by Jacy Morris
They would check the campsite first. Perhaps the black man and the pregnant lady had holed up there. It did have its own bathroom. Women loved that sort of thing.
The campsite was really nothing more than a bunch of cleared spaces marked off for out-of-towners to park their RVs and pretend they were camping. It wasn't real camping as far as he was concerned. It was just some bullshit designed to help city folk feel like they were communing with nature. They might as well sit in a parking lot outside of Wal-Mart. But the joke was on them in the end he guessed. All those city folk were gone by now. He was thankful that he had grown up a country boy, freed from the things that city folk craved.
He didn't need a mansion. He didn't need wi-fi or electricity. All he really needed was good people, some guns, and his brother. But now his brother was missing.
There were a few vehicles parked in the area. Chad saw the tell-tale signs of carnage. They were easy to spot now. A camper with its door wide open. Supplies scattered and left in the open. A bloody handprint on the side of a camper's tan siding.
A few of the dead had gathered here. They stood still, just waiting for something to draw their attention. Chad, with Dale guarding his back, snuck up on one and jammed his spear through its neck, severing the spinal cord. It was still alive, but its arms and legs no longer worked.
The noise of the body slumping to the ground was enough to draw the attention of the other corpses in the area. "Let's rock and roll," he said. Dale grunted his agreement. He liked that about the man. He didn't flap his gums too often. A man who knew the value of silence was a good man to have around in Chad's opinion.
The dead honed in on them. There were only four of them. None of them were his brother. He didn't know whether to be thankful or annoyed that his hunt still had to continue. Reed was the hunter. He knew how to track things down, find things that other people would have missed. Chad was more of a fisherman; he liked to bait the hook, catch the fish, reel it in, and watch as it flopped around on the shore gasping for breath. That intensity, that struggle for life always fascinated him.
He remembered the lake where they used to fish when they were younger, when their parents still gave a rat's ass about them. They would make a day of it. Chad would sit on a bucket with his old man, just casting and reeling while the sun worked its way across the sky. He always caught something. As the sun would go down, Reed would appear, some sort of dead animal in his hands, a beaver, squirrels, sometimes something larger. He didn't know how he did it, but he envied his brother that skill.
The first of the dead approached, and Chad sidestepped its clumsy attempt to grab him. He stuck the spear between the creature's legs as he circled, yanking it sideways so that it fell to the ground. He raised his arms in the air and drove downward with the spear. It punctured the creature's skull at the temple, and then it was dead for good.
Another came, perhaps the wife of the bearded man he just killed. She waved her arms wildly at Dale. Dale flipped the spear in his hands and swung it like a baseball bat. It crashed into the dead woman's head, and she fell sideways to the ground. Dale jumped on her, stepping on her neck with his boot. Its arms grabbed at Dale's jeans, and he drove his spear home. She stopped moving.
From there, the rest of the dead were easy pickings. Just children, they were a lot easier to knock down and dispatch. He felt sorry for them, in a distant part of his mind. He never felt good about killing the young ones, but they were just as dangerous as the older. He had seen that shit first hand at the trailer park when a couple of kids fell sick, only to attack their parents in the middle of the night. He and Reed had been the only ones capable of killing them, but after that, everyone sort of got the picture. He was sure that it was his ability to do what needed to be done that had allowed him to become the leader of his motley crew of trailer park residents. Without those kids, they all would have been dead long ago; he was sure of it.
It's funny how things work out. There I was, just a nothing slaving away on some asshole's farm, and now I'm the king of it all. He smiled at the thought.
"You want I should take a look at the bathroom?" Dale asked.
Chad nodded, and Dale took off, a handheld flashlight in one hand, his spear in the other. Chad watched the trees sway in the breeze for a second, and then he approached the camper. There was still a bunch of good shit in there. He found a can of Pringles that was still unopened. He reached down and grabbed them from the bloodstained floor of the camper.
"Pizza flavor?" He shook his head, pulled the plastic lid off, and then ripped open the foil seal. He reached inside and pulled out a stack of Pringles. He popped them in his mouth and shrugged his shoulders as he chewed. "Not bad."
He put the lid back on the Pringles and then began rummaging through the rest of the crap that was left. He had an eye on the cooler in the corner. Who knew what good shit would be hiding in there?
He was bent over reaching for it, when he felt something touch his elbow. Immediately he spun, his fist cocked back to deliver a blow, but it was just Dale.
"Jesus, Dale. Use your words man. You scared the fuck out of me." Then Chad noticed Dale's face. It was white, the color drained out of it. "What is it?"
"You should look," Dale said.
Chad's heart sank in his chest. He knew without having to be told what he would find in the bathroom. Shit. He walked over to the entrance to the bathrooms. It was dark inside, and he paused. "Are you sure I need to go in there?"
Dale just nodded.
Chad fumbled in his pack for his flashlight. Finding it, he took a deep breath to steady himself. He didn't want to go in there, not one bit. He clicked the flashlight on and a brilliant beam of light shot off into the gloom. "Ain't nothing moving in there, is it?" he asked, delaying the inevitable.
Dale shook his head.
Chad wiped a cold sweat off his brow and then pushed forward into the darkness. The beam only managed to light up a small portion of the bathroom. The first thing he spotted was the blood. Then he saw a boot, Reed's boot. As he panned the light up his brother's body, the light began to shake. Then the beam touched his brother's face.
He dropped the flashlight altogether, and then backed out of the bathroom. It was too horrible. Even though he couldn't visually see Reed's body anymore, the image was still in his mind. It was a mess, a smashed and devoured mess. Something had been feeding on him, but he couldn't tell what. He didn't want to know. Animal or dead thing, it didn't matter. He dropped to his knees and retched, spitting bile into the dirt in front of the bathroom.
"Holy God," he moaned. Trying to look anywhere but the bathroom. "Oh, Jesus." He looked up at the trees, but even there, he could still see his brother's mutilated face. He closed his eyes, but the face was there as well.
"Yeah, we found him. We're down the road a bit... at the campground." It was Dale, speaking into the walkie. He might as well be in another galaxy as far as Chad was concerned. He squatted in the dirt, trying to make sense of the world he was in.
He didn't know how long he sat like that, but when he came to, the others were around him. They had grim looks upon their faces, and they were obviously concerned about him. He was ashamed at showing this weakness to them, and anger unfurled in his chest where the pain had been before.
"Gimme some light," he said as he walked into the bathroom. They followed him, lighting the way. He squatted down to take a good look at the mess that used to be his brother.
"You think one of the dead got him?" a man asked him.
The face was definitely shredded, but the lines were too straight, too perfect to be from the teeth of the dead. Chad reached out and turned his brother's head from side to side. The back of his skull was gone. Animals didn't do that. Bullets did.
"Someone killed him. Look at that," he pointed to the back of the skull.
"You think it was those people?" Dale asked.
"You seen anyone else out here?"
Dale didn't need to say anything to that. Why would they cover it
up? It made no sense. They must have known that Chad had sent Reed to find them, so why go through all of this trouble? They must be afraid of him, and well they should be.
He suspected they were staying somewhere close. Most likely, they didn't want him to know that they were out here. Fear was the only logical explanation he could come up with to explain their clumsy attempt to make him think his brother had been killed by the dead. Their stupid attempt at covering their tracks was pathetic, and he would make them pay for it. He would do to them what they had done to his brother, only they would be alive while it happened.
"Come on. Let's get you home, little brother." Chad leaned down and hefted his brother's body off the floor. Even though Reed wasn't a big man, he still weighed what seemed like a ton. He threw the body over his shoulder, and they began the long walk home.
****
For a while, Dez slept. After she had eaten, she had fallen into a silent, brooding mood. Clara wondered what would happen if she let Dez go. She cared nothing for the drama of this compound. If Dez wanted to kill herself, she had every right. It wasn't something that Clara would ever consider, but who was she to rob someone of what they truly wanted? If Dez wanted to die, let her.
That she was pregnant didn't even enter the equation. The way Clara saw it, it was criminal to even bring a baby into this world. It was a selfish and misguided act, but then it always had been in her mind, even before the world had died. But society had to start up again sooner or later, or else they were all just part of a species slowly going extinct.
Looking back on everything that she had seen, maybe that was a good thing. She shivered at her own morbid thoughts.
"You look like I feel," Dez said sleepily.
"Yeah, well, we all got our problems, don't we?"
"You know what I miss the most?" Dez asked. Clara said nothing. She didn't want to have this conversation. She had heard it enough to be sick of it. "I miss the smells of the morning. My parents would always get up before me. I was supposed to go to college, so they didn't bother trying to teach me the farm life. But those smells, they would always wake me up, even though I could have slept in. I can still see them there, my father sitting at the table reading his newspaper, drinking a black cup of coffee. That coffee smell would just crawl right up my nose while I was sleeping, and it would always wake me up, didn't matter how late I had gone to sleep. I miss the clink of glasses and forks and knives as they ate. I miss the smell of sizzling bacon and toast warming in the toaster."
"Stop it," Clara said. "You're depressing me."
"You weren't depressed before?" Dez asked. "That's a miracle."
They lapsed into silence, Clara looking through the cracks between the boards that covered the window. She could see the womenfolk out there. That's what they called them, right? Womenfolk? They went about their duties, gardening, hauling water, preparing the evening meal. The sun had moved over the big house so that it was dark in the room.
"Grab that bedpan. I have to shit," Dez asked.
Clara turned and grabbed the bedpan from the floor. Dez was in the act of squirting out a runny shit when the door burst open. A demon stood in the doorway, covered in blood. For a moment, Clara thought it was one of the dead, but then the demon pointed at her and yelled, "You!"
That's all there was. No other words accompanied the demon's declaration, and then it flew across the room, knocking her to the ground. She slapped at the demon as it advanced upon her again. It picked her up and threw her into the wall. She fell to the side, knocking over an end table. An ancient lamp fell to the ground, breaking into a dozen pieces and cutting Clara's legs.
The demon picked her up again and punched her in the ribs. Then it dragged her through the big house, out the front door, and down the rickety, wooden porch. She tried to fight, tried to stop what was happening to her, but she couldn't. Her heels hammered on wooden floor boards and then dirt, but he was too strong, too violent.
He threw her down in the courtyard, and Clara resisted the urge to fight back. Everyone watched, the pregnant women, the slack-jawed men. She was powerless. Everything in the compound stopped, and it was quiet, but for the buzzing of insects and the songs of birds in the trees.
Chad bent over and looked her in the face. "You said they weren't killers!" he yelled.
"They aren't," she spit back, not sure what had changed since Chad and the others had left. He grabbed her by the hair and dragged her to her feet, hauling her across the courtyard of the compound and through the open gate. She stumbled, falling, gashing her knee on a rock, but Chad didn't stop. She would be following him one way or another, on her feet or on her knees, so she pushed herself up and stumbled after.
"Then why is my brother fucking dead?" he said as he dumped her on the ground next to a corpse.
It was Reed. She recognized him by his clothes and what was left of his hair. His face was damaged beyond recognition. "It looks like one of those things got him."
Chad stalked over to his brother's corpse and lifted it up, turning its head, so she could clearly see the exit wound. "How do you explain that?"
She couldn't explain it. It was obvious. Chad kicked her hard in the ribs. He balled his hands into fists tightly, and she wondered just how far this would go. He punched her, the sound echoing across the silent courtyard. The impact struck her across the jaw, and she tasted blood in her mouth.
He picked her up again, shaking her. "Tell me why I should let you live."
She had no answer, and now wasn't the time to lie to Chad. He was on the verge of murder. She could see it in his eyes. "You shouldn't," she said.
Chad stared at her, trying to figure out what game she was playing, and then he saw that she wasn't playing a game. She was simply being honest. He let her drop to the compacted dust of the courtyard. There were too many people here for her to do anything to try and escape. All she could do was wait out the storm and hope that she made it through to the other side.
"Put her in the trailer," Chad said, though it seemed to take all of his strength to utter the words instead of beating her some more.
A couple of men rushed to pick her up off the ground. They dragged her to the trailer, and threw her inside. She heard the sound of a padlock clicking as they locked the door behind her. She dragged her battered and bruised body to the bed in the back of the trailer.
Joan was awake and concerned. She got one look at Clara and said, "My God. What's happened?"
Clara was too tired to say anything. She lay on the bed, nursing her ribs. They burned with fire as she lay down on the mattress. Joan reached over to her to see if she was alright, but Clara just batted her hand away. Then she drifted off to sleep, letting the pain turn into blackness.
****
Chad stalked across the compound, unleashing a cavalcade of swear words. His rage was consuming; his anger sought to overwhelm him.
"You oughta just kill them," Dale said.
Chad pulled up from his pacing and looked Dale in the eye. "Don't tell me what I ought to do."
Dale took a step backwards, and Chad ran his hands through his hair as if trying to physically pull the anger out of his skull. He threw his hands at the ground and looked up at the sky. A couple of men grabbed some shovels and began digging a grave.
He sat then, his mind churning up horrors and revenge fantasies. Sick thoughts flooded his brain. He ought to cut Clara's hand off. Reed was like his own right hand, and now he was dead. Shouldn't she lose her hand? Wasn't that fair? Shouldn't she have to pay for what her friends did?
The doctor was off limits. They needed her. She had skills that none of them had. Sure, people had been having babies without doctors for the better part of humanity, but just in case something happened during delivery, she was still needed. The last thing they needed was someone dying in child labor with people all around them when they turned into one of those things. Maybe they would have to tie down the pregnant women when they gave birth, but that was a problem for another time.
> Right now, his problem was revenge. He could go in there and make them a part of this whole thing, but that would defeat the purpose of this whole compound. It's not that he was against rape as a means of punishment, but he needed them functional. He needed them to be good mothers. Children needed mothers. They needed people that would care about them and feed them. Rape children would not be cared for. They would grow up crooked and twisted, despised by their own mothers.
The raspy sound of the shovels hit his ears, and another thought crossed his mind, a dark twisted thought that finally brought a smile to his face. The plan came to him, unfurling in his mind like a time-lapse video of a flower blossoming. Tomorrow... tomorrow would be a good day to execute his plan.
****
Katie heard them moving through the woods. They were searching for her and Mort. They were riled up, agitated. She regretted that her plan to mutilate Reed's body hadn't worked. It would have made things so much easier if Chad had believed his brother had been mauled by the dead. She had heard Clara's cries of pain as Chad had beaten her. She felt guilty for that, and while it wasn't a welcome sensation, it was at least a different emotion than she had felt for the last few months.
She knew why she was up in the tree with her handgun clutched in her hands. She knew why she was spending valuable effort trying to free these two women who had shown nothing but tacit acceptance of her existence. They had finally made her feel something other than depression. Katie knew she was a drowning woman, and the only thing that had kept her afloat these last few months had been the presence of others. She wasn't best friends with Clara and Joan, but she didn't like the thought of them being stuck in the compound either. They couldn't stay in there, and Mort and Katie couldn't stay outside. Something was going to have to give... and it certainly wasn't going to be Katie.
From her vantage point, she could see them moving through the forest. Mort had boosted her up into the tree as the branches were too far off the ground for her to reach. It was an old tree. The stumps of branches shed long ago stuck out of its sides, and once she had made it into the tree proper, it had been easy enough to make her way up higher into the tree.