by Brown, TW
“We are not leaving until one of two things…either we know for certain, and that means visual proof, that my brother is dead…or we send that woman and whoever is involved with her straight to Hell where they belong.”
Glenn looked into his wife’s eyes and saw that strength and fire that he had fallen in love with all those years back when they had first met. Yes, she was a very sensible person…and yes, she would not throw her life away at a whim. However, she was fiercely loyal to those she loved. She would never be able to rest if she was not a hundred percent certain of her brother’s fate. She would mourn his loss if that were the case…but she would never be able to live with herself if she did not know for certain.
“On the far side of that golf course, I thought I saw what might have been a creek…” Glenn began as Cynthia started packing all that they could carry into their bags.
***
“…well the movie never ends, it goes on and on and—” Chad’s mouth hung open, but the sound simply ceased.
He was surrounded! And as more drifted from the shadows, he almost had the feeling that it was intentional. But that is silly, he thought, zombies don’t plan…they certainly don’t set traps.
The mob that he had been luring away from Ronni was continuing to close, but he had put a good fifty feet between himself and the leading edge. However, these zombie children had him surrounded, and they were all now just a little beyond arm’s length.
He was looking for his best escape route, but he noticed that they were all simply standing there. He turned slowly, partially to find his way out of this little bind, but also because he was struck by how they were all seemingly studying him. Instead of a simple attack, they were cocking their heads one way and then the other. But not one of them was approaching him.
He decided that, whatever was going on, he did not want or need to know. Chad lunged to his right, throwing out a stiff-arm that sent a little girl of eight or nine flying backwards. Chad ran as hard as he could on his injured leg. Adrenaline or not, he still felt the aching throb from where that piece of glass had gone deep into his muscle.
He heard hisses, cries, and moans from behind him, but he was sufficiently creeped out and just wanted to get away from those children. As he continued to limp through the woods, he was trying to decide if there was anything creepier than zombie children.
“Zombie clowns,” he muttered. He decided that maybe zombie clowns and zombie ex-wives might be the only thing to knock zombie children from the top spot of most frightening.
He was so pre-occupied with his thoughts that it took him a few seconds to realize that he had emerged from the woods and was now on a long, straight, empty road. Looking around, he spied an abandoned house just up the road a ways. He glanced over his shoulder and decided to make his way over to it.
As he approached, he could see shadows moving about inside. The smears of blood and who knows what that coated the inside of the windows quickly informed him that the residents were not among the living.
Making his way to the side of the house, he used the electric meter to aid in his climb as he pulled himself up onto the roof. From there, he had a clear view back up the road as the first of the undead emerged. He was a little surprised when none of those emerging were the children.
With what felt like an almost unbearable slowness, the parade of zombies did what zombies always do; they limped and stumbled on in the same direction they had been. Chad made certain to stay as still as possible. He did not want to attract the attention of the zombies in the house. That would most definitely have them all pounding on the windows, which would, in turn, bring the attention of that horde he had just ditched.
The one thing that continued to nag at him were the children and their odd reaction. They had not moved in for the kill like zombies tend to do. It was almost like they were checking him out and deciding how to respond. As he watched, he was puzzled as to why they had not followed. This was definitely something to keep in mind for later.
As he sat on the roof, he began to feel his anxiety rise. He had left his daughter alone. Granted, she was in a relatively safe spot…but she was still alone. That made every single moment stretch on for an eternity. His fear was that she might wake and find herself abandoned. She would see the corpses scattered about. But she would not know if he had gone down under them and maybe eventually wandered off with the crowd.
As it began to grow dark, he decided that he must act. Slipping down off the roof, he had to grab onto something—it turned out to be a child’s plastic slide—to keep his leg from buckling beneath his weight. Fighting back the pain, he swallowed the saliva that had rushed to his mouth when he almost threw up.
Making his way to a small metal shed, he found a shovel and used that as a walking stick. Creeping up to the corner of the house, he could still see a few dark figures making their way across the road and into the open field that might have been a park at one time, but was now nothing more than an overgrown meadow with a swing, a wooden climbing structure, and what was probably a merry-go-round that would soon completely vanish from sight after a few more inches of growth.
Crossing the road as quickly and as quietly as possible, Chad gave one final glance over his shoulder before ducking into the woods. He knew the general direction that the big rock would be and oriented himself in what he hoped would bring him back to his daughter.
Time continued to torment him as he crept along as silent as he was able. The darkness was now making things worse. Before long, he would be in that perfect darkness that made it almost impossible to see two steps ahead.
Every so often, he would stop completely and listen. Something in his mind told him that there was a presence nearby. He actually found himself hoping that it was a wild animal. At this point, he would prefer a bear to a pack of zombies.
Just ahead he spied an open clearing. A silvery shaft of light from the moon above seemed almost as bright as the noon day sun. He reached the edge of the clearing, but something made him hesitate.
In his mind, he heard the narrator of every wildlife documentary speaking—complete with British accent.
“The tiger waits in the grass for the approach of the gazelle…”
He was certain that he was not alone in watching this clearing. There was something else there. He could not explain it…he simply knew it to be true.
“When did you get so damn paranoid?” he whispered to himself.
At last he could wait no longer. The night was now fully upon his little part of the world. He scanned the edge of the clearing and listened for even the slightest rustling of the branches. He guessed this particular patch of open ground to be about twenty or thirty feet across. It was almost perfect in its oval shape.
Testing his leg to see how it held up, Chad gave a few practice jabs with the shovel. He knew it would be awkward, but at least he had something in which to defend himself.
He was only four or five steps across when the bushes on the far side directly opposite him began to move. There was an explosion of movement and a deer bounded from the greenery. It paused to consider him for a moment; then it looked over its shoulder and bolted…directly towards him!
Chad barely had the time or the agility to dodge the obviously terrified animal and ended up falling on his back. He covered his head just as the animal leapt over him and vanished into the woods almost exactly where he had emerged.
Head on a swivel, Chad scanned the shadows and was not at all surprised when a child no older than six or seven emerged. It was a little boy wearing the remains of a football jersey. The front was a tattered mess as the child’s belly had been ripped open. It had long since dried into what was almost a black crust.
Seconds later five more children emerged. They clustered together. To Chad, it almost looked as if they were seeking comfort from one another.
He considered staying still and hoping that they would leave, but then three more joined the group. One of them almost seemed to be staring directly
at him. Of course it was impossible to tell since the child’s face was a mask of shadow, but when the group pivoted as one to orient on his position, he knew he had been spotted.
Forcing his mind to dismiss all of the creepiness that this entailed, Chad rose to his feet. The zombie children responded by fanning out.
“This is getting worse every second,” he whispered.
Yet, for some reason, they still did not advance. Chad decided to take a step forward. Nothing. He decided to try another tactic. Raising the shovel, he thrust it at them. His hope was that they would act like frightened animals and scamper off. Instead, they reverted to acting like zombies. Arms reached and the group lurched towards him.
Homing in on the closest one, Chad gauged the distance and swung when he was certain the zombie was within reach of the shovel. The metal head connected with a child’s skull and burst it like a melon.
While their behavior had certainly been peculiar, they proved no more difficult to kill than any other zombie…as long as he blocked out their age. Although, at the end there was one more surprise: one of the zombies actually looked to be trying to escape.
Chad had just swept the feet out from one—a little girl who might have been twelve, which would make her the “senior citizen” of the pack. He placed his good foot in the middle of the chest and drove the shovel down, separating the top of the head from around the middle of the bridge of her nose on up. Looking around, he spied a smallish shadow just as it ducked into some wild blackberry bushes.
Chad limped over to discover the tiny thing tangled in all the thorny vines. It turned his way as he approached and made a weak and pitiful moan. With a grimace, he raised the shovel and brought it down with all his might. The reverberation sent a pins-and-needles sensation through both hands. It took two more blows for the body to be still.
Looking around, Chad felt a new fear grip him. He had completely lost his sense of direction. He could not tell which way was which, and at some point, clouds had started to move in.
Looking skyward, he felt his heart tear through his mouth as he screamed his daughter’s name.
“Ronni!”
***
“He wants us to do what?” Danny spat.
“I don’t see what the hell you could say that will make anybody agree to that,” George added.
“How about we either consider this offer, and by consider I mean accept, or else we go to war. And if you did not see what they are packing, let me tell you, it is a war we will lose. They have M32s for crying out loud!” Jody said with palpable awe in his voice.
“For those of us not up to date with the military numbered system, you mind sharing what the hell that means with the rest of us?” George snarled.
“Freakin’ six-shooter grenade launchers.” Danny’s voice carried its own level of reverence now. “They could sit a few hundred yards away and blow us into oblivion. Those are straight up video game weapons.” When he saw a few looks of confusion lingering on some of the faces of the men gathered around, he elaborated. “Imagine a six-shooter pistol like from the cowboy movies. Now, instead of it firing bullets, it fires freakin’ grenades. And if my memory serves, those babies can toss a round about three hundred yards or so. They would blow through our defenses in a matter of minutes.”
“Be that as it may, I still think you are going to have a hard sell,” George said with a shake of his head. “I sure as hell ain’t gonna be the one to drop this bomb.”
Jody did not like it either. It was a deal that made him feel dirty. He hated to even think about how Selina would react.
“I hate to be the one to say this.” Old Man Joe stepped into the middle of the group; he had his ever present ball cap in his hands and was wringing it like a wet rag. “You folks are thinking with your hearts. This is a new world…like it or not. And unfortunately, none of the old rules apply anymore. We may hate what we have to do sometimes, but the bottom line is that we need to do what we can in order to survive. And I don’t want to point out the obvious, but they will end up with what they want one way or another. We may as well get something for ourselves in the deal. And that whole part about how we get to stay alive has some promise to it given the circumstances.”
“So you want to be the one to tell everybody?” George rounded on the much older man with clenched fists. He spun back to Jody. “Maybe you want to think this over. While you think about it, try picturing the look on Selina’s face…or maybe that youngster, Kat.”
“I’m not saying that it is what I want,” Jody countered. “What I am saying is that we might not have a choice…other than dying.”
They continued to argue in circles, sometimes coming close to blows as everybody weighed in on the subject of Sergeant Pitts’ offer until finally the boy who had been sent to bring everybody back returned. As Jody watched them coming up the road, he was struck by how few of them there suddenly seemed to be.
He thought back to just a few days ago when he once considered them a fairly large and formidable group. Now, as the women and children arrived and he looked at their numbers, he knew that there was really no choice in this matter. Of course anybody who was dead set against it could try to make a run for it, but Pitts had already thought of that.
“If you or your people try to run, Mister Rafe,” the sergeant had said at the end, “I have this entire area being patrolled. You are actually only seeing just over half of my fighting force. We number over five thousand. You got what…two or three hundred in there? Anybody that makes a run for it becomes fair game. Do the right thing, Rafe.”
Of course he could be bluffing. But Jody seriously doubted it. As much as he hated it, he saw no choice but to agree to the demands.
Twenty minutes later, every single man, woman, and child was inside the gymnasium. The silence was something he could practically feel and taste; it was so thick and heavy. Every set of eyes in the place was fixed on him. When they had returned, Pitts’ army was still just up the road. Everybody saw them as they came back. The grim faces on the men told them that bad news was coming.
Jody stepped up on the stage after squeezing Selina’s hand. Her lack of response told him all that he needed to know in regards to how she felt. He had told her the briefest version of what he was about to lay out in detail to the citizens of Hope. He wondered if they would vote for a name change to their town when he was finished.
14
While the Geek’s Away…
“Is that back where we were staying?” Deanna asked out loud.
“Sure looks like it,” Heather and Catie said together.
Everybody except for Kevin was up on the roof. It was in the middle of the night and more than just a little chilly outside. That made everybody gather in a close cluster, but what they saw might have done it as well.
To the south and east of their location a massive fireball rose into the sky. Catie was less concerned about the actual blast and more concerned about who had caused it and how.
She knew very well what sat unattended in some of the military depots. This had the earmarks of some powerful ordinance, but the ordinance by itself was nothing more than a giant paperweight. It was the delivery system that would be something to worry about.
She already knew that fuel was useless by now. The shelf life had long since passed. Sure, there might be anomalies here and there, but for the most part, humanity had been knocked back to the horse and buggy era within the last month or two. She had tried a few vehicles on some of the times she had slipped off by herself. It wasn’t that she was planning on just abandoning the group, but if she could find a way to get home quicker, she wanted to at least try. If nothing else, she could offer to take a few of the kids with her. However, that was just a fantasy.
“Is that a nuclear bomb?” one of the younger kids asked.
This caused a sudden surge of chatter from several of the kids at once. Catie had to finally raise her voice to get them to be quiet. She only briefly marveled at how quickly concerns of the wal
king dead could be replaced.
“No…that is not a nuke,” Catie said. “But it is some pretty impressive ordinance. Whoever used it has access to some very serious military hardware. My suggestion is that we get everything we can cram on to those carts and get our butts out of this area. We have no idea what else they might have…or where they will use it next.”
“Are you saying we might have been their target?” Aleah asked.
Catie turned to the woman. Actually, that thought had never occurred to her. She had dismissed it as those two groups that were fighting; The Guardians and the group of immunes. However, now she had just the smallest pinhole in that theory.
“I am not suggesting that it was directed at us…but now we have to also add that to the list of possibilities,” Catie admitted.
“You were a soldier,” Heather stepped up beside the other two women, “what sort of weapon could make an explosion that big?”
“There are too many to know. The only thing that I feel pretty confident about is that it was not homemade.”
“How can you be certain?” Aleah asked that question in her head three times before doing so out loud. She did not want it to sound like a challenge; she was genuinely curious.
“Because I was standing here and heard it fired and then saw the blast for myself. Somebody fired that from the east of our position.”
“Well then I guess we get packed and on the move by first light,” Heather said with a sigh. She had actually enjoyed the abundance of supplies. They had eaten their fill this evening. While they did not starve out on the road, there had been times when you were only able to take the edge off the hunger. Also, this place had cots…after the last few months, they had felt like the most plush and expensive beds in the world. And then there were all of the medical supplies.
“Wait!” she blurted so loud and sudden that she cause several of the kids to jump. “What about Kevin? He is in no condition to travel. Are we just going to put him on a stretcher or something and drag him along? That seems a bit risky.”