by M. Van
“Ow,” she said and clutched a hand at her side. She sighed as she shifted her butt before her eyes fell on me. Her brows furrowed as she inspected my face. For a moment, I thought she was going to fuss or pity me, but instead she said, “Well, I won’t be carrying you very far. Where’s your ride?”
For some reason, those words brought a smile to my face, where a moment ago I felt more like crying. I glanced around and spotted my chair. A handful of zombies stood between it and me. I sighed at the daunting task, but at least it gave me something to focus on.
“Do you think you’ll be able to walk if you can lean on me?” I asked.
“I guess we’ll find out,” Angie replied.
“Okay,” I said and hoped I sounded more confident than I felt. I checked the weapon Mags had handed me and confirming the safety was on, I tucked it into one of the pockets of my cargo pants. Just as I was about to maneuver into the chair’s direction, Angie grabbed my shoulder.
“Hey,” she said as she pulled me into a hug. “I’m glad you’re all right, kid.” The hug felt too good to voice any discontent about her calling me a kid, but I did scowl at her as she released me. With a grin, she waved me off.
“Go already,” she said.
With that, I shifted my butt along the ground in an attempt to go get my chair. It wasn’t easy getting past the zombies as they roamed around me, but by nudging their legs, I managed to get them moving and created the room I needed to pass.
After glancing up a few times and witnessing the blank stares on the faces of the newly infected, I kept my eyes down. Their noses were raised into the air, and their jaws snapped open and closed just as with every other zombie, but their normal-human-looking faces were an unwelcome distraction. The ones that noticed me kept following me with those foggy eyes, and something in those eyes made it appear as if they screamed for help. Help with being put out of their misery.
I felt exhausted as I reached my chair and turned it into its upright position. Shots rang out as I slid into my seat, and I flinched in reaction. I had removed the gun from my pocket and slid it between my thighs so I would have easy access.
The automatic gunfire sounded close, and my eyes immediately searched for Angie. I could only make out parts of her uniform as zombies crossed my line of sight. In a combination of shoving zombies from my path and pushing the wheels of my chair forward, I made my way back to her. Fortunately, the grass didn’t offer that much resistance.
As I approached, I heard her talking, but I couldn’t make out the words, until she called out, “Ash, I’ve called those idiots and told them to stop firing while we’re still in here, but keep your head down just in case.”
I didn’t know whom she had meant by “those idiots,” but I figured it meant she and Mags hadn’t come alone, and we could use the help getting out of here. Angie was tough, and although it seemed her injury wasn’t life threatening, it must have hurt like hell, and I doubted whether I’d be able to help her get out of here.
Easing the final zombie aside, I rolled at a stop by her side. She looked up at me with a silly grin, but it didn’t hide the pain along with the exhaustion of her face.
“You ready,” I said as I stuck out a hand to help her get to her feet. Nearby voices distracted me. I glanced up, just as the bodies of two zombies were forcefully pulled aside, and I was faced with the barrel of a rifle pointed at my head. The tall soldier holding the weapon raised his head and frowned. My eyes widened as another zombie was jerked from the circle surrounding us and made way for another, stockier soldier.
“Hey, babe,” he said as the stocky soldier knelt at Angie’s side, “you all right?”
“Shut up, Tom,” she replied. If her face hadn’t already been flushed by the pain, I think it might have at Tom’s words. I raised an eyebrow, and she rolled her eyes at me as the tall soldier, who by then had lowered his weapon, spoke.
“You must be Ash,” he said.
I nodded and took the hand he offered.
“I’m Preston, and this is Tom,” he added. “We’ve been traveling a bit with your friend over here.” My eyes shifted to Angie for confirmation, and she nodded in reply. Tom had taken it upon himself to check Mags’s handiwork and inspected Angie’s dressing. He spoke to her in a soft voice as he promised that she’d be okay, but the look on Tom’s face had me worried. That and the color that seemed to drain from Angie’s face all of a sudden.
“We’ve heard Mars on the radio and came here as fast as we could. Where did they go?” Preston asked. The urgent tone of his voice drew my eyes from Angie, and I met Preston’s eager gaze.
“Mags ran off that way,” I said, pointing a finger. Without hesitation, he tapped Tom on the shoulder and said, “You got this?”
“Right behind you,” Tom replied. With that, Preston stepped around us and disappeared into the crowd of zombies. In a reflex, my hands shot to my push rings and turned to follow.
“Wow, there, kid,” Tom said as he grabbed my chair.
“Let go,” I said and tried to wrench my chair from his grasp. Mags was still out there, and if it hadn’t been for Angie, I would have been with her. We would have faced Warren together, just like we’d always done. Now that Tom was here, he could look after Angie.
“There is nothing you can do out there,” Tom added.
“The hell there isn’t!” I said and lashed out at his arm holding my chair. It shouldn’t have surprised me that Tom wasn’t at the least impressed by me striking his muscular arm.
“Listen, kid—” Tom started to say, but Angie cut him off.
“Don’t call her kid,” she said, sounding determined, “Now shut up and help me. We’re going with her.” She gave Tom a look that made him feel like a five-year-old being reprimanded for stealing candy if his wide-eyed stare had been any indication. Within an instant, Tom released my chair and pulled Angie’s arm over his shoulder. I heard her groan as he helped her up, but I didn’t wait to see whether they had followed as I pushed my chair past the lingering zombies.
I heard them shouting before I could see them. Mars must have been able to cut Warren off because they didn’t seem that far off. I pushed through the remaining zombies standing between me and the edge of the grass, and I stopped where a railing separated the field from the stands. I rolled up next to Preston, who stood unmoving, with his rifle raised and pointed at Warren.
The doctor had found his way up the stands and stood on one of the benches on the ninth or tenth row.
“Give it up, Warren,” Mars shouted, standing at my far left in a similar posture to Preston, with his weapon raised and pointed at Warren. Mars had barely climbed the stands, but then there had been no need to go higher. With Mags on my right, they had Warren boxed in. He could go up, but that was it. Angie was breathing heavily as she and Tom came up from behind me. Tom eased her down next to me. We shared a glance that told me she was hanging in there as Preston called out to Warren, “Drop the weapon!”
Just in case, I grabbed the gun Mags had given me and added another weapon pointing in the direction of Warren. Tom did the same.
The doctor didn’t seem impressed as he flexed the muscles in his shoulders. He stretched his head from left to right and then said with a shrug, “All right.” He released the gun he was holding, and it fell to the ground with a thud. “As long as you don’t think that this will do you any good.”
“Shut up and put your hands up,” Mars said as he took a step in the doctor’s direction.
“Why even bother?” Warren said, sounding cocky. “You’ll have orders to release me within the hour.”
“I wouldn’t count on it,” Preston said.
Warren grinned as he narrowed his eyes at Preston. “Are you sure about that?” he said.
“What is he talking about?” I asked to no one in particular.
“Politics,” Angie said through clenched teeth. I glanced down at her as understanding dawned. Warren had been getting support in high places through all this, and they would
get him free to do whatever they needed him to do. I couldn’t let that happen and tightened the grip on my weapon.
“No!” I said adamantly, “We can’t let that happen.” I felt the anger starting to build inside me as my eyes locked on Warren. It seemed as if everything around us ceased to exist except for him, me, and the memories that kept me awake at night—images of box-shaped rooms with glass walls, examination tables, medical equipment, and most of all, those blank, fogged-over eyes of the infected that haunted me in my dreams. As I sat there in the midst of the infected on this field with the man responsible facing the other end of my gun, I couldn’t just let him leave so that he might do this to someone else. My index finger slid over the trigger.
Mars and the two soldiers didn’t even flinch at my exclamation, but Mags shifted her gaze to me.
“Ash,” she said in a low voice. I caught her watching me from the corner of my eye, and I could read the concern on her face, but that wouldn’t stop me from pulling the trigger. She lowered her weapon and came down the steps until she met solid ground.
Preston cursed as Mags crossed his field of vision, and he had to adjust the aim of his weapon around her.
“We need him alive,” she said.
“No,” I shot back at her as I kept my eyes on Warren’s cocky grin. I could nearly taste the venom in my voice, and I hadn’t meant to spew it at Mags. God knows she had never deserved that, but I couldn’t help myself as everything that had happened because of this man stirred inside my head. “He deserves to die for what he has done.”
Even Warren shifted uncomfortably at the sound of my voice and the words that fell from my mouth. The smirk on his face disappeared, and his complexion turned into a shade of ghostly white.
“I know,” Mags said and I knew she felt the same as me. We had lived through this together, and she hated the man as much as I did, but still she stepped closer and placed a hand on top of mine holding the gun. Tears fell from my eyes and rolled down my cheeks as I looked up to face her.
“That is not your burden to bear,” she said. I felt the trust we shared resonate between us, but her green eyes held an iciness that I had rarely witnessed as I let her take the gun from my grasp. “It’s mine.”
I blinked the tears from my eyes, as the way she had said those words resonated inside my head, and realization dawned. Within the same second Mags swung the weapon around and fired. She kept firing until the weapon clicked, empty and all that was left of Warren was a bloody corpse drilled with holes, and for some reason Dutch cheese came to mind.
Epilogue
Mags
My feet dug into the warm sand as they poked out over the towel that I lay on. A warm breeze caressed my scarcely clothed body, and I couldn’t care less that the bikini I wore didn’t cover the scars that marked my body. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky as the sun started to make its descent toward the horizon, and the weather had been perfect for a day’s lounging at the beach.
Children’s laughter caused me to raise myself up onto my elbows, and a smile tugged at my lips as I watched Mars lift Rowdy up over his head. The little man was all giggles as he spread his arms and pretended to fly like a bird. A few feet away, Toby chased the waves as they rolled up and down the beach. It hadn’t taken long for the kid to warm up to me again, and the smile on his face as he played in the surf was contagious.
A couple of towels over to my right Ash had a look of focus on her face as she mimicked Savanna’s hand signing. The two of them had become friends over the past few weeks, and it was good to see Ash hang out with someone closer to her age. Savanna was a few years older than her, but I think Ash’s experiences in life more than made up for the age difference. She had become eager to learn sign language, and ever since, the two of them managed to hold up quite a conversation between themselves.
Pushing my sunglasses up, I drew in a deep breath, faintly tasting the salt of the North Sea and felt content. This wasn’t where I’d pictured ending up. In fact, I’d thought never to see my home again, but here we were, on the west coast about sixteen miles outside of Rotterdam, sitting at the beach at Scheveningen. Fortunately, the seaside resort had become a safe zone, similar to what we had come to know in the US, and with the help of Divus, the Dutch government had managed to push the zombie plague back as far as below the Waal. The river basically cut the country in half and served as a border much as the Mississippi did. The threat wasn’t over, but at least some things had turned back to normal, and I had found my way back home, although it hadn’t come easy.
I had pissed off some very high-ranking people by pulling the trigger on Dr. David. The act itself had come as a shock to me as much as anyone. I knew we needed him alive, but seeing Ash nearly torn apart by the emotions of fear and anger that had been left behind by the things that this man had done caused something to snap inside me. The moment I took the gun from Ash’s grasp, I’d felt this calm fall over me. I knew what I had to do, and it was easy. That was kind of what had scared me most about what I had done. That it had come so easy.
The shock came afterward as I met the eyes of the people around me. The ones that had looked at me wide-eyed and in disbelief. At least Preston and Tom had. The anger on Preston’s face had been evident, but the words he spewed hadn’t registered, as if they’d bounced off my ears before their meaning could reach my mind. Nothing had registered except the relief on Ash’s face, and anything else did not matter.
As I stood frozen in place, it had been Mars who had taken the empty gun from my shaking hand. The calm I had felt before seemed to dissipate, and the effects of coming down from an adrenaline rush had replaced it. My legs had buckled, and Mars had wrapped an arm around my waist to help lower me to the ground while he’d knelt beside me.
“It’s okay,” he had said in that calm and soothing voice of his. “It’s gonna be okay.” I had stared into those pale jade eyes as he’d tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. In those eyes, I had seen something that I’d never wanted to live without, and I’d believed him as he repeated his words. “It’s gonna be okay.”
“It’s over now, right?” Ash had asked, and her voice had pulled my gaze from Mars. She was probably the only one that could ever do that, and I hadn’t thought he’d mind.
Hopeful blue eyes had stared back at me, and for once I’d allowed myself to feel it too: hope that everything was going to be okay. I had wrapped my arms around Ash to pull her close, and I’d felt Mars’ strong arms wrap around both of us.
“Don’t forget about me,” Angie had groaned as she sat with her back leaning against Ash’s chair. She’d stuck her hand in the air, and I had grabbed it, holding it tight.
Not even getting arrested for what I had done had taken away that newly regained hope. It hadn’t taken the soldiers that had followed us inside the stadium long to find their way across the field to us. Injected with Divus, the combined military forces had reclaimed the camp in no time and had kind of caught us by surprise as we’d stood around Dr. David Warren’s corpse.
Despite the anger he had displayed moments before, Preston had tried to spin a tale, but that hadn’t felt right. Anyone could have seen what had happened, especially with helicopters flying overhead, and I hadn’t wanted Preston to jeopardize his career. So under the scrutinizing glares of the others, I had come forward and told the truth.
As I’d sat in some jail cell, I had held on to the memories of those final moments on that field. I had everyone I needed in one place. Mars and his son were okay, Angie was going to be fine, and we had found Ash. She’d been a little banged up, but she was a tough kid. She’d be fine.
Stuck in that cell, lying awake at night, I hadn’t been able to stop the fear that I might have forfeited my family with that act of revenge, but I’d never given up hope. Fortunately, those had only been a couple of nights.
For the first time in my life, I’d come to appreciate the perks of being the child of a rich and influential man. If something needed to be negotiated, then my fath
er was the man for the job. Over the years, he had turned his company into a highly acclaimed multinational that sold computer parts all over the world, and he had done it all on his own. His ties with the Dutch government had given him an edge in negotiating overseas, and I guessed he’d approached getting his daughter out of jail with even more tenacity than any deal he had ever brokered.
Of course, there had been extenuating circumstances. They’d had our full cooperation during the development of the Divus serum. The government would not have had this weapon against Mortem virus if it hadn’t been for us, and it seemed we had gained some appreciation for that.
It had been one of my dad’s main bargaining chips, and with everything that had come to play these past two years, I wouldn’t have been surprised if my dad had even threatened to sue the US government, but that would have meant all of Dr. David Warren’s little secrets would have become public.
Instead, deals had been made and in the end I think they were just glad to get rid of us. Personally, I’d made a point not to know the details of the arrangements that had been concocted. All I knew was that they’d basically kicked me out of the country and was told never to return. Fortunately, they had left Ash the choice to come with me, and she had chosen just that.
“I’d bet your mom and dad never expected you to bring back four grandkids?” Angie said as she poked her head up. She lay stretched out beside me on her own towel, dressed in a bikini and soaking up the remaining sun.
“If I’m not mistaken, you showed up with the kids,” I said, but I couldn’t stop the grin from forming on my face. Instead of staying behind, Angie had decided to tag along after she had visited her family. Together with Savanna and Toby, she had arrived a few days after Ash and I had settled into my parents’ home. Expecting our visitors, Mom and Dad, who had welcomed us with open arms, had offered to stay at my place for a while, and with Mars and Rowdy arriving that same week, it had seemed like a sound idea.