by mike Evans
They set up a set of blankets around a small fire. Shaun cut two cans open and placed them in the fire. “Is that what you are eating for supper?” Ben asked.
“No, that is what the four of us are eating for supper. You ought to be pretty happy that I have anything to feed us. I didn’t dare take many of your rations from your town, and pickings have been slim along the way. I could happily eat the two of these cans by myself.” Shaun explained.
They sat around the fire quietly, dividing the food, which none of them—including Shaun—were very pleased with. Ben said, “This food sucks, dude. Is this the kind of shit you’ve been eating the last year?”
“Yeah, I know, Ben. Tell you what, why don’t you come up with a better idea and we can happily cook that up. Like I said, I don’t care for it either, but it’s better than starving to death, isn’t it? No, I haven’t eaten like this. Compared to most, I’ve probably been eating like a king. That base we stayed on had an entire stock of frozen food, steaks, chicken… you name it, they had it.”
“No offense,” Jay said, holding up his hands, “but why the hell would you leave a paradise like that? I mean, really, if you had it that good, what purpose would you have in walking out on it? Was it dangerous?”
“Not really, we made it dangerous ourselves. We didn’t want to stay there without trying to help others, so before the guys we were training with signed off, we started leaving. Didn't go good. You guys actually did better than we did, our first time out.”
“What do you mean?” Brady asked.
“I got hypothermia. I’m lucky I didn’t die. My girlfriend got a serious head injury, and by the grace of God, we made it back.” Shaun looked to Jay and continued. “That was the day that, when they were coming to find us, one of the guys got shot in the skull by someone not paying attention to what he was doing with the gun while driving around.”
“I bet he got his ass kicked?” Ben said.
“He’s dead now too. One of The Turned got him when he was out on a run with me. He wanted to stay on the ground when we were going to get some gear. We had no idea there was a horde in there. By the time we knew what was going on, they were already coming for him. We had to put him out of his misery. They weren’t going to leave anything of him to turn. I think they’d been trapped in there the entire year; they were probably starving. The problem with the dead, guys, is they never stop. They never starve to death, or at least it doesn’t look like that. If you burn them, they’ll heal; if you miss any vital spots on them, they’ll come right back after you even more pissed than before. If you hit one of them and miss the other, then you better reload and shoot again, or run, because god damn they hold a grudge.”
“We aren’t going to change our minds, Shaun,” Jay said.
“I’m not trying to make you guys change your minds. What I really want is for you to understand that it isn’t glamorous. It isn’t something fun, you aren’t going to like it, and you’ll be around us and yet never feel so lonely as you ever have in your entire life.”
“Sounds great, Shaun,” Jay said as he lay down, pulling up a blanket and closing his eyes.
Ben did the same, yawning and stretching out. He said, “Yeah, this is going to be the best. If we can show someone something, then it will make everything worth it.”
“You say that, but it isn’t that easy. I say we get up early, and we will try to see how responsive those things are to noise. You guys get some sleep.”
Jay and Ben did as suggested; within a few minutes they were out for the count. Shaun, of course, had no intentions of sleeping. He took his rifle, setting it on top of the Humvee, and listened. He turned on the headlights once every thirty minutes to see if any of the town’s dead were coming, but they were far enough out that they were as safe as they could be in the middle of nowhere. They would die from starvation before they would be found by the dead.
Shaun watched the distance, not wanting to waste the battery and only keeping it on for so long at a time.
“Hey, Shaun, can we talk for a couple minutes?” Brady asked.
“You should be sleeping, man, it’s going to be a busy couple of days. You guys aren’t going to just learn to shoot.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You will once we start workout regiments. Shooting is half of it. Sometimes you don’t have the chance to do it, and you need to be quick and able to think.”
“So, what are you thinking?”
“That we wait a few days. We have a week of food at least, more if we don’t need to get stuffed. Give me a week; it’ll make any school workout you’ve done seem like a sweet memory. I think we should go back out another ten or fifteen miles so that we don’t need to worry quite so much about the dead. We can find a place like we shot at with nothing around for miles.”
“Sure. But Shaun, I wanted to ask you one thing, if you don’t mind?”
“Shoot,” Shaun replied.
“You said that you met the Navy Seals in your hometown, right? So, out of all the places in the entire state—shit, the entire world—they ended up wherever it is that you come from. How is that?”
Shaun ran the scope across the field and debated on the answer that he wanted to give. He wasn’t quite sure how to go about it, even though he’d been required to tell people on more than one occasion. He hated it and didn’t necessarily enjoy it all that much. “If I tell you, I don’t want any shit, you understand me? It’s your choice to tell Jay and Ben, but God help you if you guys come down on me. It wasn’t something I expected to happen.”
Brady took a few steps back, not really sure what to say. Shaun tried to gauge his facial expressions in the fire’s light, which left shadows dancing on the teen’s face. He shrugged, “I can’t promise anything. I hate those things though.”
“The short and not so sweet of it is that my dad worked at a chemical company. Before he worked there, he was in the military. He was smart. Like, genius smart. Never refused to say something wasn’t possible if you put the work into it.”
“Is the short and sweet that your dad created or had something to do with that shit that started it?”
“He tried to create a cure for cancer. His lab assistant didn’t think they were getting results fast enough and tweaked the formula, lied about the results. The woman he was creating it for—his fiancé—was dying quickly from cancer. He had a choice of giving it to her and seeing if it worked, or not and letting her die. Well, he did the latter, and that was the outbreak in Des Moines. The company made a huge batch of it, and there was a spill; everyone within miles of it got infected and continued on their way. It’s impossible to know how far they all got before the shit hit the fan,” Shaun explained.
“Yeah, well, that was exactly what happened when they made it here. There were cars crashing into everything. Once people went to see what was going on, they just came out and killed anything in their way. So, the Seals came to your town because they thought your dad was still around? Did he flee town or something?”
“He did, but that was after the outbreak. He made sure myself and some friends, and some kids we picked up along the way, were safe.”
“Do you think he is working on a cure somewhere?” Brady asked.
“There is no cure. He isn’t working on anything.”
“Fuck, there has to be some way to kill them. Have you pleaded with him?”
“You aren’t understanding, Brady. Sorry for the confusion, but I don’t care to talk about it. My dad got bit by one of them.”
“That’s a little ironic, isn’t it? He makes death in a bottle and then gets bit by his own creation. What about his lab guy, where is he? Is there anyone who worked on the project that knows what to do with it?”
“No, Brady, they are all dead. The Seals sent the information to their commanders. They tried to figure something out, but months after the outbreak, the government had their last broadcast, saying that there was no cure. They’d checked some of The Turned, and they were unsavabl
e. Their heart explodes. There’s something inside of my dad’s cure that keeps them from dying; it just regenerates them or something.”
“So, they can’t die, they want to eat everything, and they don’t ever stop. Hell of a cure,” Brady said.
Ben sat in the dark, listening to the two talk, thinking of his mother and how he’d lost her to them. The words from Shaun peeled a layer from his heart with each explanation. Ben didn’t care about Jay sleeping. “You couldn’t have told us earlier that you—or your dad, whatever—were responsible for this shit? What the fuck, Fox?”
Shaun did his best to stay calm, but disrespect towards his father was going to be unacceptable. “Be careful, Ben, we aren’t all that close. Last thing I'm going to tolerate is anyone talking bad about my dad. You have every reason to, but if you aren’t him, then you don’t know what really happened; no one would. If you can’t handle the fact that this is what happened, then let me know. I’ll take you and anyone else that needs a ride back home. No judgement. Just let me know. I'm sure your dad would be really happy to have you back.”
Ben sat there, sitting up from his blanket and thinking about it. He thought of The Turned sprinting through the streets. He’d escaped only because his mother was the slightest bit slower and had one of the dead leap on her, sending her to the ground where a horde of volleyball players he’d once daydreamed about tore her apart piece by piece until there was nothing left to turn. “I don’t know what I want to do. I guess we are going to have to see. I thought you were going to be something good. I don’t know if I can even trust you now.”
“Really, you don’t know if you can trust me? I could have kept going when I came to your town but-”
“You’re fucking kidding, right? You stopped because you want God to have mercy on your soul. You feel horrible about it! You don’t understand that what is done is done, and there’s no redemption for what you did. For what he did. Yeah, you could have kept driving, gone right on past us, but you didn’t, and that’s because of your guilt,” Ben yelled.
“Hey, Ben, shut up! We all lost people that day. He just said that his dad got taken. No matter what you are feeling, you need to get a little control over it. It isn’t his fault. It isn’t anyone’s fault. His dad is gone now. Shaun’s trying to set people up to take care of things. He’s trying to fix what his dad and his assistant did wrong. I think that takes about the biggest damn balls in the world. I couldn’t imagine being somewhat responsible for something like that and then having to worry about telling people. I’d rather crawl into a damn hole than to go out and let people know. He could have lied. He could have passed our town and let us starve to death, or become one of them when we tried finally escaping the town only to be caught,” Jay said.
“What the fuck are you on his side for, Jay?” Ben accused.
“Because he’s saved our lives more than once. You don’t think that I miss my family? Then you aren’t as smart as you think you are. Get over it. It’s been a year, they aren’t coming back. But now we get to be part of something special. If you need to hate something, hate those things that took your mom. His dad did part of it, but it sounds like his assistant is more to blame than anyone. But they are both dead and I’m pretty sure a sixteen-year-old didn’t have a lot to do with the formulas. If it makes you feel better to have someone to blame, then you aren’t quite the guy that I thought you were,” Jay yelled.
“Whatever, Jay, I'm going for a walk. I'm not going to be able to sleep after finding that out. Thanks for asking fifty questions, Brady. Really made my night,” Ben snapped.
“Screw you. I listened to him earlier, and the idea of not knowing everything about a perfect stranger while headed cross country with them doesn’t seem the smartest of things, now does it?”
Ben pulled his blanket off the ground, as did Jay a moment later. “I'm going to keep an eye on him, we don’t want to have him do anything stupid.”
“I heard that, Jay!”
“Good, you were supposed to, asshat.”
Brady waited for them to leave before whispering, “I'm sorry, Shaun, I didn’t mean for that to escalate. I promise that wasn’t what I was going for. I thought that they were all sleeping.”
Shaun flicked on the scope one more time, taking the rifle across everything in the distance. He watched Ben walk for a while, making sure that there were no dead in their path, although he figured he could probably save them again and still not get any credit for what he’d done. When he saw that they were safe, he flicked it back off. “It’s cool, I’d rather you know sooner rather than later. You let me know what you three want to do. Go have a talk with Jay and Ben and decide. I really do want to keep moving, but if I have to keep stopping for days at a time to train, I can. Though if you’re just going to bail on me, I’ll take you all back first and cut my losses.”
“I'm not going anywhere, Shaun, you are stuck with me. If it just ends up being the two of us, that is what it is. I don’t think Ben or Jay are going to want to go back though. I just think they’ll need to settle down—or Ben at least.”
“Well, we leave to head back otherwise. If you’re staying, we are going to begin some hellish workouts real soon.”
Ben yelled from the distance, “We are staying, Fox!”
He nodded his head, though no one could see it in the dark. He smiled, thinking that over time, people might get over it. Then he thought of the others that had invaded their base and realized that might not necessarily be the case with everyone. But he would take those who were competent and able to take care of themselves and build his own group to take care of the dead. He just wouldn’t commit to anyone going forward, like Ellie or his friends.
Shaun set a timer on his watch to check it in an hour and laid back. “I need to shut my eyes for a minute or two.”
“Hey, sorry, Shaun, can I ask you one more thing? I know that you said you’ve killed thousands of them. Does it make things any easier for you over time? I mean, when I sleep I just get tortured, man… even when I’m sleeping it is just shit. I don’t want to come off weird.”
“No.”
“No what, Shaun?”
“No, it doesn’t get better. I’ve killed hundreds, maybe more. At some point, you stop keeping track. Maybe when all this is over, we will be able to cure our demons that follow us. Now, let me sleep for an hour or two would you? I’m tired, man. It doesn’t happen all that often.”
“Me too.”
Chapter 4
The next morning, they packed their gear up and headed out of town even further. Shaun drove country roads until they found a spot with running water with fish in the stream—which had been an unexpected surprise—and flat ground, minus some free range growing grass that went almost forever. Shaun thought that maybe the best thing to do would be to get a place like this to bring people to. But he also knew that if you brought too many people here, trying to get enough to sustain them would make it just that much harder to do so. The fish would run out, and so would the supplies, and then the danger would arise of leaving for more.
Brady looked around the area. “Christ, could you find a spot more desolate, Fox?”
“You guys want to learn how to kill, well, you need to be able to run too. These things are fast, and using your brains is the only thing that is going to make any of this training any good. You can learn how to shoot a little better out here. When we hit that town, we’ll try to pick up a few more rifles. Better to have and not need than the latter.”
When they were set up, the three boys were looking around, expecting something but not sure what. “So, what the hell are we going to do, Fox?” Jay asked.
“We are going to run, and we aren’t going to stop until everyone has puked.”
“What does that teach us exactly, except how to waste canned stew and beans?” Ben asked.
“Ben, it means that you will know what your limits are. We’ll run until you're dehydrated, you can’t hold yourself up, and you wonder if you are going to di
e. Then, when you are at that point, you still need to pick your ass up and get back to camp. Before we go, I want to get a few pots of water boiling so we have something to drink when we get back.”
“Is this what you did?” Brady asked.
“It is, but we did it for months on end, where you guys are only going to have a week or two. We don’t have an armory worth of bullets to waste and we have no promise to find any in the future. They are as good as gold now; there’s no guarantee they haven’t all been looted, but we can hope. I know there are military bases in other states, but I’d think anyone with any common sense would end up on one. We lasted all of a few days before we went to one and made it our home.”