by Brown, TW
“”What the…!” a man’s voice roared from what seemed like a million miles away. Catie did not react and continued to stab over and over. Now her attack was becoming more frenzied as she drove the blade hilt deep into the body of a woman who now stared blankly at the roof of the portable toilet, her eyes glazed in death.
“Catie!” a familiar voice called from far away despite the owner of that voice being right in front of her.
She had no recollection of how she ended up back in the middle of the old locker room. Something sticky seemed to coat every inch of her body. Salty liquid trickled into her eyes and made her blink away the stinging sensation. Braden was standing in front of her and he was covered in blood. That caused Catie to tighten up and she looked around for an attacker.
“Hey,” Braden said, this time his voice was calm but urgent. “Look at me.”
Catie blinked away the stinging sensation in her eyes and felt the adrenaline that had hit her so hard mere moments ago as it ebbed and began to recede. Realization struck and she started to turn back towards the portable toilets. Braden’s grip tightened and he pulled her back around to face him.
“No, you don’t need to see that.” He started to guide her towards the door.
“I think it’s too late for that,” the man who had been their escort snorted.
“That bitch is crazy!” a voice called from someplace.
For just a moment, Catie remembered what she had done and thought that perhaps she hadn’t actually finished Cherish Brandini off. That didn’t seem possible; and then she remembered the young lady who she had knocked out.
Catie took a step towards the woman with the intention of apologizing. The woman jumped as if she had been hit with a jolt of electricity.
“Keep away from me, you lunatic!”
“Okay, that’s enough,” the Viking said with a snort of laughter. “Sure don’t know how we are gonna explain this.”
“Nothing to explain,” Catie said as she pulled away from Braden. Her head gave a sideways nod towards the row of portable toilets. “That woman and a friend of hers crucified my husband and left him for a mob of zombies. I got the friend a while back, never thought I would see Cherish again. I got lucky.”
“The woman you killed was named Cherish?” Braden sounded incredulous.
“Cherish Brandini,” Catie answered with a nod.
“Yeah, well she was a prisoner of ours. We caught her and a group of about fifty men and women a few days ago. They were scouting us. From what we confiscated, they had detailed notes on another settlement just south of here.” The Viking walked over to the portable toilet and pulled a sturdy spike and hammer from his belt. With a few quick movements, he placed the spike in the center of the forehead of Cherish Brandini and smacked it good with the hammer a few times. “We have them separated, men and women. Our interrogators have been working their way through the bunch. I guess you just moved somebody up a spot in line.”
“They are part of a pretty large army. The thing is, I have no idea who is in charge any more or what their agenda might be,” Catie offered. She gave a very brief description and recounting of what she could remember about Erin Bergman’s army. The young woman named Erin had said something about her name being Erin Crenshaw now since she had apparently gotten married to some poor unfortunate bastard, but she would always be little Erin Bergman as far as Catie was concerned.
“Hmm, that is good to know. We haven’t even been thinking to ask them about being part of a big army. I think we figured that a group this large was just a band of raiders. Not often that you see a scouting party numbering over five. But if that army is the size you say it is—”
Just then, the door to the locker room flew open and Jess strode in with four others dressed like they were about to ride into battle. She only cast a brief glance in the direction of the row of portable toilets before stopping in front of the Viking escort.
“Report to the watch commander, Roger,” Jess said with no inflection or sign that she was angry.
“I was hoping that we could meet with you before you encountered the other prisoners,” Jess said as she made her way over to Catie.
“If there is to be some sort of punishment, I think it should be directed at me. Your guards had no idea and Braden certainly didn’t know anything was going to happen. Hell, I didn’t either until that bitch walked out of the toilet.” Catie moved her hands to her belly almost protectively. “And if you are going to kill me or whatever, please, could you possibly consider waiting until my child is born?”
“Wait.” Jess held up her hands. “Are you putting yourself up for execution even though your forces have the zombies outside our gates with an order to attack if you don’t return? Tell me how that works to my favor.”
“Naturally I would ask you to release Braden so he could give the word for our people to fall back and get the zombies away from your gates if I am to be punished for killing that piece of trash,” Catie replied.
“Well I don’t think you will be facing the headsman’s axe anytime soon,” Jess sighed. “We just discovered that this scouting force managed to get a messenger off to some unknown location according to our latest round of interrogations. We thought that we snagged them all, but it seems we were wrong. Now we have to decide how we can fight a war on two fronts.”
“But you don’t have to fight a war on two fronts,” Catie insisted.
“That remains to be seen.” Jess motioned for her escort to head for the door. “Let’s have this little meeting. Not exactly the circumstances I would have liked, but I think we are at a point where this snowball gets away from us if we don’t get it under control in a hurry.”
Catie excused herself, reminding them of her initial reason for coming in this room in the first place and then followed with Braden stepping up beside her. As they reached the doors and were about to exit, the young woman who had been Cherish Brandini’s guard called out. “What am I supposed to do with the body?”
“Take it to the incinerator,” Jess answered. “Then go let her people know that she won’t be returning.”
“But—” came the strangled and obviously confused reply.
Jess stopped and spun on her heel to face the woman, holding the door open for Catie and Braden to pass through under her arm. “If this is too much for you, then perhaps we will have to reassign you to the wall. I told your commander that you were not ready for this sort of thing. I have a feeling his reasons for requesting your transfer to this job have more to do with your performance in his bed rather than your actual ability as part of the defense force.”
Jess stepped out into the hallway and shot Catie a knowing smirk. “Some things never change, am I right? The pretty ones always try to sleep their way to the top and then act surprised when they discover that the job they thought they wanted actually involves work.”
Catie shrugged and smiled. She hated to admit it to herself, but she found that she really was starting to like this woman. It would be a shame if she was forced to deal with her in the same way they had dealt with the citizens of Montague Village. Despite her policy of making allowances for the women and children in the end, there could be no such leniency for a woman like Jessie Springfield. She was a fighter…a warrior…and thus, she would have to be classified as a threat.
They exited the building and crossed an empty street. Catie could hear the sounds of a city defending against a siege. There were shouts and the barking of orders over the almost steady background noise of the moans and rasping cries of the undead.
A short, squat building that looked like it might have once been a little automotive shop of some sort appeared to be their destination. When they reached the roll-up doors, Jess gave a solid rap with her gloved fist. A moment later, a ladder was tossed down.
“None of the doors or windows on the ground floor of any of our buildings is accessible. Most have some sort of reinforcement on the inside. Many of the more important ones are steel plates that we managed to
salvage from the college in Chattanooga,” Jess said proudly. “There were only about fifty of us, but in those early days, that was actually an impressive number since most groups were a handful of people or even singles.”
Catie made a sound of appreciation as she made her way up the ladder. Once they were all on the roof, the ladder was immediately pulled back up. A trap door was opened and led to another climb down. Inside, she confirmed her suspicions that this had been a garage. Besides the two lift racks, there was the distinct smell that greeted you in every garage. She was a little surprised that it lingered so many years later, but she supposed that perhaps it had worked itself into the very fiber of the building. Jess led them to one of the bays and Catie was amazed to discover another trap door in the floor.
They climbed down a series of rungs mounted into the concrete wall and arrived in a small chamber made all the more claustrophobic with the arrival of Jess, Catie, and Braden.
Two men were sitting at a desk and both looked up as soon as Jess arrived. They stood and greeted the woman with a crisp salute.
“This is the woman, commander?” one of the two men asked with a dubious expression on his face.
“I’d be careful if I were you,” Jess warned. “I don’t think she would have a problem kicking your ass…pregnant or not.”
Catie hid her smile. And then something dawned on her. She turned to Jess. “Commander?”
“I hated the sound of president,” Jess replied with a shrug.
“So you are the person running things here?”
“It isn’t a dictatorship, but I do have the final say.”
Catie instantly had a new and increased appreciation for this woman. Not only was she seemingly very smart, but she also led from the front. After all, Catie had encountered her outside the walls of this community. Which brought up the question…
“What were you doing outside your gates when I ran into you?” Catie asked, not really expecting an answer, but deciding that a closed mouth did not get fed and an unasked question did not get answered.
“We managed to break one of the people in Cherish Brandini’s group a few days ago. They told us about the main body of their army. I had to see for myself and I didn’t trust anybody else to go see what these people had moving in our direction.”
Once again, that was something that Catie could understand. In any other circumstance, she felt that she and this Jessie Springfield would have been friends. It was still possible for such a thing to happen, but it would take a lot more time and effort. Neither were things that Catie had a surplus of at the moment. It didn’t help any that the last thing Catie knew about the army was that they were set on wiping out the immune. That immediately put them on the side with Jess and the ideology to which her people subscribed.
“Okay, something just flitted across your face, and it didn’t look pleasant,” Jess said, moving over and taking a seat at the big desk that sat against the far wall; the men took up a position on either side of her and came to parade rest, eyes forward and no longer examining Catie. (At least not openly.)
Catie considered her answer and finally decided that she did not have the energy to play cat-and-mouse games. Also, if Brandini was a sign that Erin’s army was still together and on the move in this direction, that took everything that she had laid out in the past several days and threw it into a blender.
Catie started spilling everything, at least as to how it pertained to Cherish and the army headed this direction. More than once, Braden tried to get her to stop talking. Catie had shrugged him off until he had finally exploded.
“Are you trying to get these people to wipe us out right now?” he hollered.
“I don’t believe that to be the case,” Catie said calmly. Through it all, Jess remained quiet, her hands folded on the desk before her like an attentive student on the first day of school.
At last, Braden stomped over to a corner and folded his arms across his chest. She could understand why he was upset; after all, she was basically telling this person that an army larger than probably all the communities in the area combined (including Montague Village before it had been eliminated) was coming this direction. They were basically seeking the same agenda that was so predominant in the current culture.
When she finally finished with her narrative, Catie waited for whatever direction Jess decided to go. Maybe this was for the best, she thought. As much as she fantasized about bringing Kevin’s child into the world and raising him or her, did she really want to bring a helpless baby into this sort of world where zombies were becoming the least of the worries as a severe division was forming between those who knew they were immune and those who had no idea?
“I think you and I need the room,” Jess finally announced. She rose to her feet and motioned for her two men to escort Braden up the ladder.
Catie gave him a reassuring smile as he shot her a worried look on his way up. When the hatch closed, Catie turned to the woman.
“So what’s the verdict?”
Jess seemed to be considering her words carefully. At last she dropped her gaze and stared at the floor. Catie felt her stomach drop. Despite thinking that it might be nice for everything to just end not more than a few minutes ago, she now realized that, yes, she did want to bring this baby into the world. She only had a second or two in which to wonder if maybe she was more than a little hormonal before Jess spoke.
“My sister was immune,” Jess finally said. “Early on, when all this madness began, she was the first person I knew to survive an attack. She took it upon herself from that point forward to be the one to go out and scavenge for food and supplies. Her logic was sound…if something got her and inflicted a little damage, it would suck, but it was not fatal. Then, one time, she just didn’t come back. I never knew what happened to her and the three people that she went out with that day, but I knew my sister well enough to know that she was not one for taking chances. She was the opposite of me before the zombies. In fact, she never saw a single one of my fights. Not ladylike as far as she was concerned, and she admitted to me that she feared how seeing me get hit or possibly bleed would cause her to faint.
“I think that she ran into some bad people. Zombies aren’t that smart and are easy to predict. People? Not so much. I told myself that maybe this sort of thing was genetic, and if she was immune, then it was very likely that I was also. My brother beat me to the punch and intentionally went out and got himself bitten by one of those freaking things.” Jess paused and took a deep breath. “I put him down the next day.”
Catie squeezed her eyes shut and ran her hands through her hair. She understood the pain that was coming out so very clear in this woman’s voice.
“Six months later I woke up to discover that my boyfriend would be the next to go down.” Jess paused and a nasty look flashed across her features for just a split second. “I woke him up for the afternoon meal. He’d had the evening watch. At least, that was where he was supposed to be. But when he opened his eyes and I saw the tracers, I was stunned. I jerked the blankets back and he didn’t have a scratch on him. I asked him if he’d had any walkers that he had to deal with during his watch and he said that he hadn’t and why did I ask.”
Once more, Jess was quiet, and Catie didn’t really need to hear the details of the story to figure it out. People could turn a number of ways without being bitten.
“At the time, we didn’t know much. We had a few people in our community that survived the bite. Nobody really gave it any thought as far as being able to catch it from each other. The next few weeks were like reliving the early days when AIDS had us so scared that we were almost afraid to touch each other. He swore all the way up to the point when I jammed that spike into his temple that he hadn’t done anything. Funny coincidence, the day after the word got out and started to spread about my late boyfriend, one of the girls that we knew to be immune just up and vanished.”
“So you are judging every other immune person by that individual’s actions?” Cati
e said, not caring if it sounded harsh or even a bit sarcastic.
“I came to terms with the decision to exclude any immune citizens using that raw emotion, yes,” Jess said with a nod. “Eventually, it just became the way things were and nobody thought anything of it.”
“You do see the flaw in that logic, don’t you?”
Catie would hate to think that her admiration of this woman was misplaced, but if she still held those beliefs, then she was not worth two shits as far as Catie was concerned. She stared at Jess who was studying her hands at the moment.
“I saw it years ago,” Jess whispered. “But by then, it was too late.”
“It’s never too late!” Catie snapped. “That is an excuse and you know it.”
“Do you have any idea how much blood is on my hands if I reverse my stance now?”
“No more or less if you don’t. The only difference is that you can stop adding to it now, or have it continue to grow until you eventually drown in it.” When Jess gave her a look to continue, Catie chose her words with as much care as she was able considering the circumstances. “We are in a barbaric world now. All the social norms of the past are dead and most would get you killed these days. We make the new rules as we go, and it will be these choices that determine if we endure. The zombies might not be falling over any time soon, but they are wearing down and gathering in numbers that would actually allow us to turn the tide if we came together. They don’t think or react with any sense or reason. If we turned our attention to the largest herds and torched them or something, we could reclaim the world. But if we keep taking shots at each other, eventually there won’t be any people alive to reclaim the planet. But if we set our differences aside long enough to deal with the real problem, then the immune and those who don’t know could live apart but maintain some sort of symbiotic relationship.”
Jess was silent for a moment before speaking. When she did, there was a cautious tone to her voice. “Once the zombies are gone, then the immune would still have an upper hand. They would be walking weapons.”