by Siara Brandt
“Only about an hour,” Jake replied, and then he breathed in astonishment, “What the hell- ”
Grey spun around. Everyone turned to look at the small duck blind sitting in the overgrown, grassy area beside the library.
“I know that wasn’t there before,” Grey said.
Gabe trained his gun on the duck blind. “No, and I swear I saw it move.”
They waited. For a long time nothing moved. And no one made a sound. And then the duck blind began to move along the ground. When it reached the curb, it slowed down. They could hear voices whispering.
“There could be snarlers trapped under there,” Jake warned.
The duck blind had crossed the road, but it was still moving slowly along the sidewalk.
“Whoever is under there,” Grey called. “You’d better come out.”
The duck blind came to a sudden stop. There was a long, drawn-out silence. And then slowly the duck blind lifted and Patch and Gun looked out. With the plastic armor still strapped to their arms and legs with duct tape, they blinked against the bright sunlight.
Grey turned to look at Hanna who had drawn a sharp breath. Before another moment had passed, she was running toward the duck blind.
Chapter 12
The car finally died and rolled to a stop. Makenzie leaned back in the seat, as if suddenly giving in completely to her exhaustion. She breathed out a long, slow sigh.
“We’re out of gas,” she said, stating the obvious.
They had passed the sign for Settler’s Grove several miles back. At least they had made it this far. At least they had pulled over to the side of the road. Makenzie almost laughed at that. What possible difference did that make any more?
She could see the town in the distance. Not much had changed, she saw. She didn’t know what she had expected. How could anyone know what to expect? One thing she did observe. There were no signs of life. Only death. And those, luckily, weren’t moving.
She sighed deeply. She was resigned to her fate, almost to the point of giving up. She had fought so hard for so long to stay alive. She had seen terrible things. She had done terrible things.
She stared at the familiar sign on the hardware store. Was she here because this is where she wanted to die? She looked straight ahead through the cracked windshield, not up to looking at the younger woman who sat beside her. She felt sorry for Daniela, who hadn’t yet let go completely of her hope.
Makenzie hadn’t left much behind. Married to an abusive drunk, and praying for a way out while she worked at a job she hated, life had been a drudgery at best. Even before all this.
She wasn’t sure why she had even come back here. Maybe because it was the closest thing to a home she had ever known. They had moved so many times during her childhood, but they’d stayed here the longest. Maybe because it was rural and isolated, she hoped that they could find a haven away from the crowded cities. They had become war zones. Life there was one battle after another in a never-ending war. But real hope? Makenzie shook her head slowly against the headrest. She couldn’t seem to summon up much of that.
So far she had not found a place free of the infection. Or the zombies. The bigger the city, the worse it was. The food gave out first. With no trucks running and no food deliveries, most places had been cleaned out long ago. Hunger drove people to do unthinkable things. Society and all its restraints had broken down in an incredibly short period of time. And so far there was nothing anyone could do to stop, or even slow, the decay.
The cities became death traps. A lot of them were burned out shells. Millions of people migrated looking for food, foraging wherever they could for the basics of existence. Food, guns, gasoline, medicines, water had all disappeared rapidly, stored up by those who could stockpile and hold onto them. There simply wasn’t enough to go around. And no one was in a position to produce any more goods of any kind. Sometimes life seemed to her to be nothing more than a grim wait for starvation. When there was no more food, they would all eventually starve to death.
Life was a far cry from what it had been. She’d had to put a bullet in her husband’s brain when he turned. Not that he had been much better before that. He had been a brutal beast before everything fell apart. Half drunk and mindless most of the time, even before it all started, he wasn’t much different after.
He had broken through the car window trying to get at her. But Todd had kept weapons in the house, so in an ironic way he had saved her after all.
“Do you think we’ll find a safe place here?” Daniela asked beside her.
“I don’t know,” Makenzie admitted. She was tired of making life and death decisions that impacted not only herself, but other people as well. She was tired of people looking to her for answers she didn’t have. Out of gas, out of food, almost out of ammunition, they would have to abandon the car. They didn’t have a choice. They had to find supplies. And a safe place. If there was such a thing.
How many times had she been in this same position? She wondered. She knew that panicking wasn’t the answer. She doubted she even had the strength to give in to panic.
A car wasn’t safe. She knew that. Her mind replayed the sound of shattering glass, of screams, of terrified people. And arms reaching in. She yielded to the memory helplessly for a few moments, before she could make it go away.
She shook her head and dragged herself back to the present. This wasn’t the worst situation she’d found herself in. Of course she knew the potential for things to get bad very quickly. But she had learned over the past few months to live in the present. To think clearly in desperate situations. It was the only way to survive.
On the surface she was surprisingly calm. She had to be. Or at least she had to give that appearance.
“What will we do now?” Daniela asked. She was more visibly afraid. Makenzie saw that her hands were shaking.
Makenzie did not immediately reply. She was putting off the inevitable decision making. Just for a little while. She wanted a few moments where she did not have to be responsible for people’s lives.
“There’s a gas station up ahead,” Makenzie finally said. “But the pumps won’t work without electricity.”
“Can’t we siphon gas or something?”
“We would have to find some gas first. Then we have to find some sort of hose,” Makenzie explained, almost automatically. She had learned how to siphon gas. She’d had to.
She leaned forward, her eyes narrowing with sudden interest as she focused on something in the town. “If I’m not mistaken, that’s a hunting store down there. If we can make it there, we can at least arm ourselves. If it hasn’t been cleaned out already,” she added as an afterthought.
Frightened, Daniela mirrored the unavoidable thought that had already occurred to Makenzie. “We’ll have to leave the car.” Dany was young and she was very, very afraid.
“Yes, we will have to leave the car,” Makenzie nodded. But glass wouldn’t keep them safe anyway.
She turned to the younger woman. “We can’t wait here to die,” she said, immediately realizing that she had, perhaps, been too harsh with that comment.
Summoning up the fragile remnants of her own courage, Makenzie said, “We’ll be fine.” She even managed a faint smile.
The two women didn’t say another word. They opened their doors at the same time and got out of the vehicle.
“Whooee. This is just like hunting season year round.” Tate let out another whoop. He was enjoying himself. He had always liked hunting.
“But there’s a lot more to shoot at,” the man beside him gleefully pointed out.
Both men were dressed in faded camouflage hunting clothes and they were armed with hunting rifles.
“There’s Ox,” one of the men said. “He doesn’t look any different than when he used to stagger out of Spud‘s Tavern every Saturday night.”
Mule and Tate were looking down on the main street of Settler’s Grove from one of the surrounding hills. Tate leisurely downed half a can of beer and belched
loudly. He propped his rifle on a fence rail and squeezed the trigger. Ox flopped down heavily and didn’t get back up again.
Tate forced several more elaborate belches up from his protruding belly, scratched his backside and asked, “Where’s Laith?”
“I don’t know,” Mule replied as he carefully aimed and then spat a brown stream of tobacco to the side. “Probably off reading a book somewhere,” he said with disgust. “What good are books going to do anyone now?”
“Not a damned thing,” Tate answered and shook his head. “He ought to be getting some target practice in. That’s important.”
Not to mention it was a hell of an entertaining way to pass an afternoon, Tate thought to himself.
Tate’s rifle boomed again and a diminutive, white-haired woman, Gert the librarian, went down.
Tate swaggered over to the four wheeler for another can of beer. He was a good shot and he knew it, but it was kind of discouraging when only Mule was there to witness his talent. He walked back over to the fence, popped open the beer and watched the zombies fall one by one. Occasionally he offered advice to Mule, the man who was still shooting.
Both men were unshaven and unkempt, their beards stained brown by the tobacco they chewed. One of Mule’s front teeth was half rotted away. The rest were stained brown from the tobacco.
Their unwashed camouflage clothing was old and had numerous stains and holes in it. Their clothes had seen better days, but they hadn’t cared about fashion, or cleanliness for that matter, before everything fell apart. They certainly didn’t see any reason to bother thinking about it now. In fact, it was one of the advantages of a zombie apocalypse as they saw it.
Mule lowered his gun and squinted down the hill. “I think it’s almost cleaned out enough for us to go down.”
Tate nodded. “I think you’re right. I don’t see too much moving.” He scowled suddenly. “Where the hell is that worthless cousin of mine? You know I get tempted to leave him behind sometimes. That would teach him a lesson.”
As they watched, one of the zombies ran into a tree and broke off a branch. He swung it wildly around for a while, almost like a weapon.
Surprised, Tate exclaimed, “Did you see that?”
“Yeah,” Mule drawled slowly as he watched the zombie. “It looks like they could almost learn to use tools.”
“You think they can learn?” Tate asked, thinking it over.
“Hell, even an animal can learn.” Mule answered.
Tate paused to spit a brown stream of tobacco into the weeds beside him. He continued to eye the zombie till he dropped the tree branch and stumbled over it. “I’d hate to think what would happen if they reached our level.”
Mule gave a noncommittal grunt. “Look. There’s Miss Finkle,” he said in a sing-song, mocking voice. He carefully aimed his gun. “This is for flunking me in English class, you sour-faced old biddy.”
Tate pointed. “There’s one of ‘em in the window of the hardware store.” He narrowed his gaze. “Hey, that’s Reverend Paxton.”
There was a huge crash as he shot the Reverend through the plate glass window. Tate giggled with high-pitched glee at the destruction. And Mule found it just as amusing.
“We got ‘em thinned out about as much as we’re going to. Let’s go grab what we can.”
A third man came up behind them.
“Cover us, Laith,” Tate said. “Then come down and distract any of ‘em that get curious.”
Startled, Tate and Mule swore at the same time. It took them a while to make sense out of what they were seeing. They continued to stare with tobacco-stained, open mouths at the two women who had just come out of the back room of the gun store.
“Where the hell did you come from?” Tate asked. He had been surprised by the appearance of the women and he still had his rifle trained on them.
Makenzie didn’t move. Obviously these two men had been doing all the shooting. “Up the road,” she answered cautiously. “Our car ran out of gas.”
Tate lowered his rifle but he continued to look at the two women with suspicion in his narrowed gaze. In the meantime, Mule was already looking around the store. He suddenly let out a string of vile profanities. “What the hell happened to all the guns?”
Clearly someone else had been here. The two women only had two weapons apiece. That didn’t explain all the empty spaces on the walls or in the display cabinets. All four weapons suddenly swung toward the door.
“Shit, Laith,” Tate spat. “Don’t sneak up on us like that. You’re going to give me a heart attack one of these days.”
“You girls know where you’re heading?” Tate asked, slinging his rifle strap over his shoulder and puffing out his chest like a rooster in a hen house. He finally had an audience and he didn’t think that was such a bad thing. No, maybe it wasn’t so bad after all.
“We were deciding that when you showed up,” Makenzie said, reluctant to give them too much information.
Tate strutted across the room. “You’d best throw in with us,” he said, squinting a glance over at them. “We know this area. We’ve lived here our whole lives. We’ve got a safe place. The only one around.”
“A safe place?” Daniela looked hopeful, but Makenzie wasn’t so sure. She didn’t know if they should trust these men. She didn’t remember them from when she had lived here before. But she had been a child then and she had lived with her family in town.
Before she could make a decision, the men began moving through the store. They gathered up the remaining guns and ammo, leaving nothing on the walls. They broke into several glass cases and cleaned them out, too. The third man, the one they called Laith, picked up a book and began reading the back cover. One of the other men saw him and gave a mocking snort. “Get yourself a damned gun, Laith. You won’t stop a zombie by throwing a book at ‘im.” The other man shook his head and laughed under his breath as he swaggered over to the counter and, holding out a paper sack to catch everything, swept it clean.
Still eyeing the men with suspicion, Makenzie slipped two lethal-looking knives into her pocket from the display beside her. Then she grabbed a can of mace from the counter.
Chapter 13
Gabe found a note left by his father.
Gabe, I’m making my way to the old military compound near Cedar Ridge. Heard that they have set up a rescue center there. It’s too hard to survive here on my own without knowing what’s going on. I’ll keep hoping to see you again until I know better. Love, Dad.
The men took stock of everything in the house and the barn and the small sheds next to it.
“Let’s check upstairs,” Grey said to the other men and he led the way up the staircase.
When they were convinced that the house was safe, they told the women and children to come inside.
Right away, everyone agreed to claim their own space. Whether they decided to stay permanently or not, they would be staying for the night at least.
It was a big farmhouse with five bedrooms, a large kitchen, a separate dining room, a living room and a family room. There was also a spacious enclosed porch at the back of the house.
After everyone had deposited their scarce belongings, they gathered back in the living room, where there were further introductions.
“You mean you’re Dr. Ellis Vaden?” Grey asked incredulously. “I was sent to find you at Cambria Research Facility.”
“It was my intention to keep moving on,” Ellis said. “But then I found the boy and we headed west. Settler’s Grove was the first town that we came to.”
“So you more than anyone else understands what is going on?” Grey asked.
“I knew what they were working on. I knew their plan was to get everyone vaccinated. And that’s how this all started.” Ellis told what he knew about the vaccine and how he had been locked up so that he could not expose the truth.
““So it was the vaccine,” Grey said soberly. “But that’s not exactly the story they were telling.”
“That doesn’t surprise
me.” Ellis shook his head. “This didn’t spread all over the world on its own. Cambria Research was behind the distribution of the vaccine. And our government was funding Cambria Research Facility. As far as I can tell, something in the chemical composition of the vaccine itself changed the properties of the bacteria. It actually mutated backwards. No one knew what was taking place in the vials until it was too late. But, yes, our own government was responsible.”
“Then all this was unnecessary,” Grey commented quietly.
“Yes,” Ellis answered him. “All of it was engineered.”
Everyone was quiet as that sank in.
“Did anybody here get the vaccine?” Ellis asked as he looked around.
No one had.
“Can it pass in other ways?” Grey asked. “Like from person to person?”
“Like rabies, it can be transmitted through saliva,” Ellis told him. “But you probably already know that. If it enters the blood stream, infection is immediate.”
“You mean like through a bite?” Gabe asked.
“Yes, and possibly through a scratch,” Ellis replied. “Where there is any kind of blood contamination, there is the chance of infection. So you want to avoid contact with a zombie or anything a zombie has touched whenever possible.
“Zombies,” Grey repeated. “So you are calling these things zombies.”
Ellis nodded soberly.
“The whole research facility was injected on the same day,” Ellis went on. “Except for myself and my staff and a few others who weren’t convinced that the shot was safe, or because they had had adverse reactions to vaccines in the past. V-day they called it. It was a worldwide effort to get everyone vaccinated at once, or as close to the same date as possible. That way, if there were any problems, which they knew there would be, it would be too late to do anything about it. Project Deadrise was meticulously planned out from the beginning. It was also- ” Ellis hesitated. “A plan for population control.”