by Chris Lowry
Before the Z, I decided.
Since then, it was one constant cortisol dump after another, worry for the kids, worry for the people in the group, heck, even worry for myself.
All under the constant pressure of Z.
And people trying to kill me.
Kill us.
The birds kept singing, but there was a different smell on the air.
Funny. I took a breath expecting rotting meat and decaying flesh smells to cling to the back of my throat.
This was smoke.
Faint, but there. Wet smoke, like a fire doused too fast and left to smolder in the muck and mud.
I stopped beside a tree and studied the woods.
Easy to get lost in.
Mostly pine, but evergreens scattered among them, oaks, hickory and maples filling in some of the spaces.
There was no order to the trees, which was a little strange.
I grew up in a pine forest built by a logging company. They would come in, clear cut the forest and replant saplings in neat straight rows, ready to harvest twenty years later.
It was easy to stand on one end and stare straight down a row, until the undulation of the ground underneath caused a gradual shift that hid the other end in the distance.
Here it was different.
The ground buckled and shifted, but the there was no order to the trees. Everything was random.
Except the X.
I was five hundred meters from the camp, maybe more and two trees were lashed together to form an X eight feet off the ground.
It didn’t look natural, and I took several slow, quiet steps closer to get a better look.
A vine tied the trees together, with a skin thrown around it, like a teepee.
I moved closer. Slower.
There was a tent across a small scratched out clearing, two more further on.
And a shallow pit scraped into the earth full of mud and ash.
Smoke trickled off gray charred logs.
The campsite was empty, but only by just a few minutes.
This close to our site.
If they had waited to say hello, or event to start shooting, it would have answered a question.
Like what they wanted.
But since they disappeared, probably after seeing me walk through the woods, it made me nervous.
I stopped behind a tree and kept watch for a few minutes. It stretched longer and I wondered if I was being watched back.
But the birds kept singing, the sun kept shining and after waiting for half an hour, I turned back toward the bus.
Either they weren’t coming back, spooked by my appearance, or they were waiting me out.
Neither would do me any good and I wanted to get back to the bus to double check on my people.
The sun slipped below the horizon, but twilight was bright enough to keep me from walking into trees.
I made the perimeter of our camp at full on dark, drawn by the orange glow of a campfire.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
I guess they didn't hear me coming.
I wasn't trying to be stealthy, but maybe too much time sneaking around the woods made me watch my steps, or I was just lucky.
Probably lucky.
I could see the flicker of the campfire through the trees and it made me think of how to hide it better in the future.
There weren't too many folks roaming around after dark, and there happened to be some, chances were high there were up to no good.
Trying to start trouble in my neighborhood.
"He used to think we wanted his money," said Bem. "That he had to provide for us. So that's all he focused on. Even on our weekends with him and our summers with him, he was always working. On the laptop, on the phone. And now, he thinks that he still has to provide for us. Not with money, but with all he's got left."
"He's got a lot left."
"Does he?" asked the Boy. "He keeps getting into situations that are going to get him killed. Get one of us killed."
It's weird to listen to people talk about you when they don't know you can hear them.
And this didn't have the flavor of gossip, though technically I guess it was. If it wasn't, it was a close cousin.
They were discussing me, and I felt awkward. Embarrassed.
It was true, I did think most of what I was good for in regards to the kids was providing a paycheck.
I didn't have the best examples growing up, and I wasn't around enough for the little moments to turn those into memories.
Sure, we had good times.
We always talked about the two times the boy fainted, and how Bis, my youngest got into the wrong car in a parking lot because it looked just like my rental.
We talked about games and the hotel room we called home every time I was in town.
But there was so much I missed, so much I couldn't see just because I wasn't there.
I compensated by sending money.
By working hard to give money.
I suppose that's how I valued myself eventually. Based on how much I could provide.
When I looked in the mirror, I saw a cash value, and when it came time to no longer provide cash because let's face it, Z worked on a cashless society, I was left searching for what I could provide.
What I could define myself by.
"He's gotten us out of a lot of tight spots," Tyler said softly. "Your dad is a fighter."
The Boy sighed.
"Do you know who his favorite hero is? Batman."
"Because he's self made," said Anna.
I didn't know she realized that. I pressed further into the tree, hiding in the shadow.
It was too late to step out.
They would know I had heard something, maybe guessed I'd heard a lot.
Now it would just be weird.
So I hid instead.
"Exactly," the Boy continued. "He talked about this a couple of times. He wasn't an alien. He wasn't a mutant. He was just a guy who worked on his skills and became a hero. Basically, he just said to the world, I am a Super Hero, even though he didn't have any super powers."
"Your Dad trained to fight?" asked Brian.
"Probably. We don't know what he did when he wasn't around us, but he had a lot of time to fill. But what he said about Batman, about a lot of super heroes is, did they create their own enemies."
"Batman made Joker," said Anna.
"But what he meant was a chicken and egg debate," Bem added. "Yes, the world needed a hero, but did those heroes create super villains just by stepping up? We had a great talk about it."
"I never would have pegged him for a comic geek," Brian said.
"My point is you say he keeps fighting for you, but what if he's creating the fights?"
"He's not," Anna answered quickly.
"You've seen him."
"Yes, he's saved us. He said he would come to get us if something like this happened and he did. It's amazing and unbelievable. But he's also made a lot of enemies."
"Couldn't he have just driven across the country and picked us up? Car hop to get to Arkansas, then car hop to find Bis? Instead, we're fighting. Everyone."
I wanted to step around the tree and start defending myself.
I didn't ask for the General to start hunting me.
I didn't ask for Mags to kidnap the kids, or the cults to kidnap Anna, or her husband to declare a jihad on me.
I was just a simple guy trying to save my kids.
Those other people, the bad guys, they just happened to cross my path.
But what if you don't believe in coincidence.
What if karma was a bitch and this was payback for dumb choices I'd made in life.
What if I was making my own villains?
Could I have just snuck across the backroads of the South to rescue my children, skipping fights, skipping help when asked, and playing the role of a mobile hermit?
Like Mel in her cabin, just doing my own thing while the world went on around me?
"I want to t
ell you a story about your Dad," Hannah spoke up.
The weight of her mother's death made her voice low and husky, throat torn by ragged sobs.
She was dealing with guilt too I suspected for her role in surviving.
She could have talked Byron out of it but didn't.
"When we first met him, maybe we'd known him for two days, three. It's hard to keep track of time now, but we were still new to each other. He was helping all of us escape Florida when some bad guys kidnapped me. He saved me. He didn't have to."
"Another kidnapping," the Boy huffed.
"He saved us all," Brian added. "More than once."
"It shouldn't happen more than once," the Boy said. "The first time he did it, he should stop putting the group in those situations."
I couldn't see their reactions, but their silence told me they were thinking about it.
Did I keep putting them all in danger?
Was that what I was doing to pay my bills now?
The only thing I was good for was rescuing them, so if they weren't in danger, they didn't need rescuing.
If that was the case, I wasn't worth much to the group.
If I'm not a fighter, what am I?
"Your Dad is a hero," said Brian. "We can second guess everything, every decision, every fight and everyone we've lost. But if it wasn't for him, we might not be here, and we certainly wouldn't be together."
"I hope I'm nothing like him," said the Boy.
It was a kick in the nuts.
A kick in the nuts with a toe tap that followed.
I felt hollow, scooped out and empty.
I could hear my heartbeat thudding in my ears.
I guess most people get their children's respect, or want it, but I hadn't earned it.
Being an absent dad had consequences and choosing to help others had ramifications downstream.
Fighting had consequences.
So did living.
A part of me wanted to leave. I quit that pity party fast.
They still weren't safe. Even if for the moment, the danger had passed, I couldn't abandon them.
None of them.
But I wasn’t strong enough to step around the tree. I couldn’t handle the looks on their faces when they say me, when they realized I had heard.
I turned in the darkness and made my way back to another trail.
Then I made a lot of noise on the way in again. This time they heard me and stopped talking.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
"Before," I said then stopped.
I wasn't sure how much I wanted to share.
But once a woman has wiped zombie guts off of you, bathed you in pink bathwater and picked the gristle and bone from your hair, there aren't too many secrets left.
"Sometimes, I would sit in my house and feel sorry for myself," I said.
"I would listen to sad songs and cry because my kids were a thousand miles away. And when I was with them, or in the state waiting to see them, I would cry because my youngest couldn't come."
I heard her stir and was afraid I said too much, showed too much.
"Isn’t that sad?" I asked without expecting an answer. "Some broken hearts never mend. I'll never know a life with the three of them under one roof, anything approaching normal."
She snorted.
"Are you laughing at me?" I twisted around and looked at her.
She was. A small smile lit her face.
"This," she circled her finger to indicate the camp, the woods. "Is normal?"
"Old normal," I corrected.
"I know what you meant. But maybe it was normal. My Dad had kids with another woman after he divorced my mom."
"Mine too. I called them his second family."
"It happens," she shrugged. "People get together when they're young and grow apart."
"That sounds like making an excuse," I said. "I'm an expert at those, you know. Excuses."
"I've had a lot of practice too."
"Did you resent him?"
I was afraid to ask. It took more courage to let the words out than it did to face down a horde of Z outside a five story building on the outskirts of Nashville.
If she said yes, I'd be afraid my kids would resent me.
I crossed half the country to save them, an act of love.
But what if they couldn't forgive me for not being there in the first place. For being gone.
"I thought I would," she said. "But I never did. My mom remarried too, and I love my step-dad. Loved him. And my siblings, though they were half, I loved them too."
"All gone now?"
She shrugged.
"It's the way of it. I don't mean to sound glib, but we've lost so many, it's like you grow to expect it."
"Not on my watch," I said.
But it was just tough talk. She knew it. We had lost a lot since Florida.
Too many.
"Speaking of watch," she said and pushed me away from her. "It's my turn."
I watched her go to the ladder bolted to the back of the school bus and pull herself up the steps to take her turn.
Two hours in the cold, two hours away from the fire while the rest of us moved inside the bus to sleep.
I thought about going up to keep her company, but it was my job to cover the dead hours between 3:00 and 5:00 am.
I'd need my beauty sleep, and because of the way I looked, I probably needed more than most.
I nudged Brian to round up the rest of the small group.
We covered the fire and tromped into the bus and shut the doors for the night.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Armies used to attack in the darkest hour before dawn.
That was when people were in their deepest sleep, the REM cycle where the brain processed everything it learned that day, dumping it into long term and short term memory.
It was the time of dreams, and a natural down cycle in biological rhythms.
Warriors figured it out a long time ago, and the knowledge has stuck, backed by science and tradition now.
It made sense to be extra alert at that time of night.
Which is why I picked it.
I’m not saying I didn’t trust anyone else.
I am saying that they had yet to earn my trust enough for me to stay off the top of our bus during that time frame.
Plus, I liked getting up early before the Z showed up, and pulling guard duty when the black night turned to gray as dawn approached made it a favorite time for me.
I wished for a cup of coffee, amended it to a pot when I saw the shadows move in the trees.
The thing about advancing light is it’s tricky.
Depending on cloud cover, the light grows brighter and brighter, extending visibility by grades.
It is not like flicking a light switch. It’s realizing that oh now I can see the rocks around the campfire. Oh now I can see the tree. Oh hey, the thing behind the tree is moving.
I placed a rifle against my shoulder and sighted on the patch of darkness.
A Z would shuffle. Maybe moan. But this thing, whatever it was, did neither.
And I knew it couldn’t be an animal, because it was trying to be sneaky.
I’m not saying animals aren’t sneaky. Watch a cat stalk a mouse, or a mountain lion target a jogger as its next easy meal.
But the majority of non-predators in the forest move like they’re grazing or searching for food, unless something is chasing them.
If they’re being chased, they don’t flit from tree to tree.
Only one animal moves like that.
A person trying to hide. Trying to spy.
I thought about dropping them and lay my finger on the trigger.
All the rules shifted after the zombie plague turned what was left of America into a wasteland, but there was a rule I was keen to implement.