There was another pause. The voice coming through the speakers had been getting heavier the further he had gotten into the story. When the voice spoke again it only said six words. But those six words were the last nail in the med center's coffin.
“I never saw her alive again.” The PA said. Now the quiet was heavy. I watched as Tabitha’s posture changed. It was very slight, but it changed. The idea that she was never getting out of this building was starting to flash into her mind.
“I’m sorry for your loss, but my men…” Tabitha tried to say, but she was violently cut off.
“SHUT UP!” Blared from the PA. It was so loud that I jumped, bumping into Chester as I did. Chester turned to look at me and I expected him to make fun of me, but he said nothing. I think if I could have seen through those sunglasses I would have seen surprise, and maybe some concern, on his face.
“Just, shut up.” The PA said, more in control this time. “The group at Food City had no guns. They were using bows and arrows and home made spears for weapons. I know this because we made them the spears and delivered four hundred arrows and eight compound bows to them when we set their walls up. They didn’t shoot at you. They didn’t even know you were there until it was too late.”
“How could you even know this?” Tabitha asked. Her skin turning pale and her voice getting softer.
“Your men aren’t as efficient as you think they are. Abbey led a group out the back in an attempt to escape your attack. She was trying to get them here; she was trying to warn us of you. She only succeeded in one of her goals. You see the noise of your military action had drawn the interest of the local wildlife. Abbeys group was surrounded and overran. Out of the eight people she had led from the building only two made it back here. Abbey and a little girl name Nel. Both had been bitten and were infected. Before I had to put a bullet into my girlfriend’s head, she had told the doctor what had happened. She told of the attack that had come from nowhere. She was helping to sort stock in the back of the store when the front walls, the wooden walls we had built for them, exploded. Men were entering the building with automatic rifles and were killing everyone they saw. Abbey said she didn’t see anyone she recognized. She wasn’t sure who was attacking them, but she knew she had to get those she could to safety. Everyone who was with her followed her out the back door and made a run for our territory. We weren’t the Head Hunters back then. We hadn’t felt the need to protect ourselves from other humans yet. That attack changed us. You, black witch, changed us.”
“The story you were told was wrong. That’s not how it happened.” Tabitha said. “My men told me…”
“Are you telling me that my girlfriend lied to us, on her death bed?”
Tabitha got very quiet.
“Are you?” The PA asked again.
“No.” Tabitha said. “I’m just saying if she was in the back then she wasn’t really there. How could she know what happened if she wasn’t really there?”
“How could you?” The voice asked. Tabitha had no answer for that.
“I was out of the building that day. I was called back with a code five. Code five here is a life or death call. They were trying to get me back here before she died and turned. I didn’t make it. Like I said, I never saw my girlfriend again. I got here just in time to watch some nightmare inhabit her body and try to devour my doctor. I had no choice but to put a bullet through the face of the woman I loved.” Tabitha didn’t speak. She looked down at the ground.
“Last night two people showed up at my door. Two people whom I had told if they ever came to my house again I would kill them. At first, I thought they had lost their minds. As you can no doubt imagine, it had been a good while since I’d had a good laugh, so I decided to hear them out before I killed them. We spoke at some length and they told me about life in your tower. They told about the things you had done. Then they gave me a notebook. Inside this notebook was your inventory of everything you had taken from Food City before you lit it on fire and burned it to the ground. You killed those people, those good people, just so you could have some food? Hell, they would have given you food if you had just asked. But that’s not you, is it Tabitha?”
Hearing her name come across the PA seemed to unnerve her a bit more.
“You take what you want by force. Because of you, thirty-four men, women, and children died that day. Because of you, I had to shoot my girlfriend, the woman I had been with since freshman year in high school. Have you ever had to take the life of somebody you loved Tabitha?”
After a pause Tabitha said, in a voice that was barely audible, “No”.
“Want me to describe to you how much fun it is?”
“No.” Tabitha said seeming to screw her courage up for one last volley at this unseen opponent. “I want you to go ahead and kill me. I know you’re going to. Just get it over with; I have heard enough of your words.”
Laughter rolled across the building again. “I’m not going to kill you, black witch. In fact, I'm going to give you a fighting chance at life. Here at the head Hunters Arena we play a special game called survival of the fittest. You see the doors lining both sides of the arena? Each of those doors is connected to a set of rooms that have doors to the outside. We use these doors to lure in and then capture zombies. Usually what we do is open a door every minute or so and if you can kill all the zombies that we have tucked away inside our home then we let you go free. I’m not saying it will be easy, but it is doable. We had a group make it back out into the world just yesterday.”
Chester leaned his body in my direction and bumped me with his shoulder shooting me a smile. “You all are celebrities for that little stunt by the way.” He said before taking another drink.
“Today we are going to play it a bit differently. I am going to open all of the inside doors at the same time. A minute later I will instruct the outside doors to be opened. If you can fight your way through the zombies and make it to the outside then you are free to go.”
“What’s the catch?” Tabitha asked.
“The catch is, the game starts now.”
The PA crackled off. The doors opened and zombies began to flood the arena.
THREE
It didn’t take long. Nobody made it. I didn’t want to watch, but it was like when you drive by a bad car accident, you just can’t make yourself look away. Tabitha wasn’t the first to fall but she was far from the last. With all the doors opening at the same time the group in the middle found themselves surrounded almost instantly. I would have backed up to the wall and attempted to clear my way to the first door then run for the outside. This would have put maximum distance between me and the far end zombies giving me more time to work with less resistance and it would have given me cover on one of the four sides of the attack. Once I had cleared a path to a doorway then all of the zombies would have been to my back and it would have just been a foot race at that point. That’s how I would have done it. Tabitha’s men however, they panicked. They lost the tactical advantages they could have created for themselves almost instantly. Gunshots and screams filled the night. After maybe five minutes everything quieted down to just the soft moans of the dead as they lingered around in the arena.
“That was aweful.” I said to Chester.
“She had a big tab to pay off. Come on, let’s get your group together, Brandon was wanting to talk to ya’ll before you left.”
On the bottom floor we found the head Hunter’s leader talking to the refugees from the medical center that we had brought with us. I walked over and said hello. The leader, Brandon turned and smiled at me.
“I was just telling them their nightmare is over. They have been given back control of their lives.”
Fred looked like a different man. He smiled at me and hugged Samantha to him. I heard the rest of our group coming up behind me and heard Marky Mark clear his throat.
“So. Is that it? Is it done?”
“Yeah.” I said looking at Brandon. “It’s over.”
“Then I sug
gest you’se start talking.” Marky Mark said.
I turned to look at the man, confused as to where he was going with this. “Do what?” I said.
“You’se told Jane that as soon as this was over you’d tell us all what was going on. Start talking.”
I looked to Brandon and he made a hand gesture which said, the floor is yours.
“Okay. This all started yesterday morning around three when Fred started screaming Samantha’s name into the night. I left my tent and got the story from Amanda, or was it you Jane? I don’t remember, and I guess it doesn’t really matter. What did matter was a group of intruders had gained entrance to our home and they had kidnapped Samantha. This bothered me a great deal. My concern was twofold, I was, of course, concerned for Samantha, but there was something else that worried me even more. Sometimes I get fixated on a problem when what I’m being told makes no sense. And being told that men had made their way onto our roof made no sense to me, so I got hung up on that one thought. They got up into our house. How did they do that? We have three very smart military people who have gone over our building with a fine tooth comb. There is nothing that we missed. There is no way up to the roof unless we let you up. By my line of thinking this meant that Fred was lying to us. Now the question became why was he lying to us, and how did the kidnappers get their hands on Samantha?”
“And that would explain why you have acted like you haven’t trusted me since this all started.” Fred said.
“I had given up on trusting you before you ever came down to meet us in the parking lot. I had decided that if I went up to the roof and looked in your tent I would find a slit down the back of it and a rope that you had used to lower Samantha down to her kidnappers. How close was I?”
Fred looked at me sheepishly. “The hole you would have found. The rope they took with them.”
Sass looked from Fred to me. “Whoa.”
“Like I keep telling you, it’s not paranoia if they really are out to get you.”
“You’re saying this was all planned out from yesterday morning?” Sass asked.
“This has been in the plans for I’d guess nearly two months.” I said.
“How? Fred wasn’t even there two months ago.” Sass said.
“If you’se let the man talk I’m sure he’ll tell you. Charlie loves to hear his own voice.”
I flashed Marky Mark an evil look, but I continued to talk all the same. “The other thing that gave me a moment of pause as to what we were exactly getting ourselves into was something Jane said. Fred you were going off on your tangent about the blood trail wanting Jane to convince you that it couldn’t be Sam’s blood when he said something that was, at least to me, very alarming. Jane said the bullet couldn’t have been anywhere near Sam because he shot the last guy in line and Sam was walking along side the front two guys.”
“What’s so alarming about that?” Fred asked.
“She was walking. She wasn’t fighting them. They weren’t dragging her. She was walking beside the two front guys in the group. None of you find anything strange about that?”
“Well, she would have known these men. Maybe she thought that if she played it cool she could talk them into letting her go back to her dad.” Sass said.
“No.” Amanda said.
“She would know that they would fear her mother more than they would pity her. She would know that her only play would be to run for it.” Jane said.
“Exactly. No offense Sam, but you're still just a little kid. The fact that you weren’t fighting these men who were taking you away from the safety of your father was a huge message to me that things were not as they seemed. It was at this point that I knew we had to play this out. I knew something larger was happening. Some new threat was peaking out of the bushes, and I wanted to try to stop the next war before it began.”
“So that’s why you made your Ghostbusters reference.” Jane said.
“Well, I had always wanted to use that line in conversation. How many chances like that do you think you’ll get in a lifetime?”
“By the time we were leaving you had decided that I was trying to lead you into a trap.” Fred said. “That explains why you wouldn’t let me take the lead on how to get to the med center.”
“Exactly. I didn’t know how much I could trust you, so I decided to not trust you at all. Also, in all of our arguments about what path to take to the bad guys you let something else slip which convinced me that you were not on our side.”
Fred looked alarmed. “What? I thought I was so careful.”
“It wasn’t anything you said. It was how you acted. You were so concerned about yourself. You were terrified of running into the Head Hunters. I couldn’t figure out why you were so worried about yourself and not worried at all about Samantha. It was like you knew she would be safe and all you had to do was keep yourself safe long enough to make it back to the med center and then you would see her again. If that was the case and Sam was in no danger, why were we in any hurry to get to her? It just seemed that had she really been kidnapped you wouldn’t have cared about the danger to yourself as long as it got you down the road as fast as possible.”
“I had been having thoughts along those lines as well.” Amanda said.
“I never thought about it.” Fred said.
Sass looked at Brandon. “But you said you had been at Food City when Tabitha took Fred and Samantha back. Why would Fred be scared of you if he knew you already?”
“I think the fact that I might recognize him would have given him some concern.” Brandon said.
“Exactly, and that was the final straw. You did recognize him. That’s when Fred officially became public enemy number one. Then, later, while talking to Tabitha I learned that this was the second time Fred and Sam had pulled their vanishing act. That was the last piece of information I needed. It took me a bit to put it all together, but at that point I knew everything I needed to know to figure this entire game out.”
“So, what exactly was going on?” Sass asked.
“We were to be the next Food City. You see the seventh floor of the med center is a really safe place to live, but you have no supplies. Tabitha was a very smart woman. She knew her group was going to run out of food and water. I bet it infuriated her to look out the window and see Food City sitting across the intersection. Enough food to feed her people for months just sitting there on shelves. I’m sure she quickly found ways to hate those people. But, like I said, she was smart. Taking into consideration everything she had to work with she figured out a plan to take what she wanted. That’s where Fred and Sam come in.”
“But she had the man power, why not just go and take it?” Sass asked.
I looked at Fred as I spoke. “She couldn’t. Most everybody up there was loyal to her, but they were not evil people. They were nurses and visitors that just happened to be on the seventh floor when the bottom fell out of the world. She had to make it look like the people at Food City were the bad guys. To that end, Fred and Sam disappear. When they find them, they are hiding out at Food City. They come back reluctantly but the leaders at Food City won’t let it go. They pick a fight. They lose that fight to the superior forces of the med center and to the winner goes the spoils.”
“You’se mean all those people died just so’s she could have some Frosted Flakes?” Marky Mark asked.
“Of course.” Jane said.
“That’s friggin crazy.” Marky Mark said,
“Get used to it. The world is going to become more and more like that the further into this we get. The food and supplies that are inside Wal-Mart is what makes us such a target.” Amanda said.
“It’s what made us a target for Tabitha.” I said.
“But how did she even know we were there?” Sass asked.
“Like I said earlier, this has been in the works for months. She knew about us because she had a spy in our group before Fred ever showed up.”
“I had thought of that, but who could it have been?” Jane asked.
For the first time since I started talking I found myself not wanting to answer a question. I didn’t want to admit that my friend was really a bad guy. I didn’t want to say his name. “I hate to say this, but the spy was…”
“Lindell Green.” Amanda said.
I looked up at Amanda and nodded. “Green like cash money.” I said.
“I’ll be damned. It fits. So, I guess Jericho didn’t kill him after all.” Jane said.
“I guess not, if we’re right.” I said.
“You’re right.” Fred said. “Lindell was the advance scout. He’s actually off somewhere finding us our next target now.”
“Wow.” Sass said. “He knew damn near everything the council knew.”
“He knew everything.” Fred said. “It helped us fine tune our story to play on your sympathies better.”
“Guys, seriously, that’s just evil.” Sass said.
“Then we get caught and trapped here and Amanda earns us our freedom with her wall walker bit.” Jane said, but Amanda interrupted. “No. I had six different guns pointed on me up top. I didn’t earn us anything. The Head Hunters let us go for some other reason.”
“That reason was me.” I said. Shocked expressions all around. Everyone but Brandon was looking at me like I was crazy.
“How’d you’se get us out?” Marky Mark asked.
“I mentioned the right name.” I said. Everyone still looked lost, so I decided to connect the dots for them. “The entire time all of this is going down in the arena I am thinking that it just feels familiar. Amanda buys us a pause in the action and I take that moment to try a long shot, but it pays off. It seems the name Jack bought a lot of good will here at Head Hunter Central.”
“No. Way.” Sass said.
“Even after he let us go I had my doubts, so I waited until everyone else was out of the arena and paused to look up at the lip of the inner wall. I saw a man walk up to the edge and watch me.” I said.
A Good Distance From Dying_Book 2_Samantha's Song Page 33