by Brown, TW
Everybody was silent and looked back and forth from Heather to Catie…until Aleah stepped forward. All of the past few weeks had made many of the children skittish anytime she and Catie got into any sort of conversation. It had led to a few fights and a lot of yelling.
“You all go,” Aleah said. “Heather and Catie and I will sit down with a map so I know the route that you took. We will follow as soon as we can.”
“You can’t stay here alone,” Heather disagreed, grabbing the woman’s hands in hers. “I will stay with you.”
“I think that is a bad idea,” Deanna said as she stepped forward. “Why can’t we all just stay here until he gets better? We can’t know if that attack was directed at us.”
“And we can’t know that it wasn’t,” Catie countered. “And whether it was or wasn’t does not matter. If people are fighting like that in this area, we can just as easily end up a casualty of being in their crossfire. We need to move and we need to do it now.”
“Then I will stay,” Deanna said, crossing her arms in stubborn finality.
“Catie will need you and Sean along with the rest of the older kids to keep the younger ones in line,” Heather spoke up again. “I know Kevin would appreciate your wanting to stay, but he would also want you safe.”
“And she is absolutely right about helping with the other kids,” Catie added.
“And what about me?” Trent spoke up. “You guys act like I’m not even here most of the time. I get the fact that you have to be able to trust me, but how long do I have to be part of things for that to happen?”
“Maybe never,” Sean said just loud enough to be heard. Deanna elbowed him in the ribs.
“Actually, it would be nice if you stayed,” Heather spoke up. “Catie will have plenty of help, but Aleah and I could use another set of eyes…and a gun if it gets ugly.”
It took a couple of hours, but eventually Catie, Sean, Deanna and the rest of the children were packed and ready. Several meeting places were circled on the map. Catie was to travel west to a place called Shabbona Lake for her first leg of the journey. They had a half dozen places picked out as possible meeting spots as well as a crude code that would let Heather and Aleah know the actual location once it was decided. They would wait there for ten days before moving to the next location. The same procedure was designed for each spot all the way to Sioux Falls.
Heather and Trent watched until the procession had vanished from sight before returning downstairs where Aleah was sitting beside Kevin’s cot. As the day drew on, the three took turns standing watch up on the roof. Other than a few zombies and the black column of smoke that grew into something so big there was no doubt it could be spotted for miles in every direction, there was not much to see.
“Maybe it will keep the heat off of us,” Trent said when Aleah came up late that afternoon to relieve him.
“What do you mean?” Aleah asked absently; her mind was still down with Kevin. He had been tossing and turning, occasionally crying out. Also, he had a terrible fever that just would not break.
“That big plume of smoke from the blast. Hopefully it will draw people that way and away from us. I know you all like to joke about this not being like the movies…well I could use a nice break because you all have had more action in the short time I’ve known you than I have since a couple of months after this whole thing started.”
“What do you mean?”
“We walled up our location and after we had it out with some of the crazies from the nearby prison, there was not much happening in our little community,” Trent explained. “I guess that is why I do not understand this desire to travel so far. We were able to raid surrounding neighborhoods and did just fine for ourselves. We dealt with zombies only when we had to and mostly it was just to keep them from building up around our walls.
“When winter came and the snow fell…it was almost like life was normal. There were a few folks that got sick and passed, but there was not much action.”
Aleah thought back to their winter. If it were not for that lunatic Major Beers and her followers, perhaps she could have said the same.
“You just got lucky,” Aleah said with a shrug. “There is a lot out there…and zombies are no longer the biggest problem. It is now more about the survivors, they are far more dangerous. Kevin thinks that the cities will start attracting more attention this year now that the zombies have sort of dispersed. He believes that the living will return like roaches.
“He actually has a laugh when he talks about it. He says that in the movies it was always the norm to say that the zombies were acting out of habit…like memories from their former selves coming through, but in reality, it is the living. They want to return to what is familiar…despite the fact that it was so broken.”
Trent considered the words for a moment. He wondered what it must be like to spend an hour inside Kevin’s head. That guy had no shortage of ideas…and most of them were pretty damn good. And for somebody so socially awkward, he seemed to have a pretty good grasp on human nature. When it was clear that Aleah was not really paying him any attention, Trent headed down to grab something to eat and get some sleep.
He allowed himself a moment to remember the life he’d once had before. Maybe his old life was why he now relished the boredom. He certainly had not been able to just sit back and relax for hours at a time with nothing to do.
As a long haul truck driver, his life was one of constantly being on the go. Some folks might think it is no big deal to sit behind the wheel of an eighteen wheeler, but those were the same folks who bitched and moaned about their commute of thirty minutes to an hour! His life was one non-stop commute where he had to deal with the worst drivers in the world all day and night.
He still recalled those first few reports that came across the radio. Initially, a lot of the truckers thought it was some sort of huge practical joke. After all, who ever thought that zombies would ever be a real thing? He had tried to listen to a few of the titles when he swapped out his audio book selections every so often, but they had just seemed too silly. Most of them sounded like a bunch of conspiracy theory nutjobs trying to take jabs at technology. Flu shots…secret government labs…aliens; a bunch of nonsense as far as he was concerned. Just give him a good Western and he could sit in traffic all day.
That had been his stance until he had pulled into the Little America truck stop as he was headed east to Fort Wayne, Indiana. At first he thought that there was a fight. It was not unheard of for a couple of truckers to settle their business in the back lot of a stop. It only ever became a situation when some busy body stuck their nose in where it wasn’t needed.
He set his brake and climbed out onto the stoop of his cab. From his vantage point it was one of those situations that he hated and blamed on the younger generation. Back when he was getting started, a fight was between two men and settled when it was over. But this looked like four or five against one.
Trent reached in and grabbed his club, the one he named “The Equalizer”. He hopped down to the ground and was approaching the fight when one of the punks who had ganged up on the one poor soul turned his way. The first thing that he noticed was that the man’s eyes were…weird. It was like they were all white and filled with goop, but then laced with black tracers.
That was bad, but all the blood was worse. The topper was when two more of the attackers turned to face him. It gave him a perfect view of the pair that were on their knees ripping the guts out of the guy on the ground and stuffing the ropy strands and dark jelly-like pieces into their mouths.
He probably should have run inside the truck stop, but instead he jumped right back into the cab of his rig and hauled ass over to the pumps. Nobody was around and that had never been the case in all his years and the hundreds of times he had passed through here. He swiped the company card, filled up, and then hauled ass.
He drove all the rest of the day and into the night. He continued to listen to the radio which now was beginning to resemble those gawdawf
ul stories. There was even one case where those things got into a cab. Somehow the mic was keyed open and broadcast the whole thing…the screams, the ripping and tearing…
The screaming.
That was when he knew it was real. Nobody could scream like that and be pretending. He drove past stop after stop, each time he neared the more dense population, he saw them. He was thankful for the darkness so that all he saw were the headlights…until he saw the line of red lights in the distance that indicated the traffic had come to a halt.
He had pulled over, climbed out, and hooked up with about thirty other people. And a month later he had met up with some others and they had built their sanctuary. They had taken in lots of people those first days, but most were only “passing through” as they insisted on trying to reach friends, family, and other loved ones.
The sound of a bottle skittering along the floor snapped his focus back to the present. He had his machete in his hand before he had hardly realized it. That sound had come from downstairs.
Heather’s head popped out from one of the rooms down the hall. “What was that?” she whispered.
Trent shrugged and then put a finger to his lips. He pointed to the stairs. Heather drew the pistol at her hip, but after a vigorous shake of the head by Trent, she put it back and drew her own blade.
The two met at the bannister of the stairs and tried to peer down. Besides being too gloomy, there was not much field of vision.
“I will go first, you watch my back. We can leap frog each other at the landing and then as we move down the corridor,” Trent said in the young girl’s ear.
She gave a nod and stepped aside so he could go first. Once he reached the landing, she crept down and then past him to the ground floor. It was in that moment that it struck her; they had not even bothered to see if this place had any sort of sub level or basement.
Once she signaled the way was clear, Trent came down and pointed left with raised eyebrows. That seemed as good of a direction as the other. The floor plan of this building was a giant “U”. They would make sure the left path was clear and then come back and check the right.
“I am going to the corner. You keep your eyes peeled…if any of the doors open, you should see a glow on the floor,” Trent said and then crept away, his back almost glued to the right hand wall.
It felt like it took an eternity, but at last he reached the corner and peeked around. He looked for what seemed like an inordinate amount of time to Heather. That stretch of hall was maybe thirty or forty feet long and the doors on both sides were shut and boarded up. What else was there to see?
At last he turned and came back. “Not a damn thing…I’ll check the other—”
“You checked your end, now watch my back…I can do this,” Heather cut him off and headed away before he could object. She found it humorous that some people still clung to the “old” ways.
She was a girl…she was just a kid…
Well she had been surviving this zombie apocalypse just like everybody else, thank you very much. She could certainly go to the end of the hall and look around a corner.
She reached the end and took a deep breath before peeking. She was only mildly surprised to discover that the area was empty. But if it was not here, and certainly could not have gone up the stairs without them seeing it…then where was the source of that sound?
A scream came from outside causing Heather to spin back towards Trent. She was less than pleased to see that he had already taken off for the main exit. She understood that somebody might be in trouble, but it might also be a trap. In any case, he had just abandoned her to go investigate the source of the scream.
Machete in hand, Heather sprinted to catch up. She reached the main doors that would allow her to exit the building and skidded to a halt. She recognized the groans of the undead coming in what sounded like considerable numbers from outside. For a moment she considered pulling the chain back into place and leaving Trent to his fate.
After a few seconds of deliberation that surprised her in just how prepared she was to let another person die, Heather pushed the door open just a crack so that she could see. Sure enough, on the street in front of the building, at least a hundred of the undead were passing by. They looked focused on something just ahead of them and to her left; that would be back the way they had originally come from.
Another scream shattered the silence…this one from the direction that the zombies were moving. Heather struggled with her decision now that she could better hear the scream. She had no doubt that it was female…and young.
“Dammit,” she growled and stepped outside.
Immediately, several of the undead turned her direction. Heather did not wait; she chopped down the closest ones and then made a dash in the general direction she had heard the screams come from.
“Go to the end of the building and turn right!” a voice yelled from above.
Heather had almost forgotten about Aleah being on watch. She glanced up and saw the woman jogging along the roof, staying parallel to her as she came up on a zombie that was just starting to turn to face her direction when she plunged the heavy tip of her blade into the back of its skull.
Side-stepping the corpse as it fell, she shoved another out of the way as she reached the corner. The recognizable sound of a blade shattering a skull came just a split second ahead of her actually turning the corner and a debris-strewn parking lot. The broken remnants of a Cyclone fence still stood in some places, but was gone for the most part.
The mob of zombies had turned this way as well and Heather spotted Trent just as he vanished around the far corner that gave way to the back side of the school and the macabre playground that would never again see children engaged in hopscotch, foursquare or dodge ball ever again.
She had looked back here when they first decided to settle in this school and had been given a chill. The playground had become a sort of killing field at some point. Rotting corpses littered the area, each with black stains around the head that looked oddly like the sort of full head halos that were often depicted on religious figures in classical paintings. It had struck a nerve for some inexplicable reason and she had not looked out there again. Even when she stood her watch, she looked out across it, but refused to let her eyes be drawn down into it.
There were fresh kills strewn along the way. A brief observational insight hit her as she ran past all the downed corpses. She could tell that many of the bodies had been rotting in place for quite some time. The fresh kills barely leaked anything, but they had not turned the near black color of those that had been truly dead. An out-of-the-blue thought hit her; How come these zombies are not rotting away to nothing? But it was wiped away as another scream came; this one was followed by a howl of what could have been rage, fury, or just simply Trent’s version of a war cry.
Heather saw Aleah pulling ahead of her up on the roof. She picked up her own pace and rounded the corner to discover Trent up on a large Dumpster with a smaller figure crouched at his feet. Zombies had completely surrounded the Dumpster and were all trying in earnest to get at the pair.
She recognized the diminutive figure a split second before Aleah yelled out, “Rose?”
The girl’s head popped up and a million thoughts seemed to fight for position in Heather’s mind all at once.
Where were the others?
Had they all been killed?
Had the group been forced to scatter?
“Hey! You walking bags of rot…come and get some!” Heather shouted.
She jumped up and down, waving her arms without really being sure any of that was making any difference. Now that she had their attention, Trent was making quick work of the monsters. She was glad they were so stupid. She moved in and helped put the zombies down as quickly as possible.
“Hurry up, here come the rest!” Aleah called down.
“How many?” Heather yelled back as she planted her booted foot in the chest of her latest kill and yanked her blade free.
“Too
many!” was Aleah’s worried response.
“We will need to go all the way around the building and come in from there,” Trent said as he dropped his shoulder into what had been a morbidly obese woman.
Naked, she looked like a wax figure left out in the desert sun as her folds of dead flesh seemed to sag even worse than they probably did in life. She tottered for a second and then fell with a meaty splat. Her head snapped back and hit the asphalt hard. A small trickle of dark fluid oozed from the behemoth of a woman, but not enough damage had been inflicted on the brain to actually end its existence. However, its size had it struggling like a turtle on its back.
Trent was grabbing Rose and pulling her from the Dumpster when a hand snaked out from a few of the bodies that he had assumed all to be dead. The yank was not much, but between his not expecting it and his feet tangling in all the limbs scattered about—not all of them attached to torsos—he fell back.
The impact did not entirely knock the wind out of him, but it came close and was enough to momentarily stun him. He gasped and tried in desperation to suck air into his lungs, but simply could not get enough. As he lay there practically helpless, he saw a head emerge from the meaty debris.
“Trent!” Heather screamed in panic. She knew that without his help, either she or Rose…or both…might go down. Pushing past a few of the zombies that had turned and were closing in on the downed man, Heather grabbed his hand and yanked him free of the pile. The sound of teeth clicking together sounded a split second later.
“Thanks,” Trent barely managed to croak.
“Later.” Heather stepped around and jabbed the tip of her blade into the top of the zombie’s skull. “And you!” She pulled the blade free and jabbed it in Rose’s direction. “You have some explaining to do when we get inside.”
Rose nodded and jumped down off the Dumpster. She had the decency to look more than a little embarrassed. The trio headed off around the far corner of the school. They reached it just as the tail end of the herd was passing.