by Kuhn, Steve
Murphy honked the horn and gave a friendly wave as one of the men pointed for us to pull in further. He held up a hand to stop us and then motioned for Murphy to lower the window to speak.
“Exit the vehicle, and have all parties assemble in front for inspection,” he told Murphy. It sounded very official.
We complied.
Murphy opened his mouth to greet the man, but was interrupted abruptly when the dude said, “You have a child, yes?”
Cutty told the guy, “Yeah. She in da back.”
The man nodded and said, “You stay here.” Then he eyed up JC before telling him, “You, bring out the child.”
JC sprinted to the trailer and returned within seconds with Lilly and Fart. Lilly clung to him, gripping his pants tightly, and Fart walked cautiously with her head held low.
The man took a quick headcount and nodded, saying, “You have food and ammunition in the trailer, yes?”
Murphy nodded in the affirmative and told him, “Yeah. Everything we have is in that truck and on our bodies.”
The man sized us up and finally replied with, “Stay here.” He stalked off and waved at the other men on the ground level, who followed him as he disappeared into one of the doors on our left. The door closed, and there was just awkward silence. The military men on the rooftops simply looked down at us curiously.
Then the garage doors opened. We were overtaken by the gargles and wails of the dead as a cloud of flies spilled forth from the darkness of the rooms followed by countless geeks. They spotted us and moved into the daylight with their decaying hands outstretched, gnashing their teeth.
JC swung his bear around and snapped, “Fuck! Protect Lilly!” He took three shots in rapid succession, dropping two of the approaching horde.
Cutty scooped up a screaming Lilly and tossed her onto the hood of D-Prime, telling her, “Hang in dere, baby girl. We gotcha.” Then he drew his blades and stepped forward to protect the rest of us.
I drew and took a knee for stability, joining JC in the gunfire, as Murphy began drawing and releasing arrows as fast as he could. We were downing them, but they just kept spilling out. Cutty ran a few steps forward and thrust his boot into the chest of one of the ones out front, sending it tumbling backwards. It fell into the others behind, and they dropped like bowling pins. I could make out Cutty hacking into a few on the ground before he had to fall back to us.
As the gap between us narrowed, Fart latched her jaws onto the arm of one and shook it so hard the entire thing came apart at the elbow. She didn’t even know it as she whipped the severed limb around in her mouth. Murphy shouted at the marines above us, “Fuckin’ do something, Goddammit!”
Nothing. They were actually cheering, those fuckers.
JC warned us all, “I’m goin’ out!” before flipping a switch on his bear. “Cutty, back up!”
He squeezed and held his trigger, opening up that rifle on full automatic. Spraying round after round into the crowd of bernies, the barrage sent gray hunks of brain mixed with black-red blood streaming into the surrounding air and halving their numbers before he lowered the barrel and shouted, “That’s it! I’m out. I’m out!”
I let loose the last rounds in my own mag as well and reached in my belt to reload.
Fuck! All the other ammo was in the trailer! I took off down the side of the trailer, shouting to the others, “Ammo run! I’m on it.” I had made it about halfway down the side of D-Prime when I heard two loud shots from above me—boom, boom.
Two rounds hit the ground at my feet, stopping me in my tracks and sending chunks of asphalt into the side of D-Prime. I looked up to see one of the military men with his rifle shouldered and smoking above my head. He shook his head ‘no.’ I ignored his warning and maintained eye contact with him as I made a move forward again. He twitched just enough to let me know he would shoot me if I went for it. I drew my knife and sprinted back to the others empty handed.
JC was stabbing geeks in the face with his bayonet as Cutty swung in his wild, yet calculated style dropping some to the ground without limbs and others with gigantic splits in their heads.
I left the three of them to the task of the shamblers and began stabbing the crawlers and the severed heads. In minutes, the tides had turned and we were polishing off the last of them. As silence fell on the lot and the whooping of the men above trailed off into nothing more than a murmur, we gathered ourselves once again. We were winded and tired, but everyone was all right.
The men above stood motionless as Murphy shouted angrily, “Fuck you! You pieces of shit!” He drew an arrow from his secondary quiver and took aim at one of the men above, holding him in his sights.
Just then, one of the doors swung open to our left, and the form of female emerged followed by about six or seven guys. She had a length of steel pipe tucked under her armpit and a pistol on her hip while the others were armed with various types of rifles. She approached us, clapping slowly, saying, “Bravo! Bra-fucking-vo! Now… drop your weapons.”
I was ill. I remember thinking, This is it. This is how I’m going to die. We did as we were told, except for Murphy. He stood firm.
Cutty whispered harshly to him as the woman and her entourage approached us, “Drop it, Murph. They gon’ kill us if we don’t.”
Murphy said flatly, “We’re already dead…” He released his bowstring and sent the arrow hissing up into the sky. It stuck in the hip of his target, causing the man to let out a shriek of pain as he clutched the wound and dropped to his knees. Two of the other men drug him back out of sight as one of the men in the entourage hit Murphy across his jaw with the butt of a rifle. Murphy dropped to a knee, sputtering blood from his mouth. JC crouched to check on Murphy, who grabbed Fart’s collar just in time to keep her from lashing out at the assailant.
The nameless woman raised her hand and shouted, “Don’t shoot them yet!”
She sauntered over to us, where I was able to get a good look at her. She was dressed in the ragged clothes of a survivor, and her stringy, brown hair hung around her face, greasy and filthy. She looked down at Murphy and Fart with her head cocked curiously to the side. “That wasn’t very nice now, was it?” she said callously.
The men around her collected our weapons and left us standing there helpless before backing away once more. She asked us, “Where’d you come from?”
Cutty coldly answered her, “The road.”
She shook her head, clearly unimpressed, and told him, “You’re lying.” Then she raised her pipe above her head and brought it down in a crushing blow on Fart’s head. Our dog instantly fell to the ground with a gaping wound and began thrashing around in a bloody seizure. Her tongue hung out of her mouth as she violently shook, whining uncontrollably.
Murphy shrieked, “No!” and clutched his girl with Lilly squealing behind us in horror. He wept as the seizure deteriorated into shivering death throws and she was gone.
The woman spat on the corpse and said teasingly, “I hate liars.”
There was a brief struggle between us and the men as our emotions got the best of us, but we were outmanned and outgunned. We ended up getting the shit kicked out of us. They had us on our knees in total submission.
One of the men called to her from behind D-Prime, “Bianca, you should see this thing! They’ve got it set up like a damn apartment! There’s all kinds of shit in here!”
She smirked arrogantly and said, “You ain’t smart enough or tough enough to do this all on your own. I’ll ask again. Where are you from? Where did you get this?”
Cutty looked at her through a swollen eye and said, “Bitch, fuck you. You ain’t shit.” He spat a wad of blood on the ground.
JC raised his voice to address the men on the rooftops, saying, “You’re marines! You’re supposed to be helping people! The fuck is wrong with you?”
“Correction!” Bianca snapped. “Some of them were marines. And some army. And whatever. These men have come to their senses. No longer do they fight for a dead country that doesn’
t appreciate them. Sure, some of the others that were with them kept going, kept evacuating, kept riding around following orders… but these are the smart ones. These are the men that decided to stop living the lie.”
She shot a glance to one of the men on the roof and shouted, “Jansen! When was the last time you saw a paycheck?”
The man shouted down, “Can’t remember! Too long!”
She shouted, “When was the last time you saw your family?”
He answered, “What family?”
She had made her point. These guys here gave zero fucks about honor and humanity. They were pirates now—nothing more.
She turned her attention back to us now with, “Last time, now. Tell me something.”
No one said a word. We just waited to die.
She gave a slight pause to think before shoving past us to the hood of D-Prime. She reached up and roughly grabbed Lilly by the hair, dragging her forcefully down to the ground. She then drug Lilly kicking and screaming to the front where we could see her, tossed her pipe to the side, and drew her pistol.
I swear, I wanted to puke. I had tunnel vision, so I have no clue if the others protested in any way.
Bianca kicked Lilly in the back of the knees to drop her to the asphalt and pressed the gun to Lilly’s head. “You tell me something, or so help me I’ll kill this little brat right in front of you like I did that mutt.”
Lilly stared into my eyes, crying and petrified. I lost my nerve and cracked first.
“There’s a town… three days drive northeast. You can see it on the map. They have everything you could ever want. They set us up and sent us on our way.”
The word vomit just spewed from my mouth as I knelt there selling out what could possibly be the last decent people on earth to save our Lilly. I couldn’t stop. I told them about Cotton and Harris and how they were set up—all of it.
Bianca smiled and kicked Lilly towards me. Lilly fell into my arms, weeping. I just wrapped her up and rocked her.
“Kill them,” Bianca said as she began walking back to the building.
A man in uniform drew a pistol and leveled it to Cutty’s head. Cutty shut his eyes tightly, but said nothing otherwise.
“Giacomo Fulci!” JC yelled the name again, “Giacomo Fulci!”
The man with the gun to Cutty’s head stopped and asked curiously, “Whatchu know ’bout Fool?”
JC looked up at the guy and told him, “He’s a friend. He ran with us for a good, long while after you guys separated. He survived that night the truck with all the bernies flipped. Told us all about it.”
The guy lowered his gun and asked JC, “He still alive?”
JC lied. “Yeah, man. He’s good. He’s back at that town. He said all you guys were good people. I want to believe that. Don’t kill us, man. You already have all our shit. We got nothing left.”
Bianca turned around and said, “That’s right. We have all your shit, and you’re dead without it. I figured I’d do you a favor and make it quick.”
The former marine asked Bianca sincerely, “Do we have to?”
Bianca thought it through for a second or two before answering him with, “I don’t give a fuck what you do with them. Just get ’em out of my sight. We’ll hang around here for the next two or three days, then we’re leaving for this little town. Sounds like we’re about to hit the jackpot, boys, and I wanna be there by the end of the week.”
The men all whooped eagerly and cheered at the prospect as they led us away from Fart’s lifeless body and into the covered bed of a military vehicle. We were driven a few miles away from the business park and dumped off at an old barn. The one Bianca called Jansen dumped our weapons at our feet, but nothing more. No food. No water. No ammo. No transportation. Nothing.
“Best of luck to ya,” he said with heartless sarcasm before they sped away in the truck, kicking us with dust and bits of gravel.
We have nothing left but one another. We’re alive, but maybe Bianca was right. She would have been doing us a favor.
I have the blood of an entire community on my hands.
Entry 108
This is impossible. Our weapons are completely useless, save for the blades, and that means we have to get close to them. Getting close to them means the chances of a bite have increased tenfold. More importantly, we’re crippled in terms of transportation, and this bitch, Bianca, has seen to it that every resource in the surrounding area is dried up. It never ceases to amaze me how greedy and thoughtless our species has become. Even in these trying times, no one can seem to stand together for a ‘greater good.’ I mean, all we do is consume, consume, consume. For some reason they have to have it all instead of just what they need.
The biggest thing on my mind right now is that we all fought so hard to change JC’s mind. We hated him for that ‘survival of the fittest’ mindset. We told him he was wrong to think only of himself and our group, that he should be mindful of the other people out there trying just as hard as we are to provide for themselves and to survive. And look at us now.
We should’ve been ruthless—not because we want to be ruthless, but because it is now crystal clear that we have to be that way if we want to continue on. Problem is that if we go that route from here on, we could miss out on people like Murphy or Trey in the future. I suppose, theoretically, we could just kill anyone we come across to save any trouble. We could steal, pillage, and lay waste to everything that’s left, but what does that accomplish besides a further breakdown of what makes us human? What will that do to help us as a species rebuild and thrive?
Perhaps this is the time for our extinction. Perhaps this is nature’s way of telling us we fucked up. Shit, man, maybe there is a God up there somewhere, and he’s just fed up with how shitty we are.
So, what really sets us apart from any other animal out there now? It used to be that we cared for one another. It used to be that we harnessed our intelligence to build and create beautiful things, and we used to lend a helping hand to those less fortunate. Sure, there was always this seedy underbelly of assholes and foul regimes, but on the whole we were good. And that ‘good’ was what made us strong enough to fight the ‘bad.’ Sadly, those days seem to be at an end.
What about Lilly? So sweet, so innocent, so vulnerable—she doesn’t deserve to live in this world. She doesn’t have an evil bone in her body. No. That type of shit is taught. That ugliness is passed down and nurtured over time through experiences. The question still remains, though. What about Lilly? Do we teach her kindness and thoughtfulness so that she can be once again stripped of everything she owns and has earned? Do we teach her that everyone left on this planet is a threat that is to be eliminated without emotion? Because if we don’t prepare her, she’s going to end up dead… or worse. No. If we teach her anything, it will have to be that she needs to be good only to a point. She needs to be aware that she is a rare breed and that she needs to put others ahead of herself only until an outside party threatens what’s hers. If that ever happens, she can never hesitate to unleash the beast.
You know, there was a time when I despised Kate. I only knew her for a short time, but she affected me so strongly by taking Hope’s life and her own. She left Wyatt alone in this world with a raggedy group of strangers to fight every step of the way for his life—a life that was cut tragically short. I hated everything about that… and everything about her.
But now I see it clearly. She spared Hope the horrors of this life, and if she believed in a higher power, which I’m sure she did, she gave Hope heaven instead of this hell we live in. What’s more motherly than that? She took her own life in an effort to not only avoid the guilt of what she had done, but also so she could be with her little girl and Chuck in the heaven she so strongly felt was there. Even if the stories are true and she couldn’t go to that heaven of hers because she took her own life, her little girl didn’t have to suffer anymore. Kate was just trying to be a good mother by protecting her baby from… this.
Lilly doesn’t deserve
this.
I see her sleeping right now like a little angel. She used to snuggle up with Fart by her side and sleep soundly, but now she tosses and turns. She complains that she’s cold and hungry and uncomfortable. We have nothing. She has nothing. I’d be lying if I didn’t confess that I think about setting her free sometimes, like Kate. I can’t bring myself to do it, but I think about it. It would have to be quick and painless for her, obviously. I just can’t do it. I don’t have the balls…
I’m fucking starving, too. We haven’t eaten since the day before we came across Bianca and the others, but it’s not just that. I’ve missed many meals since the beginning, but this time it’s different because there is no end in sight. I feel so desperate. I have the others, but I feel alone.
Murphy is fletching some new arrows for himself, and hopefully he’ll have better luck hunting in the morning than he did last time. He hasn’t said a word to anyone about Fart or anything. He’s just keeping his head in his work. JC refuses to take his eyes off Lilly, so that seems to be his new role. He will destroy any threat to Lilly by any means necessary, which is probably another reason why I haven’t acted on my thoughts yet. Cutty keeps watch even when it’s not his turn. I offered to stand guard for a while as the others rested in the empty hayloft, above ground level, but he politely refused. I decided to write instead, since this may be it for a while. My pen is nearly out of ink, and my spare is back there with D-Prime.
I’ve never prayed before. Sure, I can be heard saying, “God, I hope…,” or, “Thank God,” from time to time, but that was more just a figure of speech I’d heard often growing up.
I’ve never actually prayed.
Until now.
Entry 109
Life has a way of fucking with your emotions. I don’t care what you attribute it to, whether it’s Karma, prayer, luck, divine intervention, or just plain randomness. Either way, shit happens with a strange sort of purpose every once in a while, and those things leave you feeling hopeful, sometimes grateful.