“You two will look out for each other.”
“But I want you!” Her hands cupped my cheeks, and she forced me to look at her. “You don’t expect to come back alive, do you?” Her voice had that tone I had once heard in my mother’s just before my real dad died. Was it . . . remorse?
“I expect to win,” I said, as if that were an answer.
The first time I had waged war on my stepfather, when I’d lured his sons to the cabin and then attracted the soldiers to his home, I had also expected to win. And maybe I had or I hadn’t won, considering the soldiers hadn’t killed him. But because they had driven him from the colony, I got stronger.
“Do you hear that?” Oliver whispered, and I heard it for the first time. At first I heard a gentle rustle of bushes. But soon the snapping of twigs turned into a crashing through the woods.
They had found us. Unprepared. We were dead.
Chapter Twenty-four
Oliver loaded her crossbow at the same moment that I loaded my bow. She grunted as she pulled the drawstring back, and I knew she wouldn’t be able to do that twice. We steeled ourselves for either my stepfather’s army or the army brats, knowing no matter which showed up, this would be our last stand.
Kady better be prepared. Just in case, I kicked my foot on the roof as an alarm for her. We had nowhere to hide. Nothing to crouch behind. What had I been thinking? That this would be a safe place? I should’ve set the traps around the cabin. In the end, we would take more than a few with us.
The first of the army emerged, and I nearly released my arrow. He was dressed in camouflage but not wearing a flak jacket. His face was gray, and rotted skin hung from his cheeks. Then they all emerged, and they all had that same look. Decomposed bodies that shouldn’t be wandering the woods. But they were. The army brats had released their ultimate weapon and had aimed it straight for my stepfather’s colony. That meant Timothy was walking with them somewhere, probably at or near Evergreen Resort.
This is how I will win. I understood now. The same way Timothy thought he would win. I understood the power he wielded, and the events played out in my mind. I saw what I had to do, and what it would take to end the war with my stepfather. I had been a blind boy wandering the land of the One-Eyed King. But in the land of the blind, I saw how I would steal the reign of the One-Eyed King.
“General, what are you thinking?” Oliver asked me. She was gripping my arm tightly, and I suspected she knew what I was about to do.
Images of my mother flooded into my mind, of how sometimes she’d hated my stepfather and sometimes she’d loved him. Before his accident, they had been affectionate with each other. They found sitters for us kids while they went on dates, and they often kept their bedroom door locked at night after they thought we’d gone to sleep.
During his recovery, she bought my stepfather novels to read. When he became obsessed only with conspiracy stories, she fed into it by bringing him all that he asked for. Then she listened to him ramble on for hours about the storylines—not seeing that point when he no longer believed they were fictional. In losing his eye, the words he had read turned to voices of prophetic wisdom. Conversations that had scared my mother. Yet, perhaps because she still loved him, she listened and never argued.
Oliver was trying to look me in the eyes, just as my mom had once done with my stepfather. How that made it easier to read someone, I couldn’t understand. I liked Oliver, always had, and it was never a mixed-emotions kind of feeling. Whether she was Oliver or Olive had made no difference to me. At this moment, my emotions were sadness—a strange yearning to not go where I couldn’t return.
I brought my hand up to Oliver’s cheeks, the way she had done to me when we first met on the credit union’s rooftop. She let loose her grip on my arm and brushed my cheek with the back of her fingers. I was sad that only now I understood what these motions meant.
She closed her eyes. Leaned in closer.
I leaped to my feet and jumped from the roof. It was not high enough that I needed to worry about the fall, but I did land harder than I had expected. I stumbled and made a racket as I banged into a pile of fire logs. A nearby deader turned to me just as Oliver yelled, “NO!”
The deader fell after a thwapt! and a bolt appeared in his forehead.
“Oliver, save your ammo!” I told her.
She didn’t listen to me. She never had before, so why would she now?
I scoured the area for another deader. They weren’t hard to find. They ran at me, and I ran back at them. Each time, Oliver shot them in the head.
“Please, Ethan! Get back up here!”
“ETHAN!” Kady screamed at me from the cabin. I glanced one last time at Oliver on the roof to say goodbye, and at Kady, who watched through the window. I couldn’t listen to them beg. I had to stay completely focused on my plan.
Deaders walked toward me out from the darkest, thickest part of the woods. Oliver wouldn’t be able to shoot them. Rushing into the woods, I found myself in front of a cluster. My plan was ready for action, and once in motion I couldn’t turn back. For a second, I wanted to forget my stepfather and leave with Oliver and Kady. Live that life of freedom without fear of rival colonies.
I heard a deader behind me and many more to the sides. I was surrounded and had now left myself no choice. Just like Doctor Manhattan in the Watchmen comics, I had to sacrifice myself to save my friends. Unlike what my mother showed my stepfather, I had no such love-hate for him. I just had hate.
With that, I rolled up my sleeve. A deader grabbed me from behind. I grabbed the deader by the hair and pulled his head onto my forearm. Another deader grabbed at my side, and then another. The deader whose hair I was holding bit down harder than I’d expected, and my blood burned as my whole body felt like it had caught on fire. Then, I could hear nothing but the beating of my heart as if it might shatter my eardrums.
All the deaders let me go and started wandering away. I drew my machete and stabbed into the brain of the one that had bitten me. I pulled my arm free and fell to the ground. I took out my first aid kit and poured antiseptic all over my wound. Lastly, I wrapped it with a bandage. I heard Oliver running toward me.
“That didn’t help the girl we found,” Oliver sobbed. “You’ll die, too.”
“But you’ll live. And so will Kady,” I whispered. “And the One-Eyed King will die.”
I RUSHED THROUGH THE woods, trying to put my burning blood to the back of my mind. From beneath the bandage, I could see my arm turning black, like a timer running down. A red line began making its way toward my heart. My blood had been poisoned. As I stumbled past the deaders, perhaps instinctually, they followed behind me. It made sense the corpses would be driven with me toward the living. The virus’s primary objective was to spread.
I started to jog toward the farm to get there before I lost consciousness and died.
The deaders didn’t follow as fast as I jogged, and I emerged onto the farm first. Bodies littered the field between the barn and the trees. Some were starting to rise again. I had to stop and take a moment to let the sight completely soak in. The army brats that had died were children, kids who had come to believe they could rule the world. The grown-ups who followed my stepfather should have protected them but instead stood over them in sick triumph.
A gibbet had been dragged to the middle of the field. Timothy screamed from inside it for someone to come save him. When I listened to his calls above the rest of the noise, I heard him calling for his mom. He was no longer the fearsome leader, no longer the dictator bent on controlling the region with an iron fist, but the child he had been before the virus poisoned the world. Before the virus poisoned him.
I approached the main building and got close enough to see the wooden shingle hanging above the door: Site Office. No longer a place for guests to check into their assigned cabins, it was now the headquarters from where the One-Eyed King planned his world takeover. Or at least his world around Loon Lake. I coughed and held my hand to my mouth, spitting bl
ood into my palm.
Six men dashed from the house with rifles pointed at me. I took out my machetes, and forced myself to stand tall, even though all I wanted was to close my eyes and sleep forever. The clicking of their weapons was like crackles of fireworks. One of them fired, the gun blast igniting the air. But just as his finger pulled the trigger, my stepfather was on the stoop, knocking the barrel from proper aim. I was so numb that, had the bullet found me, I probably would not have felt it.
“You come back to die?” my stepfather yelled. His men kept their guns pointed at me.
“I came back to see if you are a coward,” I said. I was shaking, but no longer from fear. The deader virus was pumping mercilessly through my veins.
My stepfather scoffed. “There’s no dog here to save you.”
The way he said this was the way I’d imagined Woundwort, the evil rabbit in Watership Down, speaking similar words to Bigwig. Everything I had lost because of him struck me all at once. Maybe this revelation was my white light at the end of the tunnel, or the song of angels calling me home. But it was as though I could sense my sister, my mother, Blake, Thomas, Connor, even my birth dad, all there with me. Their strength became my strength. They were giving me one last chance to beat the One-Eyed King.
Just then, the horde of deaders that had trailed behind me emerged from the woods. The men, focused on me, gave my stepfather nervous glances before he nodded at the deaders. The men rushed by me at what was obviously the more imminent threat: the zombies.
“When I took you and your mom in, I rescued you from financial ruin in the old world and from torture in this one.”
“You killed her. You never rescued her!”
“Boy, you are but a newborn, blind, without the Sight”—he gestured to his covered eye—“so how can I expect you to understand? Sacrifices had to be made by the weak so that the strong may endure.”
My stepfather was fast. His foot slammed into my chest, sending me onto my back. I caught a glimpse of Timothy watching from the gibbet. He saluted me, as though to tell me he hoped I’d win. I attempted to stand, but fell back to the ground. The kick hadn’t hurt me, as the deader virus was numbing my senses.
“You killed my boys.” My stepfather walked around me, spitting on me as he spoke. I believed the regret I heard in him was real.
“You killed my mother. My sister,” I said back.
“No.” He laughed through gritted teeth. “You killed your sister. All I did was deliver her to you.”
Hearing him speak of my sister sent a wave of anger through my blood. As though the deader virus had given me a super strength, I rose and uppercut my stepfather beneath the chin. He bit his tongue, and he cursed as his hand covered his bleeding mouth. I stood ready to fight.
The rain blanketed us, blinding us to the others like stage lights blinding an audience. Much like actors feel alone on the stage, it was as if he and I were the only two survivors in the whole world. But wasn’t that the way it had always been? I remembered him teaching his sons, and me having to watch from a distance. I’d always credited him as having trained me, but that was only partially true. I had listened to the instructions he had given Kyle and Zeke, and had practiced them whenever no one was watching. Like the children of Sparta, I snuck from my room at night when everyone else was sleeping so that I could eat from the garden and easily master the skills that had come so hard to my stepsiblings.
“In the land of the blind—” my stepfather began.
“I was never blind.” I interrupted. “You may have made me the one running in the woods, but I was never running blind. Nor am I running blind now.”
My stepfather took out his machete and again we clashed. Sparks mixed with rain, but when he cut me I no longer felt it. The deader blood was numbing me, and as my foot smashed into his stomach, I hoped I had held out long enough to see this through.
He thrust with his blade. I sidestepped. A simple parry. And I grasped his wrist and twisted the knife from his fingers. He punched the back of my head repeatedly. But I couldn’t feel it, so I didn’t stop. My foot stomped his toes, and hooked behind his ankle. I threw him to the ground. Even as the blade of my machete arced down at his neck, I didn’t see fear in him. I stopped just short of killing him.
“Do it!” he screamed. “Send me to my sons!”
I grabbed the sleeve of my coat and pulled it up over the bandage. Using the machete, I sliced off the gauze so my stepfather could clearly see the bite mark I had suffered.
“The virus is in me,” I told him. Then, I bit down hard on his cheek. “And now it’s in you!”
I stood and he screamed, catching the attention of other deaders. The dead were running low on the living and the virus needed to spread. At first they began walking toward us, but when the horde was all around us they did nothing but bump into each other and into my stepfather and me. I’d made my stepfather one of the dead.
He made one last rush at me as he turned crazy. He swiped with his machete, but I easily ducked and bobbed away. I kicked him back to the ground, and he reached out and grabbed my blade. Pulling it against his heart, he pressed but didn’t push.
“You will rise as one of them.” I spat blood at him as I shouted against the thunder and rain. Then I left him holding his palms to his ears and screaming. I wandered toward the water where I would also die and rise as one of them.
I collapsed, but hands caught me before I hit the ground. “No, you don’t,” a woman’s voice said, and I wondered if it was my mother who had come back for me. Was she there to comfort me one last time? She placed me ass down on the sod and cupped my cheeks. My eyes fluttered open enough to see Kady, and I whispered, “Oliver? Where is Oliver?”
“At the boat. By the shore.”
Behind me, I saw the shadowy figure of my stepfather lumbering toward us. I opened my mouth to scream a warning to Kady, to tell her to run, but either the words caught in my throat or the noise of the rain drowned them out.
Just as my stepfather towered over her and lifted his hands in fists, Kady grabbed my machete and spun around. She caught him off guard and sliced into his chest. He cried louder than the rainfall. Kady kicked him in the shins and kneed him in the jaw. He flew backward onto his back. Kady scooped me under the arm with her shoulder and helped me to my feet.
“You’re not done yet!” she yelled. She walked me down to the banks, where I collapsed into the rowboat that Kady had waiting for us.
Oliver was there with a blanket around her. She was shivering, and as Kady started the motor, Oliver grabbed my arm and rolled up my sleeve. The boat rocked as we pushed off and floated down the river. The engine roared to life just as a tiny needle pricked my arm. My eyelids fluttered.
“I’ve given you the intravenous medication we had left.” Oliver’s face changed from blurry to clear. “Maybe you’ll live.”
As the rain washed away the blood from my face, Oliver wrapped me in a blanket and held me close. Instead of numbness, I experienced pain. Every cut, scrape, bruise. As though I was being pummeled all over again.
But with that pain . . . came freedom.
Freedom from my stepfather.
Freedom with Oliver.
Books by James Alfred McCann
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About the Author
James McCann has written the popular novels Rancor, Pyre, Flying Feet, and Children of Ruin.
He has written book reviews for the Canadian Children’s Book News, and has taught countless workshops for hundreds of students.
Currently, McCann works with the Richmond Public Library as a digital services technician. While most of his time is spent writing, now and then he explores the open road in his Jeep, plays Dungeons and Dragons, or pract
ices the ukulele.
Read more at James McCann’s site.
Children of Ruin Page 20