do with his heart. “The girls know what they have to do.”
“Hannah’s all down in the dumps. Darcy Lynn’s a little girl.” Abe scraped his elbow into Brody’s ribs. “You can’t expect them to…”
“We’ve all had to kill. When I sent out the mini-EMF blast in the militia camp, I killed everyone with a pacemaker. You killed those men in the cave. Who knows how many Darcy Lynn destroyed at the laboratory facility in Oak Ridge. They’ll do what they must, when push comes to shove, just like we did.”
“I hope things don’t come to that.”
“Won’t have to, if we hurry.”
Abe spurred the horse into a gallop with a kick of his heels.
Pressing his knees into sweat-tinged horsehide, Brody wrapped the coarse hair around his fingers so tight he wondered if he would pull out the mane. Poor horse. He eased up and tucked his elbows more tightly into Abe’s sides. “With EMF’s that low, a far-reaching blast would shut them down, for good, while a normal person’s brain would reboot.”
“Will it stop Irene and Merv from becoming, uh, one of them.”
“Don’t know, but I hope so.” The bounce of Brody’s tailbone on the horse’s haunches. His butt bounced in an awkward rhythm as if he might pitch off the side and pound pavement any minute.
“Hope. You flipping hope.” Abe’s voice rose in that not-quite-a-man way. “There is no such thing as hope. Not anymore. I don’t like that we are separating from the rest of the group.”
“Me neither. Merv suggested they all stay behind. Irene wanted to cook some cornmeal-battered hoecakes to stock ahead some food, and he wanted to get the word out to as many local folks as possible about the zombies and the storms. That was when both twisters headed toward Rogersville.” Brody pointed.
Down in the sloping valley, two tornadoes roared, one a half-mile-wide, headed toward the town, while the other veered off in the direction of the area where they stopped to test the EMF waves.
“We got to warn them.” Abe yanked the reins.
“No time.” Brody grabbed Abe’s wrist. “With Junior’s help, Merv will take them down into the underground tunnel systems.”
“The earthquakes haven’t altogether stopped.” Abe’s eyes were as wild as their mounts. “No place is safe. We left them in danger.”
“Not if we do what we’re supposed to do. All the elemental anomalies will end with the blast as well.”
“If we fail?”
Ah, to be a snot-nosed kid again so that he could burst out into a bawling fit. Eyes burning hot, Brody said, “Then there’s no help for any of us.”
“The blast will stop what we didn’t mean to start?”
“Let me show you.” Brody pulled out the EMF detector from the pack on his back. He attached a second, longer antenna.
&nbs
p; The EMF in the direction of the tornadoes created a screech. As did the clouds of a storm brewing in the north. “Here’s what happens when you aim it toward the burning river.”
The tone shrilled.
“Energy. All of it.” Afraid he might lose his grip if he tried tucking the radio back into the pack, he turned it off, folded in the antennas, and shoved the upgraded device into the waistband at the front of his pants.
“Bottom line,” he went on, “we’ve got out-of-whack EMF waves multiplied by a gazillion. The EMF blaster will cause a sudden drop in the energy waves. The storms, quakes, and zombies, just, go away. Except, of course, for the aftermath and the bodies.”
“Okay, we do this,” Brody said, “as big as we can, right?”
“The biggest,” said Abe.
The building, all concrete and steel and glass, looked abandoned.
The horse snorted and pawed the ground near a copse of trees several yards outside the paved parking lot. For the present, horsehide, asphalt, and pine fragrances wrapped them in a false-sense of country comfort.
“Wait, I’ve got an idea.” Brody turned on the radio and aimed the detector at the building.
White noise crackled.
“All clear.” Abe nudged the horse with his heels to spur him toward the facility.
The horse jumped and reared.
The detector flipped out of Brody’s waistband and fell.
Brody grabbed, missed.
As if his straddle were greased, he slid from his horse and thumped onto the rock-strewn ground.
A loud noise screeched.
“Broken. Dang it.” Even as pain thrummed through his wounds and his chest, Brody shot Abe what Cantrell used to call The Look. When he lifted the radio, the tone lightened. After he turned the device off and then back on, white noise ssshhhed once again. A maple syrup edge of relief settled inside his cheeks. “Whew. Not broken.”
“The antenna was pointing down between two rocks, right?” Abe pointed toward the ground.
“Yes, but—”