by SP Durnin
"Hi."
"How did...Jake, what the hell are you doing here?" She cocked her hip, truly angry at him for risking his life. "Do you know what kind of danger we're in?"
He stood there calmly, looking at her with unreadable eyes. "Well, we had a date."
"You came all this way for a date??" Laurel demanded, incredulously.
"Of course not."
"Then what are you…"
"I came here for you, Laurel. It didn't matter if I was scared, and God, I'd be crazy if I weren't right now. I didn't care how many of those things where in my way. Didn't care if I had to walk through Hell, naked, yelling the Devil is a sewage-gulping fag at the top of my lungs." His gaze made her believe it, right down to her boots.
"I don't need you to protect me." She felt she should say something confident just then, because those eyes were making her knees feel like Jell-O. Laurel had never been much of a "damsel in distress" kind of girl. She'd taken up things like aikido, dancing, and she ran in the mornings. She made a point of becoming a capable person in her own right, a woman who didn't need someone else to define who she was.
She could admit to being frightened though. And she was. Right down to the marrow of her bones. If there was ever a reason for fear, dead people getting back up and consuming the living was surely in the top five. She didn't want to die. She especially didn't want to be eaten, or worse, turned into one of the mindless things, but she would be crushed if Jake got himself killed attempting to rescue her. That was something Laurel didn't think she could handle.
He looked at the sword she held. "I know that. But it doesn't change things one bit. You could be catching bullets, swinging a magic lasso, and I'd have still come for you."
He stepped back, looking around. "I like your place. It's homey."
His sudden change in topic didn't succeed in throwing her. "No! No, no! Back up for a minute. So, you were saying what?"
Jake sighed. "That I'm a sucker when it comes to musically inclined redheads that belong on the cover of Playboy, who can kick the crap out of monsters with ancient weaponry."
Laurel twined her arm—the one not holding the sharp, pointy object—around his neck with a lopsided smile. "The cover, huh?"
Kat returned seconds later lugging her pack, to find Jake and Laurel a little distracted. She coughed loudly, causing them to break their embrace with a guilty look on his part.
"If we're all ready now, I think we should get going." She cradled her shotgun. "Allen's waiting outside. It'd be a shame if a zombie or ten came along and bit off his…"
"Alright! Swiftly approaching the point of too much information. Time to head out," Jake said quickly, gesturing behind him with his crowbar. That earned a knowing look from both women, which he firmly ignored. It was a guy thing. You didn't talk about another guy's junk with girls. You didn't talk with other guys about your junk.
Basically, you just didn't talk about it.
"Let's." Laurel shouldered her pack and readied her gladius.
"You realize we're about to head back through a mess, right?" He glanced at Laurel. "It's really bad. Worse than anything I saw with the SAS. Even Bosnia. The dead are moving farther and farther from the center of the city, hunting. And we know what they eat."
"Are they actually, you know, eating?" She frowned. "Or just biting people?"
Kat's face paled. "A little of both. Some of the ones we've seen didn't even have anything left on their insides. What they fed on was just falling through holes where their guts used to be. It's like they keep chomping until you…well, die. Then, once you start moving again, they stop and start looking for another meal."
Jake nodded and checked the hall. "There are a lot of them scattered around. We ran across a pretty large group and it was big enough to make me leery of going anywhere people might congregate. A pair of cops I talked to last night recommended I take anyone I cared about and head for the boondocks. But that's where everyone will be going, so that's where the zombies will head. When the cities empty out, they'll go for where the food is."
Laurel gave him a suspicious look. "You had a run in with the police tonight? What happened?"
"Couldn't sleep, so I stopped at a doughnut shop. Go figure, a couple cops came through."
"Why couldn't you sleep?" Laurel asked.
"Uh." He couldn't actually make the words come out. The side of her mouth quirked skyward in the beginnings of a smile as she gave him an appraising and somewhat frank look.
Jake tried to keep his face from going crimson.
"You're really cute when you blush." Kat stepped over the remains of their door. "Makes your face go all innocent and boyish. It's adorable."
Laurel tried not to laugh. Really, she did.
* * *
The world was at the brink. Rioting was petering out as more and more people fled the cities, running from the ever growing plague of the shambling dead. Or were recruited forcibly into their ranks.
Churches and places of worship became slaughter-houses. The by-God Bible thumpers, the faithful of Allah, the children of David. They all clustered around their various symbols, sang their praises to the Almighty in loud voices, and waited to be taken to paradise. They were the faithful after all.
No gods showed up.
But the dead sure did...
Chapter Six
Things began to go pear shaped about then.
Allen was only a minute from going in guns blazing when he saw the others file carefully out of the building. The girls moved slowly down the street, packs full of what he assumed were their possessions. Jake followed, eyes never still, crowbar in one hand, Hammer pistol in the other.
Wow. That'd actually make a really cool comic book, Allen thought. Apocalyptic Adventures or something. Big guns, bad guys, super-hot scantily-clad babes, lots of gratuitous violence... Nah. Too much like real life at this point.
They were halfway to the Jeep when a crowd of forty corpses began trickling around the corner, two buildings to their rear. A dozen saw the three almost immediately, and a simultaneous chorus of blood-chilling moans rose in a bubbling cry that said Dinner!
Kat and Laurel froze, staring at the choir of nightmares stumping down the middle of the asphalt. Jake, however, took one look at the rotting mob, shoved both women towards Allen, and shouted, "Move!"
The mechanic didn't wait for them to come to him. He set the vehicle heading down the street towards his friends, at speed. Screeching to a halt a car length away, he got a good look at the crowd as the others piled in. Allen was sure he wouldn't suffer from constipation for the rest of his life after coming face-to-face with that bunch.
Kat all but dove into the passenger seat after tossing her bag in the bed. Laurel jumped into the rear and Jake clambered in after her. He dropped to one knee howling, "Go-go-go-go-GO!" He brought the Hammer up, sighted on the nearest corpse, and squeezed the trigger. The gun roared. Half a second later, the thing's head blew apart like a rotten pumpkin. The body dropped bonelessly to the pavement to be ignored by the rest of the dead as they stumbled forward, eyes fixed on the still living quartet.
"Jesus Christ!" Allen threw the Beast into reverse. The off-road tires threw debris virtually into the faces of the oncoming corpses as it shot backwards, with Allen driving via rearview. The others hung on for dear life as he swerved the Jeep deftly around an old VW Bug, built up speed, pulled a sliding one-eighty, popped the clutch, floored the accelerator, and roared onto Broad
Street, leaving the stinking horrors in their wake.
They were two blocks away before Jake's heart rate returned to normal. Laurel sat in the bed beside him, clutching the roll bar support strut so hard her hands had gone white-knuckled.
"Are you alright?" he asked gently.
She was unable to speak, but nodded in reply and gave him a nervous grin. Jake turned and knelt behind the seats. "How about you, Kat?"
"As soon as I decide whether or not to puke, I'll be good."
Jake put a hand on
Allen's shoulder. "You are one great fucking wheelman, my friend."
Allen nodded and swallowed audibly.
Following the route Jake suggested that zigzagged north and south of Broad, Al kept them well away from the main body of the dead. There were zombies scattered everywhere, which in a show of great self-restraint, he refrained from running over. Even if only because that he didn't want to launch Laurel and his friend from the bed of the Jeep as the rear bucked over the putrid speed-bumps.
They continued east, doing only thirty miles per hour, hampered by abandoned vehicles, scattered bodies, and the odd vertical corpse. Jake remained standing in the bed, arm wrapped around the roll bar, crowbar in hand. At this speed there was a good chance he wouldn't be able to hit whatever he shot at, so why waste rounds. If anything got too close, he planned to deter it with nine pounds of steel to the temple.
"Oh, crap." Allen pointed to the road ahead.
Jake's eyes flicked forward. A quarter mile distant, the corner of Broad and James was literally piled six deep with automobiles. Dozens of them were abandoned. Many had become disabled or stuck after ramming other vehicles, adding to the mess.
"We'll never make it past that." Allen slowed the Beast and glanced over his shoulder. "Should I head north? Try to take the back streets?"
Jake considered it for a moment. DCSC (Defense Central Supply and Control) was only a few miles down the road on the north side. The sprawling square mile of government offices and warehouses would have been where those fleeing the zombies, perhaps thousands of them, would have fled looking for guns and refuge. Personally, he thought that would be the stupidest thing anyone could do. Short of stripping themselves naked, bathing in BBQ sauce, and running down the street yelling, Come and get it! Any government facility would be glutted with people trying to enter, and the infected would be right behind them. The creatures would gravitate wherever they found prey, anywhere people gathered in numbers. Police stations, emergency shelters, churches. Avoiding any and all of them would be paramount for the foreseeable future.
"Cut down towards Main," Jake said. "We'll have more options to the south. Should be fewer of them, too."
Allen turned right on James Road using the sidewalk to get through a narrow gap between cars. He scraped the Jeep's side against an old Buick, but Jake didn't bat an eye at the damage.
They traveled on, cutting west on Elbern, then north on Hampton to bypass the mass of now useless steel. They rode through streets full of empty houses, escaped pets, wrecked minivans, and blood stained open doors, avoiding anything that moved.
As they turned onto Hampton, a group of a dozen survivors came down a driveway at the sound of the Beast's engine. They were yelling Stop! and Hold up a second! They looked haggard and a few of them wore makeshift bandages that looked suspiciously like bed sheets. Four of the people in the group were women, which caused Kat to point across the hood while nudging Allen.
"We should check and see if…" she began.
Jake had drawn the Hammer, acquiring a sight picture on the closest survivor before Allen or the girls registered he'd moved. He'd seen the guns some of the party carried pointed vaguely in their direction. Bracing his arms on the roll bar, he stroked the trigger twice, sending both shots though the chest of the lead man. The one who was stepping out into the street to block their way.
"Keep down!" he yelled, causing both girls to duck. Allen watched as he double-tapped another who'd been taking aim through the sights of a rifle. The weapon clattered as it impacted against the pavement just before its previous owner fell on top of it, bouncing off the side of an SUV with a pair of Hammer slugs through his belly.
"Damn it, Allen, keep us moving!"
Al had taken his foot off the accelerator, and he stomped again now in earnest. He heard barks from various caliber weapons, then Jake's answering double taps, as they raced away from the group. A stray round hit the driver's side mirror, shattering the glass and tearing away the holder arm. Allen Nascar'd it down the block, fishtailed around the corner, and headed east again on Broad.
He slowed the Beast a bit and attempted to bring his shaking hands under control. Jake knelt in the bed, inserting a fresh magazine into the Hammer and glaring behind them with cold, angry eyes.
"I can't believe you did that!" Laurel said. "You didn't even give them a chance...You killed those two! They were trying to get away, like us! What the hell is wrong with you?"
Jake said nothing. He stared down at the gun like it was a viper in his palm.
I just killed someone, he thought numbly. Again.
His eyes were haunted as they rose to meet Laurel's.
Allen glanced in the rearview mirror and realized he'd seen that look on his friend's face before, after O'Connor had come back from his stint overseas. He'd seen it when Jake had been released from the hospital, after being stabbed by the shit-eating rapist he'd helped catch.
"What did you see?" Allen demanded.
Jake stared out the windshield. "Police issue firearms, matching jailhouse tattoos, the quartet of bruised faces on the women, the fact they were all handcuffed together…"
Kat turned around, her face a mix of horror and rage. "You're shitting me!"
Jake shook his head, then pulled a smoke out of the pocket of his Tac harness. He sheltered his Zippo against the breeze, lit up, exhaled explosively, and checked the road ahead.
"Could we…" Kat began.
"What?" he asked. "Go back? Sure. There are four of us, three of whom have guns, versus six or seven of them. Half of them have guns now, if they scavenged the ones I…shot. The odds aren't bad. We might be able to free those women. But some of us would probably get hurt, or killed in the process or..."
Allen was silent. He understood. No real man turned his back on a woman who needed help. He suppressed the urge to swing the Jeep around, go back, and turn those sacks of garbage into zombie kibble. Like Jake, Al was going to wonder for a long time if maybe they could've freed those women. Neither of them was willing to risk their girls on a maybe, however.
Laurel hadn't realized what prompted Jake's choice until then. He had wanted to help those people. Everything in him was screaming to go back, but if he did, they might all be killed or worse. All sorts of scenarios played through her mind. She knew he must have considered them over the space of a second or two. He and Allen would have been shot, or maybe beaten and left for the hungry dead. She and Kat would've been cuffed, then made into slaves. The word rape was prominent in her mind and she knew her roommate was thinking the same. Now that Laurel had time to look back on what she'd seen, not one of the women in that group had seemed the least bit happy about their company. One looked absolutely homicidal. She laughed as the first man Jake shot hit the ground. At the time, Laurel believed the woman's mind had cracked, but now she wasn't so sure.
She put her hand on Jake's arm, since he held a smoke in one hand and his other was still wrapped tightly around his enormous pistol. She felt his body vibrating with impotent rage as he thought about the fate of the handcuffed women. "I'm sorry," she said.
He gazed at her woodenly and finished his cigarette in silence.
* * *
The next group that needed help they didn't leave.
They were cutting through a high school parking lot when Jake spotted them. A trio of survivors half-stumbling across the soccer field next to the parking lot, pursued by a baker's dozen of hungry corpses. He bellowed for Allen to stop and jumped from the bed, almost before his friend brought the Jeep to a screeching halt. There were three figures out in front, two of which held up the third, trying to get to the gate. A cluster of dead followed slowly, just beyond the five-foot chain-link fence.
Jake pointed at the field. "Kat, come with me! Al, make for the gate. They're almost there anyway. When you reach it, don't ram it! Just push it open with the bumper. And give Laurel your gun!" He started for the fence.
Allen passed the redhead his Desert Eagle and put the Beast in gear again. Laur
el took the weapon and called out, "Jake! Wait! I'll come with you!"
"Laurel, please!" he begged, running for the fence with Kat close behind. "Allen needs someone to watch his back. He can't do that and drive, and I need Kat to cover me with the shotgun!"
Laurel cursed, frightened for them, and jumped into the passenger seat as the vehicle roared for the far side of the field.
Jake grabbed the fence rail and leapt over, only touching the top with one foot briefly as he cleared it on the fly. He was about to grab the bottom and pull it up for Kat to roll under when she tossed the shotgun at him. He caught it reflexively as she took three running strides, jumped, planted both hands on the top rail, and flipped over the fence like a gymnast off a vaulting horse. She landed in a crouch and took the weapon back as he stood, jaw hanging open.
"Allen was right." He drew his pistol and headed after the group of zombies.
"What?" Kat pulled abreast as they closed on the dead.
"You are so hot," he said, coming to a halt and dropping into a shooting stance. "Can you really use that weapon?"
"Watch me!" She exclaimed beside him and brought the Remington to her shoulder. "And I promise I won't mention you said that to Laurel."
"I'd appreciate that. I need you to take the left. Don't just start blasting; wait until those three are clear. Work from the outermost in." Then Jake opened fire.
He managed to kill five of them before the rest turned to see where all the noise was coming from. Kat waited with her shotgun while he dropped two more, then paused to reload as the pack began to shuffle towards them. The fleeing trio saw Allen take out the gate and made for the Jeep as she blew the head completely off one corpse, then shot another through the left eye. Jake yelled for her to hold fire unless any of them got close, slapped in a new mag, dropped the slide on the Hammer, and began dealing with the remaining five. He killed three of them before they got within forty feet, and Kat felt she needed to get involved again. She pulled the trigger, vaporizing one zombie's face. The writer fired on the last one, killing it not ten yards from where they stood, just as Allen brought the Jeep onto the field and coasted to a halt in the grass.