by R. J. Spears
But, if a world full of zombies taught you something, it was that you couldn’t afford to look too far ahead. That lesson became evident as the sound of a helicopter’s engine seemed to settle down just a few hundred yards away. It wasn’t moving away; it was stopping. That meant the troops had landed.
I put a finger to my lips for us to be quiet, even with the distance we had away from them. I leaned in and whispered, “They have boots on the ground. We need to move.”
I had no real idea where we were and in what direction we were going. I only knew we needed to move away from the troops with the greatest of speed.
It was hard to run all-out because of the darkness and the rain. As we ran, cracks of lightning lit up the terrain, allowing us to re-orient our navigation. Tree limbs smacked us in the face and, every two minutes, one of us almost fell, tripping over small bushes or gnarly roots.
We made it another half mile, moving more cautiously when I spotted movement in the trees ahead. In the rain and the darkness, it was hard to make it out, but I could have sworn it looked like people. I stopped and put up a hand in a gesture that told the others to stop.
The forms became more distinct as they got closer. I counted three of them heading our way. They shambled among the trees, moving on an aimless path directly at us. After a few more seconds, I know who, or better put, what they were. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that only one type of creature shambled around in the night heading directly for the sound of big guns firing away.
The undead loved things that went boom in the night. The bigger the sound, the better. Sounds like that meant people, and people meant food. It didn’t matter if the people had big guns. The possibility of juicy people-food was just too much to deny.
I leaned back, turning my head back to Kara and whispered, “We have at least three deaders coming our way.”
She whispered back, “Can we go around them?”
That wasn’t something I usually considered, but she was always smarter than me.
“We could, but I think we can handle them,” I responded.
By then, Brother Ed had nudged his way into our conversation. “What’s going on?” He sounded less than happy and looked like a drowned, skinny rat.
“Three deaders coming through the trees just ahead.”
He started to raise his rifle, but I said, “No shooting. That could draw the helicopter our way.”
He looked doubly unhappy but understood the situation.
I reached for my baseball bat, but the others didn’t have their hand-to-hand weapons. Wasn’t I special?
“You’ll have to use your rifle butts,” I said quietly.
I looked forward again, and the forms were about twenty feet away, ambling along, unaware that we were there due to the hard rain. We had the element of surprise, and I decided it was best to take full advantage of it.
“Wait until they are just about on us and take them out,” I said. “I’ll take the one in the middle. Kara, you take the one on the right. Brother Ed, the one on the left.”
They both nodded in agreement, and we spread out just a little and waited. A bolt of lightning lit up the sky, searing my vision again. A monster clap of thunder followed almost immediately, rumbling in my ears for the next few seconds.
The zombie in the middle was tall and broad. Even in the dark, I could see it was missing an arm. Woo-woo. That gave me a decided advantage, I thought, and that’s what went to my head, giving me a little too much confidence.
It was down to just less than eight feet when I jumped forward, with my bat pulled back and ready to strike. The plan was to give it a face-full of my bat. The execution was me jumping forward, my feet slamming down into the mud, and then both of them slipping out from under me.
My only saving grace was that I held onto my bat because my motion got the immediate attention of tall, dark, and dead. (That’s what I was calling the one I was supposed to take out.) He fell on me just two seconds after my back hit the ground.
In a pure instinctual gesture, I brought my bat down in front of my chest to act as a barrier from the descending zombie. It worked, but just barely, pressing against the zombie’s chest and pinning its only arm there. The dead thing must have weighed two fifty or more. It leaned forward, and its jaws snapped away, only inches from my face. I pushed upward with all my strength and was able to move it’s horrid, broken teeth a few inches away, but it pushed off with its legs and lunged downward again. I turned my head to the right just in time as its teeth clacked together like a trap, just in front of my face. Its breath smelled like a trashcan full of week old dead ‘possums.
The mud worked against me as I tried to wiggle out from under the zombie as my body just sank deeper into it. It’s bulk, and gravity gave it a decided advantage. I felt my arms starting to give way. Before our middle of the night run, I had been nearly blown up and burned to death. My strength was at a low ebb.
With what little strength I had left, I gave it one last push upward. Its upper torso, and head moved back nearly a foot, but I knew I didn’t have any energy left in the tank for anything like that again. If something didn’t happen in the next few seconds, that thing was going to be munching on my face.
I held the zombie aloft for two more seconds but felt my arm muscles starting to shake from the strain. They were just a moment from giving out when I saw what looked like a dark cloud pass over the zombie’s head and a moment later, a long blade shot out of the zombie’s eyes socket, sending a stream of stinking ooze onto my face and nearly in my mouth.
I would have vomited, but I still had two hundred and fifty pounds of zombie on top of me. The zombie went slack, and I pivoted slightly to the right and let go of the stinking bastard. It plopped down face first in the mud next to me. I looked up and saw Brother Ed staring down at me still holding his bowie knife in his hand. I could swear he had a slight smile on his face.
“Thanks,” I said, but he didn’t acknowledge me. Instead, he stuck out and a hand, which I took. He hoisted me to my feet and surprised me with his strength. He must have been one of those guys with wiry muscles.
I looked around and saw two more dead zombies in the mud. One had the back of its skull caved in, and the other had a large dent where its face had been.
I took a moment and looked up into the rain and let it wash the zombie goo off my face. The others left me to have my little moment.
Without a word, I looked down and started us forward. They stepped in behind me, as I took point and headed our intrepid little group in what I hoped was north, seeing in my mind’s eye the woods filling with soldiers using night vision goggles and weapons primed and ready to kill us without hesitation. That or more undead.
Oh, happy days.
Chapter 2
Back on the Homefront
“Jones, where the hell are they?” Kilgore asked, nearly shouting.
Colonel Kilgore stalked back and forth like a caged animal while waiting for the pilots. They were in a room on the second floor the Manor that had a view onto the field they were using as a makeshift landing strip. A landing strip littered with the carcasses of the undead. Normally an even tempered man, his patience was nearing the bottom of the well. In fact, it was very nearly dry.
“The storm forced them back, sir,” Jones said, keeping his voice even and calm. “They should be here any time now. They landed just a few minutes ago and are making their way here.”
Sergeant Nathaniel Jones, a tall and broad shouldered African-American man in his mid-thirties with a gleaming shaved head, was Kilgore’s right-hand man. He had seen his commander frustrated and upset before, but not like this.
In Jones’ estimation, the man was about in, what his grandmother used to say, a tizzy, although Jones would never say that out loud. He knew a lot better than to do that. Kilgore was usually a meticulous and controlled man, but his temper seemed to be about to boil over lately with even the slightest complication. Jones had seen Kilgore browbeat a soldier, but
had rarely seen him hit a man. At least, not before the dead came back to life. Jones had watched Kilgore knock a soldier out not too long ago and witnessed him pistol whip a civilian just the day before. To say that the boss was on edge was an understatement.
But a zombie apocalypse could bring that out in a man, Jones thought. They were all under a lot of stress. Jones had seen plenty of his men crack under the strain, but it unsettled him that the Colonel displayed the wear and tear so obviously. Up until recently, the man had been unflappable, but Kilgore was the one that had ordered them off base for reasons he could only perceive. Leaving the safe confines of Wright-Patterson seemed to be an extreme move, but anyone standards. For a reserved man like Kilgore, it bordered on insanity, in Jones opinion, but he kept that opinion to himself.
Something was driving Kilgore. Something bad, and Jones had no idea what it was and what he could, or would, do about it. For the time being, it was watch and wait, because a soldier’s life wasn’t to question why, only to do or die.
“Damn pussies,” Kilgore cursed under his breath as he paced across the room, his well-polished hard soled shoes slapping on the linoleum floor and echoing off the walls. Lightning flashed outside the windows, bathing the room in its intense and almost overwhelming brightness.
Kilgore and his men had arrived at The Manor in spectacular fashion using attack helicopters to blast away a veritable army of the undead. It had been quite a show for the people of the Manor, a planned retirement community that never opened and ended up being their refuge in the face of the undead onslaught. The Manor folks liked the idea of having that much firepower on their side, but Kilgore was on a very specific mission.
Jones stood, resting against one of the room’s tables, his arms crossed, seeming calm and self-contained. A pillar of restraint in a sea of discord.
Kilgore and his contingent of troops had taken the facility less than twenty hours before in their search for Jason Carter. Jones knew that Carter was immune to the zombie virus and that was a rare commodity, but he couldn’t get his head around his commander’s single-minded fixation on capturing Carter again. And why now, after initially wanting to re-capture Carter, were the orders to take him dead or alive? It didn’t make sense.
It seemed to him they should be focused on long-term survival. All the experiments on the small handful of immune subjects had ended up two ways, with the patients dead or in failure. Carter was the only promising subject left alive, but the means by which they tried to extract a solution from him had nearly taken Carter’s life. With that in mind, Jones could see why Carter didn’t want to be found.
Hurried footsteps came from the adjoining hall, and ten seconds after Jones looked in that directions, two men in soaked uniforms shuffled nervously into the room. Kilgore didn’t wait for them to come to him but strode across the room to meet them halfway. Jones noted this as yet another inconsistency. Kilgore never met people halfway. They always came to him.
“Report, Airmen,” Kilgore bellowed out coming to a stop in front of the two men that had skidded to a halt.
The older of the two men, a man with graying hair and a flat nose, spoke in a clipped and neutral tone, “Sir, we discovered a truck on the road just thirty miles north of our current location. We thought we saw a light of some sort beside it. We engaged it with our machine guns, and after seeing no signs of life, we landed and searched the vehicle. We found no one there other than a single zombie in the road.”
“Was the truck abandoned there recently or long ago?” Kilgore asked.
“The engine was hot, and the cab seemed warm, too,” the older airman answered.
“Did you search the area around the vehicle?”
“The detail you sent with us did search the woods around that area, but in this rain, it was impossible to see any signs of people.”
“Do you think it was the people who escaped from this complex?” Kilgore asked, the intensity in his voice obvious.
The older airman paused before answering, “There was no definitive way to tell, but yes, I think it was.”
Kilgore leaned into the man’s face and yelled, “Then why the hell are you here?”
The man shrank back a step and stammered out, “Sir, we were running low on fuel, and the storm was worsening. Our thermal imaging wasn’t working in the driving rain and our night vision was nearly useless with all the lightning. Visibility, on a whole, was dangerously bad.”
It happened almost faster than Jones’ eyes could follow, but Kilgore shot out a fist and the airman went backward as if pulled by a wire, his head smacking the hard floor with a sickening thud. Kilgore moved in over the man while the other airman took two cowering steps back.
“You don’t get paid to make decisions like that!” Kilgore yelled, his voice ragged. “I said find Jason Carter, and you come back with your tail between your legs because of a little bad weather. We didn’t take this shithole to become cowards, afraid of a little weather.” He shot out a foot, and it connected with the man’s side, and Jones could swear he heard one of the downed man’s ribs crack.
Jones had seen enough and went into motion, moving as quietly as possible in a stealthy arc to get an approach from Kilgore’s rear.
“You shouldn’t have been such a fucking pussy! Coming back to base doesn’t achieve any results,” Kilgore shouted, spittle spraying from his lips.
Jones moved in with caution from behind as he watched Kilgore tense for another kick. Jones outweighed the Colonel by at least forty pounds and had nearly five inches on him, but pound-for-pound, the Colonel was one of the toughest men he had ever seen. No, correct that. He was the toughest man Jones have ever seen and, in this uncontrolled state, that could make him the most dangerous of men.
Kilgore started back with his foot, but Jones risked it and put a firm hand on the Colonel’s shoulder, knocking him slightly off balance, making him put the foot back down to maintain his upright position.
Kilgore whirled around, his fists up, ready for a fight, and his eyes blazing with fury. His breaths came out like steam from a train engine.
His mind told Jones to back down, but his heart said that there was something raging behind Kilgore’s eyes, ready to run like wildfire. Jones thought if he didn’t act, Kilgore might just kick that pilot to death. They didn’t have that many air-ready pilots left and damn few that could fly in conditions like tonight.
Hoping to diffuse the situation, Jones maintained an open and defenseless posture. He knew this left him wide open, but he didn’t want to show any sign of a threat for fear that would only incite the Colonel more.
The two men faced-off like this for nearly twenty seconds, but as quickly as the fury had come, it drifted away like a summer storm. Kilgore’s breathing calmed, and his hands fell to his side. He let his eyes drift away from Jones, and he stepped back from the downed pilot.
“I want you back in the air at first light, whether it’s raining hellfire or not,” Kilgore said as he walked out of the room.
Jones waited a few seconds to make sure that Kilgore wasn’t coming back and spoke in a quiet tone to the other airman, “Help me get this guy up.”
Together, they got the now groggy man to his feet. The airman groaned in pain with each movement, so they gave him time to recover. After another minute, the man was able to walk with assistance as both of the pilots left the room, leaving Jones alone with his doubts.
Chapter 3
On the Run
The rain let up, but we were all soaked and close to hypothermia. Naveen, with hardly any skin on her bones, shook from head to toe, and her teeth were chattering. A part of me wanted to find a place that we could consider making a fire to warm up, but there was no chance of that with the helicopter out searching for us. We may have been near freezing, but we had put some distance on our pursuers.
“Joel, can we stop and rest for a few minutes?” Kara asked, but more for Naveen and Jason than herself. Jason seemed perpetually weak from his mistreatment by the soldiers wh
en he was held captive. It didn’t help that we had used him in a half-baked medical experiment to keep one of our people alive. (One that ultimately failed.) Naveen was just so small, she didn’t have any body fat to keep her warm. We were all thinned out by months of rationed eating.
“Yes, I guess we can,” I replied. “Let’s wait until we can find a semi-dry spot.”
I’m not sure how many miles we had walked in the pouring rain, but it felt akin to the Bataan death march. I would guess we had gone close to ten miles. Since we started off just trying to escape the wrath of the helicopter, we didn’t have a course in mind, just to get the hell out of Dodge. I did know we were headed north because that’s where we had to go.
Saying, “we had to go there” was only possibly understating it. Jason, Naveen, and I had experienced the same vision about a hospital in Columbus that we had to go to. Naveen had recognized it as the cancer hospital at Ohio State University. Her father had worked there as some sort of researcher. She didn’t know what type. The hospital was familiar to her because he would take her there on weekends when he worked in his lab with the promise they would go for ice cream if she were patient. She said it required the patience of Job on some days, but always paid off in the end.
I reflected on our quest, be it a real one or a spiritual one, and I weighed against the lives of our people back at the Manor. I’m not sure the five of us could do anything to save our friends from the soldiers, but I felt really shitty about abandoning them. There was no doubt in my mind and in Jason’s that we were doing what we were being guided to do, but it was extremely hard to live with the potential reality that our friends could be dead or worse by the time we got back.
If we ever made it back, that is.
Brother Ed had a point now as I followed up our rear, trying to make sure that no one surprised us from behind, but at this point, I was lucky to be upright and walking.