John reached into my pocket and pulled out a cigarette and lit it up, I never knew he smoked. After a long deep inhalation he looked me in the eye while I was trying to find the words to explain, he relaxed “Mate, I understand how much you love Max, but you’re not the only father in our circle. I watch every day over my adopted family whom I do love. Yes even you, Marshall. But every day I see you and Max together I die thinking about my three kids. I miss the touch of my wife’s embrace, I miss my kids nagging the shit out of me and I miss the sounds of their laughter and the sight of their smiles.”
John knelt down to Max’s eye level “Hey Bucko, sorry about that. Do you know how you felt when you were away from your dad? That’s how I feel every day. Can I talk to my brother please?”
“My bugs are very sick, that’s why I couldn’t even talk to Daddy. But they’ll be better soon and you can talk to Sean. I like him, he’s nice. He talks funny, like you.”
We drove home in relative silence. I felt horrible about not telling John. John was the best friend I’d ever had and I was too self-absorbed to consider that he might not still do what was necessary. I’d been so afraid he’d leave to try and find his family and I needed him there. I didn’t even consider that he felt like this was home now and would want to bring them here. It was horribly selfish and I felt about one inch tall.
When we got home, it was about an hour until daylight. “Max, are you sleepy still buddy? Or do you want to stay up?”
“I want to see Gramma, I missed her. And I’m hungry. The bugs say we need to sleep though.”
Inside the kitchen we found my mother cooking away, as she seemed to always be doing. We walked in looking beat up, except the little boy who was bright eyed and cheerful. Max ran to her and jumped into her arms and said “Gramma!”. She immediately burst into tears.
“Gramma, I’m hungry. Can I have a cheese sandwich?”
“Sure!” She said between sobs, trying not to look like she was crying. She went to the refrigerator and opened it quickly. She removed two quart sized tubs before closing the door tightly. On the long stainless steel metro shelves were loaves of bread.
“Mom, where did you get cheese?”
“I made it last week. It could use some more age, it’s not as good as it will be, but it’s pretty good. Ron brought me some goat’s milk and I knew we’d never drink all the milk. It seemed terrible to let it go to waste, so I made a batch of goat’s milk mozzarella. It was pretty easy to do. The worst part was gathering the rennet. It’s the enzyme that makes cheese, primarily found in the stomach of baby mammals. I had to have Ron butcher one of the baby goats, but now I have enough rennet to make cheese for a year and I thought we’d all enjoy the roasted goat. There’s mint chutney to go with it.”
“Mrs. Tookes, you’re amazing,” said Leo.
“Aw, it’s nothing honey. Just something I read in a cookbook a few years ago.”
She sliced the baseball sized mozzarella balls into round slices and we all ate a little of the cheese. She took the two best, the middle slices, added a little salt and put them on a plate. Next she sliced the bread. She’d made it in a sandwich loaf pan. She deftly cut it into slices that looked exactly like store bought bread. She dipped the knife into the second tub and spread mayonnaise on the two pieces of bread.
“Oh my god, you have mayonnaise too?” said Marshall.
“Well, Max can’t have a cheese sandwich without mayo.”
Max dragged a metal stool loudly across the tiled kitchen floor and set it at the stainless steel table we were all gathered around. I think he’d grown an inch in the three days since I saw him last. He climbed up on the stool, sat down and started eating his sandwich with huge bites, enjoying every second of it.
“Max, can you tell me about Steve and Jason?” I asked.
“They’re nice. I made them not eat people and follow me. They’re my friends.” When my bugs are better I have to tell them to come here.”
“Max, they can’t come here. The others wouldn’t understand, they’d be very afraid.”
“But they’re my friends. They helped me when I was lost.”
“I know buddy, but they’re very different than us. And everyone else like Jason and Steve are badguys. The people that live here would have a hard time believing that they’re not also badguys.”
“Where can they live then?” he asked.
“Do they need a house? Or can they just live in the woods?”
“Would you want to live in the woods?” asked Max.
“Well, no. But I feel hot and cold. I feel the rain. I feel uncomfortable. They don’t notice those things.”
“They’re people. They need a house,” Max said flatly.
“Ok, I’ll find them a house and I’ll put markers up that it’s off limits. No one will go near it.” Once I get it set up, we can bring them there and let them exist as long as they can.”
“I’m full of sandwich. I need to go sleep now,” Max said definitively.
“Ok Buddy. Let’s go get you in some clean clothes and into bed. You’re stinky! Be sure to give everyone hugs and kisses.”
Max made his way around the table, hugging and kissing everyone in the room, before I picked him up and gave him a tight squeeze. Peee ewwww!” I said, scrunching up my face. “Stinky!”
Max giggled all the way out of the kitchen. I carried him up the steps and stripped his clothes off. I washed him off with a washcloth and some soap, rinsed him down and pronounced him not smelly any more. Once he was in fresh clothes and PJ’s, I tucked him into bed and gave him a kiss on the forehead.
“I love you buddy. I’m so glad you’re home.”
“I love you too. Why did Mr. Frye take me away?”
“He’s a bad guy, Max. I won’t ever let him, or anyone else, take you away from me again, I promise.”
“Are you going to kill him Daddy?”
“I’m going to go talk to him. If he is really a bad guy, I might have to. It’s not right to kill people Max. But these days we can’t put them in jail. I have to do things that I don’t like to do to keep you and Grammy and all of our friends safe.”
“It’s Ok to kill badguys Dad.”
“No, Max. It’s not Ok to ever kill anyone living. The people with bugs aren’t living, they’re dead. The only thing in there is the bugs.”
“I’m not dead, I have bugs living in me.” He said.
“Your bugs are different because you are different. Normally the bugs kill the person and take over. They make the person’s body do whatever they want. You’re different somehow. Your bugs didn’t kill you and they learned to talk to you.”
“I love you Daddy. I’m tired.”
“I love you too little man. You’re a good boy, I’m proud of you.”
“I love you all the way to the moon,” said Max, quoting his favorite book.
“I love you all the way to the moon and back,” I replied, quoting the next line.
I walked out of Max’s room and closed the door. There were so many men dead here. There was so much left to do, so much cleaning up from the battle here. So much repair to do in my relationship with John. I still had to tell Marshall about Renee. We burned up most of our ammunition in the last few days and lost all we’d gained from the sporting goods store. It might be worth a trip back to Germantown to try and recover it. Most of all, I wanted to know what was going on with Candi.
First things first, I went looking for John. I found him out back, sitting in a red Adirondack chair watching the sun rise. I sat down in the chair next to him, silent.
“John, I’m sorry. I’m an asshole, but I want you to know, whatever it takes to get your family here, you can count on me as much as I count on you.”
“I appreciate what you’re saying, mate. I’m tired of being taken for granted around here. You need to open your eyes that this is bigger than just you and Max. Max is a huge part of this, but there’s a whole bloody world out there.”
“John, I don’t take
you for granted. I am grateful for you every single day. I may be terrible at showing it, but I promise you that I am. I’ll leave you to your thoughts. As soon as Max is able, we’ll contact Sean and see about getting him here.”
“Alright mate.”
As I walked by the barn, I stopped in to check on the wounded and dead. We’d lost a lot of men and we were going to have a lot of funerals to attend to. There were two men with walking injuries and a bunch of dead.
After about thirty minutes of talking about funerals and how we wanted to honor them and how we were going to take care of the people they left behind, I excused myself by saying “I have to go find Marshall, we’ll help in any way possible.”
Really, I excused myself because I’ve been keeping something from him too, that I found out the day we went to Germantown that our sister is alive.
I walked away, with a new feeling of hope that my relationship with John could be salvaged, that I could make it up to him. Now I just had to figure out how to tell Marshall about Renee.
I found him down in the shop; he was building a small bed. ”Hey man.”
“Hey.”
“I guess John is pretty pissed at me. I just apologized to him and said I’d do whatever it takes to get his family here.”
Marshall continued to work in silence. He had always been like that. He knew that by not talking he’d learn more than if he was talking. That’s a skill I never picked up.
“So, the morning we left for Germantown, Max told me he talked to Renee. She’s still alive, somewhere south of here. She’s just south of Charlotte, North Carolina,” I said.
Marshall stopped what he was doing and looked up.
“I was thinking we might run down to get her,” I said.
“Vic, you’re talking about going through two million people in Charlotte. We’re tough, but we’re not that tough.”
“I have a plan.”
“Oh shit. I hate when you say that,” grinned Marshall.
“Did you ever hear the story “The Pied Piper?”
“Vic, you’re insane.”
“No, hear me out, this could work.”
Chapter 23
Reggie
Reggie rode his four wheeler north, through the national forest. He had no idea where he was going; he left it up to Max to guide him. He bounced over fallen trees and splashed through cold mountain creeks. He felt the spirit of the small boy within him burning inside his heart. He rode with abandon. When his four-wheeler ran out of gas he stopped on a bluff overlooking a serene valley. A blue river snaked through the center of it, with an empty road paralleling the river. Reggie refilled the old hunting quad from the red plastic container and strapped the empty gas can back to the rack. He ate the apple in his pocket, including the core, and was back on the quad when the sun rose.
He saw sign everywhere. In the pre-dawn sky he saw a cloud shaped like the number three, the age of Max. To his left he passed a tree branch that looked like Max’s finger pointing down a side path. He turned down that path and accelerated the quad. The abandoned fire lane became a dirt road. The dirt road became a gravel road. By noon, Reggie was getting very low on fuel, and starting to have doubt. He’d passed a couple of stumbling corpses, but avoided them easily.
The doubt evaporated when he ran out of gas directly in front of a large farmhouse. He heard a dog barking inside. Reggie let himself in the gate of the farmhouse. He noticed the latch was broken, and spent a second resetting it before he walked up to the door. Standing on the front porch, he smiled as he knocked. He was about to deliver the message of their salvation to more people.
The door opened slowly. It opened just a crack, barely wide enough for a shotgun barrel to extend through, pointing directly at Reggie’s chest.
“What’s your business, son?” asked a grizzled voice from inside the whitewashed farmhouse.
“I’m here to spread the word. Our savior has come! His name is Max. I met him yesterday. I left the safety of our fortress to let all the survivors know we are delivered!”
The door cracked open a little more, and an old man with a long gray beard stuck his head out.
“You ain’t been bit, have ya boy?” said the old man looking Reggie up and down. “Where’s yer guns?”
“I have no weapons. I’m filled with the spirit of Max. The dead can’t touch me,” replied Reggie.
“Alright, come on in off the porch. We ain’t got much, but we’ll listen to any news, and give you some hot food. My name’s Parks, Thom Parks.”
“It’s nice to meet you, Mr. Parks. Thank you for your hospitality.”
The Parks family listened to Reggie recount how Max came to them escorted by zombies, but not a zombie himself. He told of the instant overwhelming love for the boy, the sense of peace and the desire to protect him. He told of how Max’s father was in league with the zombies and was trying to turn Max in.
At the end of the story, Thom’s wife Joan said “Reggie, we’ve been praying for this news for a long time. Every night, the zombies come to our house. Every night about sunset they beat on our doors. Tonight is the first night since all this started that they haven’t come. The night you arrived, filled with Max’s Holy Spirit.”
Outside, a dozen zombies gathered around a four-wheeler, smelling richly of human. They attempted to follow the smell, but were held up at the front gate, which was securely closed for the first time in months.
The youngest Parks, a man in his late twenties named Ben, spoke up next. “We need to spread the word. The people have to know the savior is come.”
Ben’s older brother Daniel spoke next. “We should all go; the five of us. There are five roads that lead out of town, we should each take one. Max’s spirit will be with us.”
The next morning, all five started out. They walked to the town together; none of them brought a scrap of food or a gun. The spirit of Max would protect them. They didn’t encounter a single zombie on their way to the center of town. They walked quickly and quietly. When they got to the square, each of them took a long drink from the fountain and gave each other hugs.
“We’ll meet back at our farmhouse in one month,” said Thom. “Find as many people as you can and tell them that Max is come.”
Each of them said their goodbyes, and took one of the five roads out of town, all in different directions to spread the gospel.
Chapter 24
Jason and Steve
“Max, we need you to wake up.”
“Five more minutes,” Max mumbled.
“Sorry Max, we need you awake now.”
“Ok, what is it?”
“We’re dying.”
“What? You said you would get better,” cried Max.
“We were barely getting better, but a lot of our energy was used when you commanded Mrs. Goddell. We don’t have enough energy to make more of us.”
“But I don’t want you to die.”
“There is only one way we can live, Max. You have to get bitten again. We need a fresh infusion of symbiotes. Getting bitten will make you sick for a few days, but you’ll get better, just like you did the first time. We will help out as best as we can, but we’re losing all of our abilities.”
“What will happen to me? I don’t want you to go!”
“If we die, you’ll stay smart and you’ll stay strong. But you won’t be able to talk to people that are far away anymore, you’ll be more like your Dad.”
“But I need to talk to Aunt Renee and I need to talk to Uncle John’s brother.”
“Then you have to get bitten. And, it can’t just be any zombie; it has to be one that hasn’t bitten anyone in a while.”
“Where do I go?”
“We think we can wait long enough for Steve to do it. He doesn’t have that many of E’Clei, but he should be able to produce enough by the end of the week.”
“What’s an e-clay?”
“That’s us, Max. We are called E’Clei.”
“What about if Jason bit Steve? Would tha
t help?”
“Maybe. We’re not sure.”
“Jason. Bite Steve. Give him all your e clay.”
3o miles away, Jason turned to Steve and bit him on the arm. He held his mouth to the wound for nearly a minute before collapsing to the ground, lifeless.
What Zombies Fear (Book 2): The Maxists Page 18