Scavengers

by Christopher Fulbright

  “Here’s to you, Dad,” he muttered, and pulled the last bit of a mostly-smoked cigar stub out of his pocket. He cooked the black end with his lighter. Smoke puffed fragrantly into the morning air. He had just taken his third deep puff when he gazed across the mist-laden encampment and saw the doctor and David Murphy dashing to the trailer. Listening, he could hear the faint sound of the whistle. He stood.

  “It’s time to rock and roll!” he shouted.

  The group they’d assembled, no more than a dozen willing volunteers, stood as a ramshackle squad of unlikely heroes. They brandished makeshift weapons. Some of them prayed. Some of them seemed on the verge of hyperventilating. A couple of them just stared at the back of the door, ready to rush out. Abbott wished he had some words of encouragement for them, but the fact that they stood here with him at this moment said more than he could have expressed with words. Unlike the rest of the barn’s inhabitants, cowering in the shadows and the loft, these men and women were willing to fight for their lives.

  Abbott looked over and saw Torri, a broken pitchfork in her hand, rocking just slightly with nervous energy. She caught him looking and gave him a strained smile. He nodded back.

  It was time.

  “On three,” he said. “One—”

  The group tensed.

  “—two—”

  They gripped their weapons and put shoulders and backs against the doors.

  “—three!”

  They heaved against the barn doors. The air exploded with shouts and war cries as they battered through. The first door swung free. It creaked on its hinges and swung like a massive hanger bay door. Two infected guards stood at their posts, turning slowly, stunned and confused. Their group attacked the infected guards in a surging wave of brutality.

  Abbott saw Brooks separate from the group. It was time for them to make their run.

  “Are you ready?” Brooks yelled at him.

  Abbott was about to yell affirmative to his buddy when he spotted two feral zombies running around the back of the barn behind the group. Their mob of freedom fighters was intent on beating down the guards. The feral zombies would catch them unaware, and those snarling fiends looked worse off than most. Patches of flesh had opened in sores and then dried, leaving wide open wounds through which muscle and sinew shone like jerky. Their eyes had sunken into their heads, hair mostly fallen out, what remained clung to their mottled skulls in patches. The fastest of the pair came around the back of the barn and attacked like a diving hawk.

  It leapt on Torri’s back and pulled her splashing back into the mud.

  Abbott yelled and ran for her. She struggled, half-rolled, realizing what had happened. The broken pitchfork was still in her hand, but she couldn’t adjust it to an effective angle. The feral zombie opened its jaws wide. It clutched her head in its rotted hands. Torri screamed one last time before it twisted her head around, bone crunching over bone. Abbott knew he’d be too late, but he ran anyway.

  Gluey saliva stretched between the feral zombie’s jaws as it bit down on top of her head. Its teeth lodged in skin, dug into the skull. It jerked her head in its mouth, like a crazed prize-winner bobbing for apples. She screamed. The sound of her neck snapping was like gravel crunching under a boot.

  Abbott ran and launched a powerful kick at the thing.

  All the bones of the zombie’s midsection snapped. It arched away from Torri’s limp body, flopping on its side and twitching. Abbott looked down at Torri’s face beneath him. Her lifeless eyes stared heavenward, the lower half of the bite made a half-crescent above her left eye. The front of her skull was cracked open like a porcelain doll.

  “Jesus,” he said. And it wasn’t a curse. It was plea.

  As he looked up, a few members of the group had taken on the second feral zombie. A third was coming around the barn to join the fray. It lurched toward them like an emaciated Frankenstein’s monster, arms out, hands grasping toward them.

  “Abbott,” Brooks yelled for him. “We’ve got to do this, now!”

  Abbott gripped his lighter in his pocket and rushed to the fuel shed along with Brooks and another man. Gas was stored there for the emergency generators, but they had a more pressing use for it.

  They ran around the end of the center rows of tents. Inside of many of them were groans and wet coughs of the infected who were not yet too far gone, who hadn’t utterly lost their minds, but had pledged their allegiance to Bal Shem in exchange for food.

  Brooks and the other man reached the fuel shed. Brooks kicked the door in, breaking loose a tongue latch and padlocked loop. Splinters flew. They rushed inside and shut down the generators. Grabbing ten-gallon cans of gasoline, Brooks heaved one out to their new partner, a gray-haired man with weathered skin and solid arms. Brooks handed a full gas can to Abbott. Brooks pointed out the door, “Douse the tents before they all wake up. I’m right behind you!”

  Heart pounding, Abbott sprinted down the hill with the other man. They ran up and down the aisles between the tents. They tossed the fuel onto the tents and the side-trailers — whatever they could — before Brooks came behind them with fallen tree branches, tossing the burning wood into and on top of the tents.

  The infected began to stir. Some of them appeared from their tent flaps, pushing up the collapsing structures wet with gasoline.

  Abbott’s hand shook as he flicked his lighter and held its flame to as many locations as he could. The flames exploded. It happened faster than they could have hoped. In a moment, there was a blaze, flames licking up the sides of the fabric tents. The whole tent city caught fire like tinder and rags.

  They heard the groans of the infected who’d been resting inside the tents. Brooks made a sideways comment that if only it hadn’t rained the previous day, the fires would’ve been more intense. All Abbott could think about suddenly, despite all the horror they’d seen inflicted upon so many innocents by the infected, was how many of these people might have been saved by Dr. Robbins’ serum.

  Then again, how many of us would they have killed before we could even try?

  Brooks seized a gun from a fallen infected and began exterminating as many of the shuffling feral beasts as he could. They were wandering over the perimeter of barbed wire, sensing that the careful order to which Bal Shem had restricted them was in decay. Still more of the infected came stumbling out of the blazing tents, flames licking away final shreds of hair and clothes, sizzling flesh. They made awful, almost inhuman, screeching groans. Brooks mowed them down with blasts of rifle fire.

  In moments, the camp became a roar of flames and chaos. Abbott’s heart sank as he looked around him and saw, down the hill from them, the feral monsters taking down healthy people by the barn in droves. Their plan had failed; their rebellion was short lived. It died a slow, bloody death.

  “Abbott, watch out!” He heard Brooks’s yelled warning too late – he felt the soft flesh of his side ripped away in a roast-sized hunk. Abbott turned and found himself staring deep into the eyes of an infected, dilated pupils reflecting a soulless nightmare. He stared into that abyss, face-to-face with death. Teeth ripped his face. Diseased fingernails opened his throat.

  * * *

  Bal Shem lunged for the whistle, smacking at Dejah through the cage wire. Infuriated, he yanked the door from the cage. He dragged her out. With bone-bare knuckles, he pounded Dejah in the face and grabbed the whistle from her hand.

  Blood poured from her nose and mouth. Dejah looked frantically around the trailer. The front door was locked, so even though Bal Shem’s infected generals were nearby, they couldn’t get the door open. Without the touch from Selah they’d been expecting, their mental states were diminished and they just kept kicking the door instead of trying to bust it down. She could see by the gathering shadows that more and more of them congregated on the rickety stairs and beyond the other windows.

  Bal Shem held onto her arm, twisting it behind her back. She yelped. He forced her to the floor, and bit a huge chunk of meat from her forearm, growli
ng and reveling in the wet rags of flesh like a rabid dog.

  “Mommy!” Selah screamed and banged on the door to her cage. The wires were loose. The more she shook the opening, the more the door worked free.

  Dejah rolled, slipped free, and grabbed a metal folding chair, trying to swing it at Bal Shem. She only managed to knock him off balance. He reeled for just a moment, but then was standing and moving toward her again.

  There was a loud crash from the rear of the trailer. The padlocked door that led into the back hallway burst from its hinges and clattered to the floor.

  Dr. Robbins and David rushed into the room. Bal Shem immediately swung around, leaving Dejah untended as he pivoted swiftly to deflect a blow from David.

  Dejah leapt up, trailing blood across the room, and removed the door to Selah’s cage. She gathered her daughter in her arms in a tearful reunion. Having her, holding her, sent a thrill through Dejah which she had no time to enjoy. They crouched in a corner, huddled together. Dejah searched the area for a weapon. She knew it wouldn’t be long until the infected talkers, Bal Shem’s chosen few who’d been deprived of Selah’s touch, discovered the back door was open.

  Bal Shem pulled a revolver from his pants and shot Dr. Robbins. The doctor cursed, clutching his lower leg. He wobbled back against the wall but didn’t fall. A look of grit and determination set in his face as he blinked against the pain of his wound. Bal Shem smiled, seemed to gloat even as he gave a barking laugh, coughing wet globules from his lungs, unaware that David moved behind him.

  David swung and hit Bal Shem in the head with a metal wastepaper basket, knocking the infected leader momentarily senseless.

  Dr. Robbins lunged forward and stabbed Bal Shem in the arm with the syringe. The sinister terrorist gave a wolfish howl and dropped to his knees as the serum began to course through his veins. He curled up and rolled on his side, gripping his mid-section as if in exquisite pain, his howls drawing out into deep groans.

  “How long does that shit take?” David said, panting. He reached over to lean against a counter, but saw that it – and everything around them – was covered in gore.

  “It’s different for everyone,” Robbins answered, face pale and speckled with sweat.

  Three infected generals lurched into the room from the rear of the trailer. They’d found the back door. Robbins lurched quickly away, favoring his wounded leg, digging in his bag for more syringes of serum.

  David snatched up the pistol that Bal Shem dropped. He spun and emptied the clip into the three zombies. Exit wounds exploded from their backs. He hit one in the neck. They didn’t slow down much.

  With a frothing infected man looming closer and closer, Dr. Robbins backed toward the front door. As Robbins met the door, his head brushed the curtains on the window aside, revealing faces of the infected smashed against the thin glass. Dejah screamed, pointing to the glass as it shattered, bloody arms reaching inside to grab the doctor.

  And then suddenly: “Get down!” It was Brooks’s voice from outside.

  Dr. Robbins ducked as Brooks peppered the door’s window with rifle shots. Brains sprayed through the window into the trailer. Bullets riddled the walls and made the place shudder. Zombies with ruined skulls fell in heaps down the stairs outside. The rest of the infected outside moved away from the door. Robbins crawled toward Dejah and Selah. Bal Shem hissed and reached out for David. He snatched his ankle and brought David down hard. He tried to catch himself but slipped on the carnage-smeared ground.

  The front door of the trailer burst open, breaking the locks and splintering the wood. Brooks stood in the doorway, M-16s in each hand.

  “Get out of the way, David!” Brooks shouted.

  David ducked and rolled, jerking his ankle free, leaving Bal Shem on his knees in the middle of the room. David immediately engaged two of the other infected, leaping to his feet and rushing them, beating them back with the pistol and pushing them out the back door, while Robbins and Dejah pummeled the third zombie with a heavy stapler and a lamp.

  “Wait! We have to let the serum work!” Robbins screamed to Brooks.

  Bal Shem crawled forward, a new gun hanging limply in his hand. He gradually gained control of it, enough to point it directly at Robbins. It was clear he was trying to coordinate his hand with his thoughts, but his finger kept sliding from the trigger.

  “Fuck it! We don’t have time! It’s all gone to hell anyway, doc. The plan failed. We’ve just got to get out of here if we can.” Brooks shoved Robbins aside, out of harm’s way.

  Brooks fired at Bal Shem before he could level the gun. The soldier blew him away. The terrorist’s head exploded with rapid gunfire. It cracked into three chunks from the focused impacts of multiple bullets, and the rest of the skull sprayed in shards of bone and brain matter. He’d been so infected that some of the fluid was black where it should have been red or gray. The brackish blood splattered the trailer wall in a thick, oily coat of ichor evoking images of Rorschach art.

  Brooks whacked another infected in the head with the butt of his rifle, busting the monster’s skull clean open. It smacked the floor with dead weight. More infected were pouring into the trailer through the back door.

  Robbins looked out the front window. “Those fucking idiots! They’ve all gone around back!” he screamed incredulously, giddy with the opportunity.

  Robbins unlocked the front door and went through. David hefted Selah over his shoulder, and Dejah made a run for it down the trailer stairs, close behind. Brooks brought up the rear, changing clips, and spraying the onrushing band of infected with bullets.

  They ran. Where they headed they didn’t know yet, but the edge of Lake Tawakoni loomed closer than anything. They jumped a sagging section of barbed wire and continued running. The lake’s edge was the only place that wasn’t yet swarmed with zombies. It was their best chance.

  Thomas emerged from behind a tent in the distance behind them. “Dejah!”

  She saw only a glimpse of him. “Come on!” she shouted, running to stay with the group. She followed them onward — Robbins, David and the bobbing figure of her daughter, Selah.

  Brooks stopped every few paces to mow down whatever infected chose to trail them.

  Then she heard Thomas scream. This time Dejah stopped in her tracks and turned to see a small group of feral infected swarm Thomas, dragging him to the ground.

  Reaching into the pocket of his field jacket, Brooks pulled out a grenade, yanked the pin, and lobbed it into the center of the fray. Within seconds, Thomas and his murderers met their maker in a huge explosion that engulfed the nearby tents and set several hay bales on fire.

  “Oh god!” Dejah screamed, and then started running. “Oh god! Thomas!”

  “Daddy!” Selah sobbed, abruptly aware of what had just taken place.

  “Where the hell did you get that?” David shouted over his shoulder, hands clutching Selah’s legs to keep her safely on his shoulder.

  “Got them off one of Bal Shem’s henchmen,” Brooks, running, yelled in response.

  Behind them, flames billowed in giant fireballs across the camp, consuming deadfall and leaves, tents and corpses. The trailers melted away like plastic toys, leaving only bare, charred metal frames. Everywhere they looked they saw the infected and the healthy locked in struggles for survival.

  Ahead of them, the lake was close. The rain from the previous day had raised the water level, and ankle-deep puddles swallowed their feet.

  “There! A boat tied to the pier!” David yelled, voice hoarse.

  A guttural growl sounded from above. Hanging in a tree were three feral infected feasting on the rotting remains of a person they must have stowed there for safe keeping. A gray-skinned arm, swollen and rotting, fell to the ground, as the three leapt from the branch. One of the infected landed square on David’s back, knocking him forward. As he fell, the air whooshed out of his lungs. Selah, screaming careened forward onto the ground.

  “No!” Dejah ran for Selah and snatched her up just as o
ne of the infected trio grabbed the girl’s leg. A second zombie gripped David’s back, tearing through his clothes and digging at his flesh. The third knocked Brooks off-balance, sending one of his guns flying into the mud.

  Dejah grasped Selah’s arm and delivered a swift face-kick to the creature clutching her leg. The blow landed hard; it snapped the zombie’s neck backward and broke it. Still alive for a few moments, its head lolled on the top of its spine like a tether ball. She gathered Selah desperately into her arms.

  David rolled over, sending his attacker off-balance. He crab-walked backward quickly, but when he turned over to gain his footing it reached out and grabbed him again, taking him back down.

  “Get to the boat!” David yelled at Dejah. Tears filled his eyes.

  Gunfire raked the ground behind him and blasted his attacker. David was suddenly free. Brooks stood nearby, his weapon aimed at the last of the now-dead trio of feral infected.

  “Y’all go on; I’ll cover you and come after!”

  There was no argument. David grabbed Selah again and sprinted. Dejah and Dr. Robbins ran, too, despite the bleeding wound of his gunshot leg. The older man ground his teeth, keeping pace as they fled.

  They reached the shoreline and crossed the pier. David jumped into the boat. He put Selah down into the center and held out his hand, pulling Dejah and Dr. Robbins into the wobbling craft. “Come on, Brooks!”

  Brooks unloaded his gun into four more pursuers. The bullets took out half of them, but when the gun emptied, he turned to run for the pier. Brooks just made it onto the structure when the feral group sprang onto his back, pulling him down to the boards. Without a weapon, the four in the boat could do nothing to help Brooks at long range.