by Evans, Mike
The two soldiers ran for the door, guns up and ready to blow away anything in their path. What they saw when they got outside was a street only filled with dead who had already fallen. There was no Shaun. The gun’s fire had stopped, and they knew nothing of where he went. Clary yelled, “Where in the hell did he go, damn it?”
Aslin kicked the truck hard, leaving a dent. “Don’t any of you know how to follow the simplest of fucking orders? I told him not to be a hero, to stay here, damn it. What the hell is wrong with him?”
Ellie yelled in Shaun’s defense, knowing him better than anyone. “It isn’t his fault. He can’t help it; he doesn’t quit, and he doesn’t give up. He is his father’s son and he’ll come back!”
Aslin nodded slowly, seeing the anger and passion in her face, knowing that she truly believed there was little, if anything, that could stop the young man. “Let’s hope so, Ellie. We need to get moving soon though; we don’t have a lot of time to waste.”
Chapter 13: Shelter
Shaun heard the gunshots and sprinted without thinking. If there was something he could do for someone else, he was going to do so. There had been too much bloodshed today, and he did not want to see anymore spilt. He ran for everything he was worth toward the gunfire. When he reached the corner, what he saw made him only want to fire once. He took careful aim, dropping one after another. Ten of the Turned’s blood and brains were spread on the back of the brick building, slowly dripping and sliding their way to the street.
Shaun never lowered his rifle. He kept it aimed, staring with cold eyes at the scene before him. Mike was crouched on the street, head down between his knees; an empty shotgun lay to his side. After the shooting stopped and nothing had eaten him, he slowly raised himself up, looking around cautiously through the tears in his eyes. He gripped his shoulders and stomach and neck to verify there really had been nothing that had eaten or taken a bite of flesh from his skin. When his eyes met Shaun’s, they grew wide and were full of fear seeing the rifle pointed directly at him.
Mike put his hands out in front of him. “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot me. I’m sorry; I know it was a dick move. I just… I just…”
Shaun screamed, “Yeah, you got the dick part right, you son of a bitch! You know why I’ll survive and you won’t? Because I got a group and you don’t.” Shaun fired the rifle one more time and Mike’s shotgun flew in a wild spin across the street. The wooden pump handle split into many pieces, making the gun useless. Shaun turned to walk back to his group. He yelled the last words that he would ever speak to Mike again, “Don’t want anyone having unfair advantages over anyone else, do we?”
Shaun left him there, unworried about his fate. He rounded the corner to see everyone sitting outside. Ellie saw him and came running for him, not worried about anything else. “Shaun, what the hell were you thinking? We heard the gun firing in the distance and when we looked outside you were gone.” She pounded on his chest. “You can’t just go run off—what the hell were you thinking? What were you thinking, damn it?”
“I heard the shots. I thought that there was someone in need of help. I took out some more Turned though.”
“So you were too late to save them?”
Shaun nodded his head. “Yeah, there was no saving this guy. He was already gone; he didn’t stand a chance.”
The two walked up to the shop, hand in hand. Aslin was smoking a cigarette, worried sick over the damn kid. “Well, I guess it was too much to ask you not to do anything stupid, wasn’t it?”
Greg, who was just as worried and pissed about Shaun, yelled, “Dude, I was kidding when I said you couldn’t not do anything stupid. Don’t be a dumbass, Shaun. If you need to go run off half-cocked, let me know and I’ll go with you. Two is better than one. We don’t go off by ourselves if we can help it, you got it? You only got so many chances, man; don’t run out of them, please.”
Clary watched the two, knowing they were close already but knew that a friendship like theirs was going to be something that would make leaders out of the two. They would be able to help each other make decisions when they seemed impossible to make. He yelled, “Get your skinny asses inside now! We need to get packed and gone. There is no telling how long we got until those things come back here.”
Shaun and Greg just stood. Shaun wanted to tell him about Mike but wasn't sure what Greg might think. Clary snapped off like a drill sergeant. “I don’t think I need to say please, goddamn it. Get your asses moving and get it done now. Get in that building and get all the shit in the back of the truck before I snap off my foot in your ass, goddamn it!”
The two jumped, not ready to be screamed at, and got inside. Within a few minutes, they had everything in the truck and were off again. They directed Aslin to the outskirts of town where they thought that they would see less of the Turned. Shaun and Ellie sat squeezed to the sides of the truck, the back packed to the brim. Clary was standing, holding onto the top of the cab, waiting to take out anything that he saw. But to his surprise, there were no more of the Turned that they would encounter that day.
The door to a shop slammed open and a group of teens ran out of it, screaming. Clary took a knee, pulling his machine gun down and pointing it at the group, which was running for everything they could through the street. Shaun yelled, “Wait! I think they are normal. I don’t think they’re infected!”
Clary yelled, “How the hell can you tell that?”
Ellie chimed in. “Well, for one, they aren’t chasing us anymore. And two, they are standing with their hands in the air.”
Clary looked back, seeing this, and motioned for them to come forward. He yelled in through the window at Aslin to stop and reverse for them. Aslin looked in his rearview mirror and shook his head, defeated. “You have to be kidding me, right? We are purposely taking on more kids. They’re going to be pain in the asses… I can tell.”
Greg said, “Wait, you said the same thing about us, didn’t you?”
Aslin looked over, nodding his head. “Yeah, and you ended up being a pain in the ass; maybe not as bad as Shaun, but you're on top of my damn list.”
Aslin put the truck in park, waiting for the kids to make up the distance and climb into the pickup’s bed. Clary was counting them, seeing there were four new mouths that were going to need to be fed. He was not enthralled about the idea of having more responsibility to deal with.
The teens climbed in, two boys and two girls. All roughly the same age as Shaun, but some looked like they’d be seniors in high school. The oldest a boy yelled, “God, are we glad to see you guys! We just barely made it out of that school alive yesterday. My name is Jordan.”
Clary said, “So you’re on your own? You don’t have anyone waiting for you?”
They shook their heads and nothing else needed to be asked. Clary said, “Well, find a place to sit. There isn’t much room, but you are going to have a roof over your head and be safe. Aslin took a main highway outside of town a few minutes and came to a bridge made of ancient steel with a wood platform to drive across. Andy said, “Well, usually this is off limits. They closed it down a few years ago… something about it being unsafe. But when you gots zombies coming after you, do you really worry about the thirty foot drop down into the Raccoon River below?”
Aslin looked over, nodding his head slowly. “Is that a rhetorical question? Or do you really want me to answer it?”
Patrick looked out his window at the river below. “Can we speed it up a little bit there, Aslin? We got, like, a long-ass fall underneath us.”
“Watch your mouth, kid.” Aslin tightened his grip on the wheel, looking down as they drove across the long bridge. Greg sat next to Tina, watching the countryside go by. The crops were just starting to come up. It was something they’d be thankful for in the coming months, he was sure. Tina rubbed his shoulder. “You doing okay, Greg? I’m sorry about Kristy; she seemed really nice.”
Greg smiled, nodding his head. “Yeah, she definitely had something about her. There was potentia
l there, for sure.”
“Do you need a hug, Greg?”
“Well, if you're offering, but I can’t promise that I’m not going to try and enjoy it just a little.”
“It sounds like you are going to be okay if we give you a little time.”
Greg asked, “Uh, are we almost there? I don’t know how much longer I’m able to sit back here; it just feels so weird.”
Andy pointed to an old, white farmhouse. “You’ve been in the truck a whole fifteen minutes, damn it; quit your bitchin’. Look over there. That’s Casa de Andy—you can call it home until you find somewhere better to stay.”
Aslin asked, “Is there a better place than somewhere out in the middle of nowhere?”
“Probably not, but you sure as hell ain’t staying with me forever. You be happy for the time you got. I can’t be wipin’ your asses forever. Eventually you all are going to grow attached to me, and I don’t want to have to deal with the sad goodbyes.” He hocked up a loogie and spit it out the window and wiped his face on his sleeve. “Yeah, I just don’t want ya’ll growing too attached to me.”
Tina watched in disgust, nodding her head. “Yeah, I would just hate to have a tearful goodbye, Andy.”
Aslin pulled off the gravel road onto Andy’s gravel driveway that ran a few hundred yards up and had a large, overgrown yard in front of it. Andy said, “I hope you kids know how to mow. We ain’t gonna want any long grass growing around here in case those things learn how to hunt something for real.”
Aslin stopped in front of the house. There were two stories, each with a walk-around porch on it. The house was twenty years past needing its last paint job, and a screen door hung off of the front entrance. They emptied out of the truck and watched Andy walk slowly up the old wood steps, twisting open the unlocked door. “You bring all that crap in here. We are going to think it’s as good as gold in no time. There’s plenty of bedrooms; you boys can bunk in one. There’s one for the girls and one for you SEALs. Mine is on the bottom and you keep your ass out of there, and don't clean it. I got it just the way I want it, you understand?”
They all nodded, taking a handful of items into the living room and taking the meals ready to eat into the kitchen. The new additions to the group helped carry in items and then found rooms of their own. There would no be great meals at the house, but they were not going to starve. Andy pointed out into the field. “We get too hungry, all we need to do is take one of those cows out to the barn with a shotgun. We can smoke the meat and cure it, and we’d be set for months off one of those. There are plenty of them too; we just need to make sure nothing eats them.”
Shaun helped carry everything in, making neat piles that they could easily sort through at a later time. Greg went upstairs, ready to rest away from others and ready to finally let his emotions run freely. The tears fell harder than he thought they would, thinking of the girl who saw him for more than he was and could see something in him that might not have been developed fully yet, but nonetheless knew was there. She knew the man that he would become, even if he didn’t know it yet. Tina went to her room, made the beds, and lay down. Aslin and Clary made sure that every corner of the house had something that they could use to take out one of the Turned with. Andy grabbed a six-pack and a fresh pack of smokes and disappeared into his room, where he lay down and fell asleep before he knew what had hit him.
Ellie walked around the house, looking at the pictures on the walls. Most of them were very old and showed much younger pictures of Andy and his family and him as a young man dressed in his military dress uniform. She walked upstairs, admiring the old house and how nice it could be, but knowing that there was no chance of it being what it could be as long as Andy was around. She peered into the room she and Tina would share and saw that her friend was was out, her pillow wet with tears. She walked up and knocked lightly on Shaun and Greg’s door. She whispered, “Shaun, it’s Ellie. Do you want to go for a walk?”
Greg mumbled through tears, sniffing his nose, “Uh… hey, Ellie. He isn’t in here. Why don’t you check outside?”
Ellie opened her mouth to see if he needed someone to talk to but wasn’t sure if she could deal with any more heartache. She felt like she’d been on the verge of tears all day and didn’t want to worry about opening the floodgates herself. She went down the steps and outside, making sure she had her pistol that Greg had shown her how to use. She looked around the property for Shaun, not seeing him anywhere. She saw an old barn with a door open and walked up to it, slowly stepping in. It was dark and quiet and smelled strongly of farm animals. She walked into the dark looking for Shaun. He was sitting on a milking stool in the dark picking at hay on the ground. He whispered, “What’s up, Ellie?”
Ellie screamed, jumping, startled to death. “Jesus Christ, Shaun, could you be a little bit more creepy, goddamn it?”
“Yeah, probably. If you haven’t noticed, I’m kind of on a roll today.”
“You’ve just been dealing with impossible circumstances. You know that Kristy isn’t your fault. Mike isn’t your fault, either. You’ve just been doing what you thought was necessary to keep people alive. Or in Kristy’s case, to keep her from going through the pain of being one of those things.”
Shaun nodded. “Just because I did the right thing, sure as hell doesn’t mean that I felt I did… you know what I mean?”
Shaun pushed up off of the stool, pacing around the small barn. Ellie came to him, stopping him, and pressed her small palm flat to his chest. She said, “Do you feel this, Shaun? You are still alive. You still have a chance, but you need to be able to let these things go. I know not at once, but overtime. You are going to lose more people, maybe even—”
Shaun cut her off, gripping her thin arms. “It’s not going to be you. If it is, I’ll never see it because I’ll die before I let anything happen to you.”
Ellie pulled herself up close to him. Shaun brushed the hair from her face. They brought their heads in together, slowly and awkwardly, before their young lips found each other’s. They kissed slowly and deeply then Ellie rested her head on his chest. “We both need to make it, Shaun. I don’t think either one of us is strong enough to make it alone.”
Shaun gave her a long hug, kissing the top of her head. “We will make it; we will make it together, Ellie. We just have to watch out for each other. You are all that matters to me. You are everything.”
Epilogue - Six Months from Day 1
Washington, D.C., Center for Disease Research Center
Thirty minutes after outbreak at research facility
6:00 PM
Doctors McBelle and Jacobs hid beneath a gurney. The lights in the room were flickering, making the scenery around them even worse to try to take in. They watched as the Turned walked through the room slowly. They could barely hear the sniffing over the screams of tortured souls. McBelle locked eyes with Jacobs. She mouthed, “We need to move; we need to get up top and report the results.”
Jacobs was sweating profusely, sweat dripping off his head. “We just stay here and wait it out; it’s okay. You have the guard’s gun. We can, you know, hide from them.”
McBelle looked sternly, shaking her head. Her long brunette hair was a mess over her face. She was insistent. “We need to leave. All of those people on the floor will be coming back; you know this. What don’t you understand about that? They are going to—”
Drool fell in front of her face. The two doctors looked up slowly. McBelle still had the gun clenched in her hands. The zombie screamed at them and spittle flew everywhere, making them wince. They kept their eyes shut until it was done screaming. McBelle aimed the barrel square center at the thing’s forehead and squeezed the trigger once. The bullet entered its head with force, snapping its head back and making it fly off of the back of the gurney bed. It hit the floor hard. Its legs twitched and then was still. McBelle pushed up to her feet, running for the laboratory’s door. She saw the Turned rising slowly from their meals; one was still eating the intestines of a d
octor who just an hour before had been performing an autopsy on one of the Turned—the autopsy that would change the world forever.
McBelle punched the emergency exit door to lock down the facility. Jacobs screamed, “No! No! What are you doing? You just sealed us in with those things; we are all dead.”
She looked back, shrugging. “We were all dead the moment this place became compromised. This place is wired to the hilt, as you might know. They won’t let anything walk out of here, if they have their say in it. The military didn’t work so hard to keep what was left of the East Coast to let it fall to them.”
Jacobs stared around the room, realizing this would be his eternal resting place, or where he would spend forever as one of the damned, always searching for a meal, which he would never find. “We need to get this information to the CDC then. Otherwise, they will just start again; they won’t know what happened here today.”
McBelle closed the door, locking it with her badge. “They will break through this in no time, but we should be able to transmit the footage and the data from today. Get moving on it; I’m going to put as much in front of the door as I can to try to slow those things down.”
Jacobs pounded the computer keys, uploading the footage from the daily testing experiments. He hit send on the computer, transmitting the answers to everyone's questions who thought there was still hope.