by mike Evans
“What are we going to do, Shaun?” Brady asked.
“We’re going to keep driving until we crash into something or the engine blows up! I want you guys to grab a gun, you are going to need to be ready. Ben, I want you to get in the back with them, get the machine gun ready. Just flip off the safety, they are ready to go. Brady, I want you to use the high-power rifle.”
“What are we going to do?” Brady questioned.
“We’re either going to kill all of them, or we are going to die trying,” Shaun declared.
The engine finally gave out after another mile. Shaun wasted no time looking in the rearview mirror, unable to see whether there was anything there through the smoke and fire. “Let the tailgate down, let’s see what there is.”
Brady let it down, scared shitless of what they were going to see. The dead were coming, but were smoldering the fire. Shaun had seen it happen to the ones in the corn, but it was nothing compared to this. He got up, sliding near the back and lifting a crate open.
“What in the hell is that thing?” Ben said.
Shaun pulled up the fifty-caliber machine gun and mount and twisted the hatch release to the roof. He held onto a can of fifty and set it in place, wishing that Greg was here and could do the wonderful things he seemed to be naturally gifted with, with the gun. “This is a machine gun. This is the type of thing you want to use when you want to make sure that if you don’t get a headshot, they don’t get up any time soon.”
Shaun waited, but the dead did not come. He looked around the perimeter, trying to see where they were, thinking that they could come from any direction. He looked for them in the fire, which was no longer as bad as it had been when the truck had been engulfed in it. The fire burned fast and hard, and the flames almost looked purple in the daylight. The Turned walked forward, dropping to their knees before finally falling over. “Save that ammunition guys, there’s no need to waste it. We can go back into-”
The rest of the town blew up; the propane lines that ran from the tanks they had found apparently went beneath the city. The boys got out, watching as an inferno made its way through the town, shaking the ground beneath them.
Jay said, “I know that we almost died, but that was kind of awesome. I don’t think we should ever do that again, though.”
“We lost a lot of supplies. That town could have been ripe for the picking. We are going to have to be smarter about this,” Shaun said.
The four boys all looked at the truck. The tires were melted and gone, the rims bent almost in half, and the wheel wells had been destroyed from the rims. Shaun kicked at them, looking at the state of it, and watched the town burning in a blaze. He was running a million scenarios through his mind but coming up with nothing good. He knew exactly where they were from the map, how far the next town was—a long ways away—and that there was a very strong chance everything in the town had been ruined. The fact that he didn’t know how many of the dead were left did not make reentering the town overly appealing.
Chapter 5
The four of them packed what they could carry and hiked away from town by foot. Within two hours, they ran into a farm. Shaun surveyed the perimeter, seeing no humans or dead strolling about. “I'm sure they have a car in there. At the least we can stay here for a day and regroup if the coast is clear. Since my last idea couldn’t have gone shittier, I'm open to debate and questions.”
The other three looked at each other and none of them seemed to have any issues with the plan. They walked across the dead field, stopping every fifty yards trying to see if there was anything moving. When they were two football fields away, Shaun stopped, setting down his gear. He checked the wind direction; it was blowing directly for the house. He ran his hunting knife across his arm lightly, trying to get the cleanest wound that he could. The three boys grimaced at it. When Brady tried reaching out to stop him, Shaun said, “Don’t touch me. I promise I know what I'm doing.”
“You sure about that,” Ben said. “Because you are purposely cutting your own fucking arm. You want to get hurt or something? What happens if you get an infection?”
“I'm fine, there’s anti-bacterial cream and bandages in my pack. I can fix it once we are at the house. This blood is going to be like a cake in front of a fat kid.” Shaun held his arm and a bloody piece of his shirt up into the air, letting the blood’s scent drift through the air.
Ben said, “Dude, there’s nothing in there. Look, nothing is happening. We are just wasting time. Come on, let’s go please.”
Shaun ran his binoculars across the field one last time and handed his bloody rag to Ben. “Hold this for me, Ben. Keep it up high, though.”
Ben went to say something until Jay and Brady both said, “Whoa,” in unison.
Ben turned to see one of the dead sprinting towards them from across the field. An old woman who had to have been in her seventies or older was charging across the farmland. Her mouth was open, and she was jumping in leaps and bounds towards the four of them. Brady thought it looked like a YouTube video, and that it probably would have been comical watching the overweight woman bouncing up and down, had it not been for the fact that the side of her face had been torn clean from the bone.
“I got this, just stay back,” Shaun commanded.
Shaun sat steady waiting for her to be within a few hundred yards. The last thing he wanted to do was ruin a good shot. He did not want her to do something unpredictable. Shaun waited, trying to stay calm. When she got within a hundred yards, he squeezed the trigger, sending a single bullet down range towards her. The bullet hit with such force that her head practically exploded; the stopping power sent her backwards off of her feet, where she did not rise again.
Shaun did not wait to see if she would get up. Any questions were answered when he saw what had happened to her head. He walked past, taking the blood-soaked rag. He put it through a piece of his rifle, hoping that he would be able to get another to come out if he needed it to. He would take them outside over being in a house or office any day of the week. He liked having space, he liked even more having time to aim and put them out of their misery.
Shaun walked, not looking to see if the boys were following him. When they did not see anyone else, that was when Shaun walked slowly by the front door. He had shouldered his long gun and switched out for the machine gun.
Ben whispered, “You know I could handle one of those right? You leave me with no guns and you have two.”
“Four.”
“Four what?”
“You said that I have two; I’ve got a pistol and a backup as well.”
“Don’t you feel a little guilty, having so many of them?”
“Nope. You guys weren’t invited. If you’d have told me that you were coming or that you even wanted to, we could have gotten more guns from your town, or picked any of the ones that we passed in all that time that I was driving. Next time you are going to have a plan, why don’t you try to figure out some shit first.”
“Not a big sympathizer, are you, Fox?”
“Nope, never been a strong point in my family. You got what you deserved from the work you put into it. If anyone had a problem with that, then they could pretty much kiss someone’s ass. My dad was military; he’d worked for everything he got, had it all taken away when my mom passed, and didn’t have any empathy for anyone,” Shaun explained.
“Is that the reason you are… the way that you are?”
“Shut up, Ben, sometimes people are just the way they are. We don’t have to have an answer to everything. I'm sure there’s a lot that goes into why I am who I am.”
Shaun shouldered his rifle, walking up the steps to the porch slowly. The door had been ripped off, and the screen had been blown out of it. Shaun looked around, seeing very few pairs of shoes. It looked to him like a farmer and his wife had lived on the farm from the two pair of matching, muddy work boots, a pair of heels, dress shoes for him, and two pairs of cowboy boots.
Shaun sat in the doorway to the kitchen, liste
ning for the clatter of any presence. The smell that came from the living room was more than he could bear. He held his arm up to his nose, trying his best not to puke on the floor. When he made it to the living room, he saw a decapitated man—not killed by the dead, though there were plenty of pieces of him missing from his aged arms and legs. Shaun thought of the woman and felt a bit guilty that he hoped it was completely her doing that had done this damage.
“That’s freaking gross,” Jay said, coughing a little, trying to swallow the puke back down his throat.
“Yeah, what Jay said,” Brady whispered quietly.
Shaun moved through and they checked each room carefully. They walked throughout the house and found nothing else that needed to be put out of their misery.
Shaun set the gun down and pointed to the farmer. “Let’s get this guy outside.”
“I’m not touching that thing!” Jay said, holding his hands up.
“You want to sleep outside, or you want a roof over your head for a day or two? We have a chance to be out in the boonies with little to no-”
The door began to shake to the cellar basement. “Hello? Hello, is anyone there? Please help us! Be careful of our grandma, she’s gone insane.”
They looked to each other; the word “insane” threw them off. Shaun was thinking that if they didn’t know anything about what was going on, then there was a good chance that they’d been on the farm through all of it, which might have been a blessing. “You guys stand back, I'm going to knock the door knob off.”
He waited a second or two until he heard a few steps going backwards. He brought a hatchet out, bringing it down dead center on the knob once, then twice, until it flew off from Shaun’s force. Shaun and the others took a cautious step back, not sure what they were going to see. The door opened and out of the darkness stepped an eight-year-old boy. Shaun instantly knew they’d been in this basement for a while. He’d not seen a youth so pale in quite a long time. The boy looked around, scared when he saw the rifle and machine gun; he started to back up into the shadows again.
A woman yelled, “What the hell are you doing in our house, carrying guns? You’re just kids!”
Shaun shouldered both guns, holding up his hands. “We aren’t here to hurt you kid, we just need to rest for a day or two and then we’ll be on our way.”
“My name’s Timmy. Did you guys see our grandma and grandpa?”
Shaun nodded towards the man in the living room. Timmy looked around seeing what was left of his grandfather. Tears began to well in his eyes, and a girl with auburn colored hair and green eyes stepped forward. He was confident from first glance that the two of them were related.
She saw what Timmy was freaking out about and instantly clutched him to her waist. “It’s okay, Timmy, grandma must’ve done that. I don’t know what the hell she was thinking, she just went crazy after she got back home from town. She was just going to pick up some groceries she’d forgotten… we were going to make a pie.”
“Have you been at the house this entire time? I mean since it started?”
“Since what started?” the girl asked.
Brady spoke up. “When your grandma went crazy, well… it wasn’t really that she was crazy, so much as infected.”
“Infected with what?” Timmy said.
“A virus that turns those things into zombies. It’s what happened to your grandma, if I had to guess. What’s your guys’ name?” Brady replied.
Timmy backed into the shadows, the view wasn’t easy with the sun coming in, they’d been mostly in the dark the entire time. It was nice to be out, but each of them looked like they were having issues dealing with it.
The girl stepped out slowly again, opening her eyes cautiously, wanting to let the light in but not deal with the pain. “My name is Brandy, this is my little brother, Timmy. Yes, we’ve been in here since it started. We were coming out to spend the weekend. School had just gotten out; us and my cousin Talon, who’s trying to not come out of the dark for some reason, were going to help my grandpa with planting season.”
Talon stepped out from the shadows. “Don’t talk about me like I'm not here, Brandy. It’s just so damn bright.”
Shaun held out a hand to shake with him. When the boy stepped out of the shadow, he realized his hand was about ready to grab the kid’s crotch. Shaun had seen plenty of big kids at school but this kid had a baby face that looked like he couldn’t be older than fourteen or fifteen, yet was well over six foot.
Ben, who was less apt to be smooth said, “Jesus Christ, what the hell happened to you? You’re a fucking giant!”
“Oh, he said, the F word, Brandy! Oh, you’re bad. Grandma would have whooped you bad.”
Jay thought of the old woman shaking his head. “Sorry kid, Timmy, right? You guys going to be all right here, by yourselves?”
“We’ve been in that stupid cellar for the last year. I thought that we’d end up dying down there. The only thing there is to do down here is workout and sleep, and you can only sleep so much in a day,” Talon said.
“So, you must never sleep, judging by the size of those guns. Why didn’t you try getting out of there?” Brady asked.
“Because my grandma could be seen running past every so often. We thought that she’d left, and then she’d catch a whiff of something and just stay here. Right when it all started, my Grandpa Pete stuck us in here. He said not to come out for anything, or until someone came to help. Well, when a man like him says something, you do what he says to do. Just as he was locking it we saw my grandma coming and leaping in the air...” Brandy said.
“Yeah, and grandma can’t jump, cause she’s old,” Timmy said, jumping up and down nervously.
“She’s not the only one of them, guys. I'm sorry to be the bearer of shitty news,” Shaun said. “These things pretty much have taken everything over. There’s no cure, and there’s no one to save us. The government is practically as good as dead… at least it is in Iowa. I'm making my way across the state trying to show people a few things.”
Talon laughed. “And who the hell are you?”
“I’ve been out in this crap since it started. I haven’t been hiding in some basement from my grandma the entire time. How are you guys alive? I mean… no, really, that is exactly what I mean; what have you been doing?”
“We’ve been eating out of jars for the last year. My grandma thought that canning was the best way to make sure there was always food. They had storage shelves filled with them like you wouldn’t believe. We still had plenty when you came. If I never eat another one, I might not complain, though,” Brandy explained.
“Well, you might think it’s not too bad after you eat a few of these MREs that I have on us. We need to recoup for a day, if that’s okay. It’d be nice to have somewhere to sleep where we don’t have to keep an eye open at night,” Shaun said.
“We can show you all around,” Timmy said.
“I wish Grandpa Pete would have thought about it before sticking us in that dark freaking hole. If he could have let us get upstairs, we could have put grandma out of her own misery a long time ago. I’d have been perfectly fine not having to hide in a cellar for twelve months. We are lucky we didn’t get sick or freeze to death,” Talon said.
“Where’d you go to the bathroom?” Jay asked.
“There’s a toilet down there; thank god that it didn’t get plugged up. It could have been worse, I guess. Not sure how, but I'm sure something bad could have happened. We had to be quiet because every time we said something, if grandma was around, she could hear it. Woman could catch anything and she’d go insane and start running laps around the house, year round, didn’t matter,” Talon said.
Shaun, who had only heard put out her misery, said, “Wait, there’s an upstairs to this house?”
“There’s an attic. That’s where grandpa keeps all his guns and stuff. He locked us in there, and that door wasn’t about to budge for anything. At a few points I tried opening it; I didn’t care if we lived or died if
it meant we’d have to be prisoners for the rest of our lives.”
“Does he have a lot of supplies?” Shaun inquired.
“What if he does?” Talon shot back.
“Don’t be an ass, Talon. Why, do you guys need something?” Brandy asked.
Shaun shrugged a little. “Honestly, any semi-automatic ammo would be great. I’ve got what you see. We had more ammunition, but we could only carry so much when our truck broke down.”
Ben, who couldn’t help himself, snorted, trying not to laugh. “Broke down? You mean after we set an entire town on fire.”
The three newcomers all stared at Shaun, who was trying to go about explaining this to them. He had left wanting to try to help others and do it on his own. Now, he did not have three faces staring at him, but six. He thought of what his dad would tell him, how plans were the best thing in the world until God decided to show you just how very small you are.