by Brown, TW
Catie saw that the rest of the woman’s team were already down. She really wanted to take this woman alive, but not at the expense of one of her own.
“Hey! She-bitch!” Catie blurted, channeling a line from one of Kevin’s movies. “Come get some.”
The big woman froze and Braden did likewise, both obviously caught off-guard by the sudden outburst. Braden took a few steps back and seemed to be trying to determine which way would be the best to attack his opponent. Catie motioned for him to stand down.
“Are you seriously quoting Bruce Campbell?” the woman finally snorted.
“Seemed appropriate after you took that punch,” Catie took a step closer.
“It wasn’t that hard of a punch,” the woman scoffed. “He let his feet leave the ground too soon so there wasn’t really anything behind it.”
“Sure sounded like it hurt.” Catie took another step closer. She was now about ten feet from the woman.
“Yeah, well I’ve taken worse from bigger.” The woman shot a derisive look over towards Braden. “I fought in the Octagon for three years and have yet to meet somebody who could take me out with a one-hitter-quitter.”
“Seriously?” Catie gushed and then quickly recomposed herself.
“Look, I hate to say it considering my obvious disadvantage, but we ain’t here to make friends.”
“You’re absolutely right,” Catie said as she closed the rest of the distance between her and this other woman. “I think you know who we are…for the most part. I mean, we haven’t been formally introduced. So, let me start. My name is Catie Dreon. Obviously I am one of the people who display immunity to the zombie thing…infection…virus…whatever.”
Catie signaled for her people to back off a little. Everybody had converged on the pair who now stood facing each other. She could only speak for herself, but it was making Catie feel a bit claustrophobic in this giant tube despite the fact that the diameter was easily over ten feet.
“My name is Jessie Springfield,” the woman finally said. Folks call me Jess…mostly.”
“Okay, now that that is out of the way.” Catie looked up at the woman and could see the years of battle on her face. “I am pretty sure you don’t honestly want to die. And, believe it or not, I don’t want to kill you.”
“Not without a little torture first,” the woman quipped.
“You know, I have no idea what the hell was going on around these parts before I arrived, but I am so not like that. Believe it or not, I just want to live in peace. I am trying to make peace.”
“That is not at all what it looked like over at Montague Village,” Jess said flatly.
“We tried. They were the ones who executed every immune in their community as an answer to my request that we come to a sensible understanding.”
“And you are saying that you don’t want to fight us, that you want a treaty or some such nonsense?”
“That’s correct.”
“So you send a bunch of zombies at our walls?”
“Look, we can go around in circles about the methods and tactics of war all day. I am here to tell you that I just want to live in peace.”
“I will make you a deal,” the woman said calmly.
“You aren’t really in a position to make deals, but let’s hear it.”
“You pull back your zombies and then you personally come meet with our leaders.”
Instantly a series of protests rose from Catie’s people.
***
“This is stupid,” Braden whispered in Catie’s ear.
“”No talking!” the man with the massive two-handed sword poking up over his left shoulder barked.
Catie did her best to survey everything without trying to make it seem obvious that she was doing so. They had followed the tunnel for several minutes until they emerged from the sewers into a massive gated community. She had to admit, these people had chosen a pretty high end neighborhood to set themselves up in and create their home base.
What she guessed to have once been a park was now a series of greenhouses. She also saw an array of solar panels. She saw no signs of electric light, but that could simply be because it was not considered vital.
They were marched past another open area that had chickens, cows, and goats. Catie thought it strange that almost nobody looked in their direction as they were escorted down the open street.
When Catie had agreed to come along, Jess had made an allowance for her to bring one person with her. She chose Braden and told the rest to hold their position back at the manhole cover where they had entered. She made a point to emphasize that they were to wait until sunset the following day. If she and Braden were not back at that time, then it was fair to assume they had been killed.
“Send everything at their walls. Burn the place to the ground,” Catie told Mario.
“Okay, you have made your point, let’s go,” Jess had said with almost no sign of emotion.
When they had emerged inside the walls of the community, Jess had been greeted by a heavily armed group of men and women. They had come up in a dead end alley. Catie was fairly impressed. She noticed a huge gate at the end of the alley as well as a sentry tower to the left and right. If anybody did manage to find this supposedly secret entrance and follow it to this point, they would emerge in an open area with no sort of cover. Also, that gate at the end of the alley was heavy duty. It would take considerable effort and resources to break it down.
There had been a bit of an uproar when they first emerged, but Jess had shoved back one of the men who tried to rush forward with his weapon drawn. She had motioned the men and women to the far end of the alley, leaving Braden and Catie alone. Of course there wasn’t much they could do and absolutely no place they could go given the circumstances. When Jess returned, there were still a lot of scowls, but all weapons had been put away.
That was another thing that Catie noticed about these people. They were all well-armed with gear that would make King Arthur’s knights jealous. They all had leather armor that was inlaid with metal stud. Some of the men had gigantic swords strapped to their backs; others had what appeared to be well-crafted swords hanging from their hips.
Eventually, they arrived at a large building. If Catie had to guess, she figured that it had probably been some sort of community center. There was a reception area as soon as you entered. On the wall was a fairly detailed map that had to be the community. It showed the walls and had symbols in various places possibly indicating watch towers. She would love to get a closer look, but they were whisked past the large desk in the lobby area and escorted to a long hallway.
“In here,” Jess said, opening a door to a cavernous room.
Catie peeked inside. There was a Plexiglas skylight that allowed enough light in the room to be able to see. The parquet floor was dull and the finish had long since been rubbed away, but she recognized it for what it had once been: a racquetball court.
“Are we being detained?” Catie asked, pausing at the entrance. Braden had gone in first at her urging, but she was not in a hurry to be locked up.
“You are being kept here for now until you can be brought to the president and the head of our armed response team,” Jess replied.
“Fine, but just remember…the clock is ticking.” Catie knew that Mario would do what she had told him to do if they did not return. If this woman thought her order had been a bluff, she and the rest of these people would find out the hard way that Catie did not bluff.
The door shut and Catie gave the room a closer look. She didn’t see anything that led her to believe that they were being listened in on or spied on. There was a single window in the door, but she did not see anybody when she peeked back out into the hall. Now that her eyes had adjusted, she could see the multitude of scuffs on the walls and even the ceiling where rubber racquetballs had left their mark.
“This is stupid,” Braden repeated his mantra.
“I know, and it may be a mistake, but if we can just talk to these people—” C
atie started.
“They don’t want to talk to us!” Braden interrupted. “They sent our messenger’s head back in a fucking box.”
“Hey!” Catie snapped. “Language!” She pointed to her belly.
Braden opened his mouth and then shut it with an audible click. “Sorry,” he mumbled.
The two sat down in opposite corners from each other and remained quiet. Catie took the time to shut her eyes. She drifted off to sleep wondering why they had not even bothered to take her weapons. Either they were very confident or very stupid. She had learned not to try and decide which one might be the case.
***
“Catie!” Braden’s voice broke through her dreams and yanked her away from Kevin’s arms. When she opened her eyes and fixed him with her glare, he actually backed up a few steps.
“If you would come with us, please,” a tall man wearing a Viking helmet with an enormous axe strapped to his back beckoned.
“Where?” Catie asked as she climbed to her feet. “And is there a bathroom…I need to pee.”
“No time for that,” the man brushed off her request and started for the door.
“Suit yourself, but I won’t be the one mopping it up,” Catie snapped.
“You can hold it.”
“Clearly you have never been pregnant.”
The man turned to regard her and his eyes drifted to her belly as if noticing her condition for the first time. With an over-exaggerated sigh that was more fitting of a petulant teenage girl than a man so outwardly rugged looking as this one, he did an about face and took them the other direction up the hall a ways. As they walked, they passed four more racquetball courts. Two of them had covers over the small windows.
The man stopped at a door and took a parade rest pose beside it. He pointed with his hairy chin and then turned his glowering face to Braden. “You pregnant too?”
“Oh…” Braden guffawed, “you are a funny one!” He slapped his thigh for emphasis and then his face went back to solemn. “I’m good.”
Catie shot a raised eyebrow at the young man and then entered the bathroom. It had actually been a ladies locker room by the looks of things. They had taken out the old bathrooms fixtures and replaced them with a row of portable toilets. A woman dressed very similar to Jess was standing beside the blue box on the far left. Her arms were folded across her chest and she regarded Catie with what almost passed as indifference.
“Bathroom escort?” Catie chortled. “What a shitty job.” She forced a fake laugh and then returned the armed woman’s apathetic expression with a roll of her eyes.
She was always entertained by people who tried to put up a front. This girl was maybe in her early twenties. She had a pair of blades at her hips that were too big to be considered knives but too short to be a sword. Her brown hair was pulled up in a topknot and her leather attire had strips of chain that looked to almost be embedded. She was not wearing her gloves and had them tucked into the broad belt that she wore. The girl was short and almost verging on petite which made her look a bit silly with all the gear she was wearing.
“Is somebody out there?” a voice called from inside the portable toilet.
Catie pressed her lips together in thought. The acoustics of the room was playing tricks on her. That voice had sounded amazingly familiar. Only, she knew it couldn’t be who she thought it was since that sort of thing just didn’t happen. Like Kevin always said, “This ain’t the movies.”
Her bladder was suddenly feeling as if it had done a reverse Grinch and shrunk three sizes. The baby was not helping as it seemed to discover it and make it into a punching bag or soccer ball. She was just glad that she hadn’t really dealt with too much nausea.
Catie was halfway across the room when the door opened to the toilet on the far left. There was a single moment when the person emerging had her head down and Catie could not see her face. That had not made a bit of difference. She knew exactly who it was standing in the open doorway to the portable toilet.
Unlike Catie, this woman was not carrying any of her weapons. She was wearing what looked like a rough spun tunic and over-sized flip-flops. She was currently cinching the thin belt that looked as if it could wrap three or four times around the woman’s waist.
Catie froze, her body fighting every single urge to go for one of the weapons she was carrying. Her eyes flicked from the emerging woman to the guard. Either she was doing an excellent job of hiding the emotions that swirled inside her, or the young woman was simply to ignorant to realize or understand. In any case, the guard had moved to the side and had made yet another mistake that told Catie she had no business being part of security.
The guard had moved to the other side of the portable toilet which basically put the woman emerging out in the open and no more than three strides away from where Catie now stood frozen. In that single instant, time seemed to stop. As the woman’s head was raising and turning just slightly so that she would be looking directly at her, Catie had that instance to wonder if the woman would recognize her.
It would not surprise her if that was not the case; but, when the woman’s eyes met Catie’s, it was clear that recognition came quick. The woman’s eyes went wide as it was apparent that she knew exactly who was staring back at her.
Catie felt her lips pull back in a snarl as two words slithered out, fouling her tongue with the taste.
“Cherish Brandini.”
9
The Children of the Dead
I wasn’t going to sit here and wait while somebody was killed. If it was one of my people, then I was going to help. If it was one of the bad guys…well…there might be more. It’s not that I’ve become some sort of bloodthirsty killer, it is just that I am angry and sick and tired of people thinking that just because the zombies came, they can now act any way they want.
As I have said before, I am an avid reader. I love a good story, but I also enjoyed reading history. I was fascinated by the way that the world grew up and seemed to just take off all of a sudden when technology got so out of control that the day you got the newest thing, it was supposedly already out of date. I have no idea how that worked, but I have heard the stories and read from the stack of old magazines that our community has collected over the last several years.
I reached the ground and another series of shouts and screams that sounded an awful lot like somebody either very scared or in a lot of pain erupted from the woods to my left. There was a pause, and then came the explosions…one after another. Jim was now in the mix.
That was all going on sort of downhill from me, and for that I was thankful. It is much easier to sneak up and gain position on somebody that you are above versus coming up at them.
Moving along the natural ridge that kept me out of the trees, I hurried. I paused every so often to listen. There was definitely a fight going on. I could hear shouts now in amongst the screaming and the crying. It sounded horrible and reminded me of the sounds I heard the night that Suzi McFarlane’s camp was taken down.
Suddenly I just needed to be there myself. I knew why I had been put on the second line with so many others my age. We were put there to minimize the possibility that we died today. If the adults broke and were beaten, I had to think a lot of the younger folks hunkered down and trembling with a machete that they had probably never used on anything other than a practice dummy would break and run for their lives if the bad guys showed up. I wanted to at least see for myself how the fight was going. If my side was winning, then I could continue to hang back. However, if I saw where I might be able to help, then that is what I was going to do.
For just a second, my mind flashed on how Jim had tried to warn me off of my first kill. He said that it would change me forever. Maybe this was what he meant. At this very moment, the thought that I might have to kill another human being to defend my home…Stevie…well, that was something that I was okay with. I won’t say I was at peace, but I was okay with knowing it might be the eventuality.
I reached a spot that gav
e me a view down the hill. Sure enough, on a logging road that ran parallel but below where this old highway used to run was now the scene of a nasty skirmish. I instantly understood why Billy had insisted that all of our people wear red strips of cloth someplace on their person. From up here, it was just a bunch of dark blobs running around like ants that have had their hill kicked, but even from so far above the fray, I caught a flash of red every so often.
I was about to start down and try to find a spot where I might snipe one or two of the bad guys when I heard it. The moan of a zombie is something that you just know. It is like a dog barking or a bird chirping. Sure, you may not know exactly what you are dealing with, but you at least know that it is one of the walking dead.
I had to stand still for a minute, and I almost thought that I had imagined things until I caught movement out of the corner of my eye. Scurrying back to the old highway, I saw the first of them as they rounded a distant corner just down the road a ways.
“Damn,” I breathed to myself.
Coming up the hill was at least fifty of the worst sort of zombie you can encounter. Children.
According to Dr. Zahn, she believes that the child version of a zombie may show limited cognizance because of the fact that a child’s brain is in such a high state of development. She has hypothesized that the child version might even retain memory fragments. There has been more than one case reported where somebody has confronted the child zombie and it not only didn’t attack, but it actually retreated. Billy has stories that many people have a hard time believing, but I know Billy well enough to know that he is not prone to exaggeration. If anything, he minimizes. His story about encountering Emily is pretty incredible.