by Jason White
“I don’t see what help they’d be, anyway. You said one of them was slow after all, eh?”
“She’s more than that,” Bill says. Then come three more thumps on the door. These, however, are not nearly so crippling to my heart, and I’m relieved to see Grant still clutching at his chest as well.
“Hold on a minute!” Grant says. “Give us a chance to swallow our throats for fuck’s sake!”
Silence from the other end, but Bill’s face is still there, as large as ever, his sad eyes peering in.
Grant goes and opens the door. “You scared the shit out of us,” he says.
“Yeah, sorry about that,” Bill says. “I shoulda thought and knocked with a little less oomph.” He laughs at this, but it’s not heartfelt.
He pushes past Grant and the second man follows him.
“This here’s Paul Dunham,” Bill says.
Paul nods at us. He is the exact opposite of Bill. Skinny and beardless with excited, cautious eyes. He peers at us, squints, then his eyes grow wide as though his brain is finally registering what we look like.
“I thought you said there were four of them?” Paul says.
“There were,” Bill says to Paul. To Grant, he says, “Where’d the girl go?”
“Into town, after all those trucks.”
“You kiddin’ me? She went toward the gunfire?”
“Yeah,” Grant sighs. “She’s got it in her head that they’re here to help us. To restore civilization, or some other bullshit.”
“Well, she’s got it wrong,” Paul says. “I live on Mill Street, which pretty much goes right through the middle of town. Those people this morning aren’t friendly. I can tell you that.”
“Then what are you doing here?” Grant says. “How’d you get away from them if she was wrong?”
Paul smiles, a glimmer of pride crossing his face. “They never saw me. I headed into the woods. Drove most of their trucks right into the Angus Plaza while the others stopped in front of houses.”
“What are they doing?” I ask, hating that my voice cracked.
“What they’re doing now,” Paul says. “Seems to me they’re going house to house, getting rid of the zombies.”
“Maybe Eve was right,” I say to Grant, but Paul kept going.
“That’s not all they’re doing, son,” he says. “They’re rounding up anyone who’s still alive and taking them to the plaza’s parking lot. From there they chain them up together. The ones who fight back get a bullet in the skull.”
“How many survivors do you have in town?” Grant asks.
“Not many. Most I’d say, ten or fifteen people,” Paul says. He turns to Bill. “Old man Gus took down one of the fuckers. Shotgun blast right to the chest. They took him and wife, though. The bastards!” Paul’s voice began to crack, tears filling his eyes. “They … they ordered them onto their knees and—”
“I think we get the picture,” Bill said. “The question is, what are we going to do about it?”
Bill’s daughter remains untouched by our talk. She sits in his arms, fascinated by her father’s scraggly beard. She wraps it in her fingers, twirls the hair until Bill swipes her hand away. Then the process starts again. I realize suddenly that I don’t know her name.
“Are you crazy?” I say. “What can you do? How many are there of them?”
“A hundred, at least,” Paul says. “Probably way more than that, though.
“Shit,” says Grant. He turns, runs a hand through his hair.
“Why you saying ‘shit’?” I ask him. “We’re leaving, right?”
“I can’t just leave her,” he says.”
“You can’t just leave us!” Bill says.
I laugh. The sound of it is bitter to even my ears. “You were ready to shoot us yesterday. Then, when you found out that we wouldn’t hurt you, you kicked us out of your home anyway. Now you want us to help you? Help you do what? Take out an army? Kill all their soldiers? They’ll take us out in seconds.”
What I don’t tell them is that I’m not ready to die, which surprises me. Not that long ago I thought of putting a gun to Cindy’s head, pulling the trigger, then finishing myself off. I hide the surprise from these idiots. Showing any emotion other than anger and outrage could be a mistake.
“Well we can’t just let them take everybody,” Bill says, his eyes and nostrils flaring. “At least, I can’t. I’m pretty sure Paul is with me. I guess it’s unfair to ask you guys, since you don’t live here, but it doesn’t hurt to ask.”
“What are you going to do about your wife and daughter if you fail?” Grant says. I question his motives behind this question. I doubt he’s trying to make Bill think about doing anything. No. Grant wants to do this. He wants Bill’s answer because he thinks that they won’t be coming back. Which makes my point of staying out of it and letting Eve sleep in the bed she made all the more reasonable.
At the same time, I know that if Grant is going into town, then I won’t be far behind. So, what do I do about Cindy?
The question does stump Bill, though. He stands there for a few seconds, his mouth in the shape of a small “o” while his daughter continues to curl the hair of his beard around her fingers. This time he doesn’t swat her away. He grabs her hand in his giant paw and holds it.
“I hadn’t thought of that,” he says.
Obviously, I want to say, but don’t.
“You have too much to live for,” Paul says. “All I got is my friends, like you.”
“Look, guys, this is crazy!” I say, trying to throw reason into the madness. I turn to Grant. “We can’t just go in there and hope to get Eve and get back out. You know that, right? Why don’t all of us just pack up and head out? We’ll go to the next town, then Paul, Bill, and his family can come back when the bastards are gone.”
“You make that sound like it’s easy,” Bill says.
“I left my town without looking back,” I say.
“You’re just a pea in a pod, kid,” Paul says. “You’re not old enough to have grown roots. This is my town and my people. I can’t just turn my back on it.”
“Neither can I, and I’m much younger than you, Paul,” Bill says. “At the same time, I can’t leave my wife and daughter behind. Should something happen to me …” He leaves the thought unfinished, but we all know his wife is not capable of taking care of a four year old. If anything, it would end up being the other way around.
Paul’s eyes, red-rimmed and bloodshot, leak tears down his cheeks. “I know,” he says. “I can’t blame you. But I had to ask. I thought that you’d at least want a heads up.”
So what are you thinking? I want to ask Bill. You think that you can just hide in the basement hoping that this army won’t find you there? Again, I don’t say the words. I just glare at the man, shake my head and turn around.
“I’ll go with you, Paul,” Grant says. I knew it was coming, but my heart sinks at his words all the same. He turns to me. “I want to see this for myself, I have to at least try to get Eve back. You can come with me if you want, wait here, or you can leave, if that’s what you want.”
“What will I do with Cindy?” I ask. “I can’t leave her.” She trembles just at the mention of it.
“She can stay with me,” Bill says, his eyes sad. “I’ll look after her until you get back. If that’s what you’re doing.”
I laugh. Another bitter bark. No one laughs with me. Instead, they stare at me, the young fool who’s just as stupid as the men in this room.
Maybe Bill is the only one with sense. The lucky bastard.
chapter sixteen
We waste no time. All of us head over to Bill’s house. His wife is, amazingly, still in the shaded corner, her knitting needles going click … click … click. Had she been there all night knitting away? Now that she’s had more time to work on it, I see that she is making a sweater. It ’ s brown with what looks like the makings of a white stripe across the upper chest and arms. It looks like the sweater Bill wore yesterday. His closet
’s probably full of such sweaters.
From the living room we go down into Bill’s basement where he has a metal locker full of rifles. Grant and I already have our own weapons, but the large, bearded man has tons of ammo along with a few rifles and hand pistols.
“I haven’t been hunting in a couple of years,” Bill says. “For some reason I still buy the bullets.”
He stands back, his daughter in his arms making squealing noises as though the weapons are making her excited. She yanks on her father’s beard hair and he slaps her hand away. The locker stands between wooden tables covered in tools and pieces of scrap metal: a clamp, a saw, hammer, nails, screwdrivers, wrenches, sprockets, and empty bottles of Budweiser. The whole works. Hubcaps and license plates hang on the wall behind the table. They’re mixed with pictures of women in bathing suits, no doubt torn out of magazines like Maxim and Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition. Paul grabs a Remington .30 .06 from the locker. “You mind if I take this beauty?” he asks.
Bill grunts, says, “Take what you need. I’ve got all I need upstairs for now, but I suggest you take something smaller too. Might be better for something close range.”
Paul. Somehow finding room within the pockets of his winter coat he grabs ammo, a Glock sidearm, and a handful of magazines for it.
“Don’t take too much,” Grant says. “It’ll weigh you down.” We’re not taking ammo from Bill’s locker just yet. We’re on the floor, digging through the duffle bag that used to hold extra weapons and ammo. I make sure that I’ve got enough bullets for the Colt and look up to see Grant doing the same with his Glock and shotgun.
“You mind if we get a little from you?”
“That’s what you’re here for.”
“You know that you should probably leave town,” Grant says as he digs into the locker. “For a day at least.”
Bill’s smile is sardonic, grim, he nods his head and says, “You bet.”
Nervous energy stabs at my belly. I’m leaving Cindy with this man. He’d better take care of her, and I tell him so. Cindy sits cross-legged on the cement floor, rocking back and forth. She starts whining and I know that she’s about to start crying.
“She isn’t easy to take care of,” I say. “If those bastards come this way, and she’s crying, it doesn’t matter if you hide or not. They’ll hear you.”
“I know,” he says. “I’ll take good care of her. Don’t you worry.”
I am worried. It’s my job to take care of Cindy. I feel responsible for Grant as well. He should have left us to die. Instead, I’m here ready to go into battle with a probable bunch of lunatics. My job is simply to make sure Grant is satisfied with Eve’s situation and then get us both out. I know that it’s a lie. For Cindy’s sake I have to hope, it could be the only thing to get Grant and me out of this alive.
I barely notice the weather. It’s warmed up a bit. Our breaths still steam in the air before us, leaving trails in our wake. My heart feels like there’s a humming bird with wings of steel flapping away inside my chest. Grant looks at me, obviously sees my discomfort, the fear inside me that could spread its ugly arms and embrace us all.
“You sure you wanna do this?” he says. He’s back to looking bored, as relaxed as an old lazy dog. How does he do it? “You know I don’t hold you to anything. You can leave right now if you want.”
“I appreciate the sentiment,” I say. “But I’m not doing this just for you.”
We walk through the woods, Grant with his shotgun, me with the rifle. We walk as softly as the snow will let us. We whisper to each other. Just two ghosts in the woods, haunting it. Paul walks ahead of us, leading the way, like an old soldier in plaid, slouched over his rifle. His pockets bulge with ammo as he marches through the nearly knee-high snow.
Grant looks at me. I sigh. Despite his calmness, I can tell the bastard can’t get Eve off his mind, and I understand a little better why he does this. It would haunt him for a long time if he just walked away, just as it would have if he’d walked away from Cindy and me.
“I’m doing it for everybody who’s helped me and my sister since all this shit began,” I say. “If it weren’t for them, we wouldn’t be alive today. We should be dead.”
Grant nods. Smiles. Says, “Ah, yeah. I get it.”
“You know that everyone who has helped me and my sister has died, though. Right?” I say, and the smile quickly comes off Grants face. He glares at me.
“Well, you better not be hoping I get added to that list,” he says.
I want to laugh at his reaction, it would certainly help ease the razor blades in my stomach. If I started, however, I’m not sure I’d be able to stop. So I think about Cindy and her reaction as we were leaving Bill’s. This time her cries weren’t so loud as they were desperate. She knew I was leaving. More importantly, she knew that I might not come back.
She had clung on to my clothes with rigor mortis tightness, pinching and bruising my arms when she contacted my skin.
She wasn’t the only one with tears in her eyes.
I took her by the chin, just as Grant had, and I looked deep in her eyes. I wiped my own tears away and I said, “It’s okay, Cindy. You need to calm down for Mr. Bill, okay? He’s going to take care of you for a little while. No longer than an hour. I promise.”
I hated lying to her, but had no choice. It worked, and she calmed down enough where I was able to give her a hug and a big kiss on the cheek, which always brought a big smile and a laugh from her.
I no longer want to laugh. My head is now where it should be at. In a dark place. Perhaps the darkest it’s been because I can’t see a way out of this. Being on Dahmer’s couch was pretty dire, but I had given myself over to what I thought was the inevitable then. It was almost easy to accept the thought that we were going to die a horrible death. Now I feel differently. I no longer want to die. I want Cindy to have a good and happy life. If that’s even possible.
First, I have to figure out a way to survive this.
Gunshots echo through the woods, the odd pop here and there, but nothing like before. It’s midmorning now and I imagine that operations are well on the way. Along with the odd gunshot is the rumble of engines, the occasional hooting and hollering of idiot men who think themselves soldiers. Who knows, maybe they once were.
We reach a clearing in the woods into someone’s backyard. A small yard with an above ground swimming pool faces us: a fence and a deck. The backyard is blocked off from the trees by a wooden fence, in which most of it has been blown to splinters by either gunshots or something else. Probably gunshots, for the house before us looks as though it has suffered. Its red-bricked outer wall is riddled with fingertip to fist-sized bullet holes. All the windows are shattered. The snow upon the deck and through the yard is littered with short, human-sized dunes that can only be corpses. This is somehow more ugly and frightening than seeing the actual bodies.
How long we’ve been standing here at the edge of what was a thriving subdivision, I don’t know. There are similar houses to the left and right all in similar states of past violence. Soon my eyes adjust to the gloomy inside of the red-bricked house before us. Something is moving in there. I imagine it’s the last surviving member of that household, someone who had fought until the bitter end. Now they stumble inside, moaning, forever hungry and not smart enough to figure out how to get out of the house.
Sounds of the men and women from the battalion have probably agitated it, and now it thinks—if indeed they’re capable of thought—that there’s food on the way.
It’s not wrong. The trucks roll through the subdivision. Troops march on the street. We hear them kicking down doors, firing their shots at the undead. There are no survivors here, or at least I don’t think there are. No outraged screams of capture or fearful wailings. This is perhaps why we haven’t moved since coming to the subdivision.
“Damn they move fast,” Paul says. “This is the way I came, and they were on the other side of town, then.”
“Maybe there’s m
ore of them,” Grant says. “I wonder why they waste the ammo, though?”
“Who knows?” Paul said. “I bet that they stop and load up at all the Wal-Marts and Canadian Tire’s they run across. There’s also a military base that neighbors Angus. I doubt a convoy like this would have trouble keeping armed.”
“What about gas?” I say.
“They must carry generators with them, or something. Somehow they got the only two gas stations in town to work. There was a line of them filling up at both of them when I left. They were also filling military gas cans.”
“They’re well organized,” Grant says. He’s pointing out the obvious, but I know that there’s a reason for it. “There’s no way you’re gonna take them down. You’ll die in seconds, Paul. Help us get our girl and your friends out then come with us. Get the hell out of here.”
There’s no talking for a long time. Paul looks at the rear of the houses along the street. His eyes are wrinkled slits. The door to the house next to us gets kicked down. It sounds like thunder booming on the ground. The undead inside get excited, charge at its prey. The charge doesn’t last long before bullets tear through its head, dropping its silhouette from our sight. The first of the soldiers we see comes into view and we duck behind spindly skeletons of sleeping trees, some hedges and pine behind the fence.
Through the cracks, a man and a woman appear through a broken window of the house. The man’s black beard moves, and words pour out to us. “I thought I saw movement.” He aims the gun, a semi-automatic machine gun, and fires a few rounds into the bush. The bullets zip, kicking up dirt, snow and chunks of ruined fence into our faces.