“Hi, Jack,” little Charlie Mason said from under the blanket. His voice was still thick with sleep. His face was creased and he blinked his eyes stifling a yawn that still made his eyes water.
“Charlie!” Jack screamed. The sound echoed through the mall and brought dozens of fiends shambling, loping and sprinting in their direction. No one moved until the creatures settled down. He picked the boy up into his arms slowly, held him to his breast and swirled around. Jack began to laugh as hot tears washed white lines through the gore on his face. “Precious, precious boy!”
“Charlie!” It was Carol. “Oh God! My Charlie!”
“Shhh!” said a dozen people.
* * *
Doctor Shirley Baker watched with joy as the small group crowded around Jack Wages as he held Charlie up for all to see. She was forced to choke back her own sobs as tears of joy flowed so freely around the group. The women she had been travelling with allowed themselves to soak in the moment, too. They had their own tears to add to the celebration. The whole event brought words to her remembrance. She whispered, “For this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.” She looked to Alexandra and said, “So they began to celebrate.”
“The parable of the lost son,” Alexandra said. “Luke chapter 15.”
“Luke chapter 15,” Shirley nodded.
* * *
It took the party most of the afternoon to find access to the roof. The stairwell leading to it was concealed behind a locked door not far from the mall management offices on the first floor. The key to the heavy steel door was located an hour later. With footfalls echoing through the dark stairwell, the group climbed quietly one steel stair at a time until Jack lead them through a second door into the dimming evening light. The sun was going to bed and in one last defiant yawn, it splattered the sky in vibrant pastels of purples, blues, greens, yellows, oranges and reds. It was the coup dé grace before night was to sweep the world into a slumber. The sight wiped the stress of the day from their faces. Clenched brows and fists unfurled. Blowing across them, the autumn breeze carried with it a promise of winter.
The rooftop was much larger than he had expected. It was a sea of pea gravel interrupted by the occasional air vent or pipe. There were no HVAC units. The only structure on the roof was the exit leading back down into the mall and then there was the large expanse of the skylight that divided the roof like a very long knee-high greenhouse.
The mall covered acres of real estate. Jack was sure that if he stood on one end of the building and looked at the person standing in the middle, he would need binoculars to see facial features. A three-foot, wall-like crenellation lined the edge of the roof and would prevent anyone from accidentally falling off.
Jack looked around at the enlarged group. Doctor Baker’s companions continued to huddle so close to her that they were touching. There was over thirty of them. They had lived in such fear for so long that they couldn’t see that for the first time since their ordeal began, they were safe. Denise was standing by the exit as if she expected a herd of undead to come charging through the locked door below, up the stairs, and to try to eat everyone. Mike was awake and sitting up against the wall next to the exit door. Carol was holding Charlie so tightly that he had to complain before she would loosen her grip on him. Sheri looked around the roof as she held on to Charlie’s foot and Steven stood next to his mother staring at the other kids near Doctor Shirley.
“Denise,” Jack said feeling suddenly very tired. “We need to find bottled water. These kids don’t need to go to bed still covered in zombie goo. Steven, will you go with her?”
Alexandra said, “I’ll go as well. There will be other supplies we’ll need before the night is out.”
“Candice? Megan?” Doctor Shirley said, turning her head. “You go, as well. We’ll need as many blankets as you can find; food, too”
“There’s a linen boutique near the Food Court,” Carol said. She looked at Charlie and then to Steven and Sheri. “I’d better go with you. I know this mall like it’s my second home,” she said setting Charlie down.
“Fire,” Mike said, the pain in his leg making his voice sound different.
“What’s that, Mike?” Jack asked.
“We’re going to need fire to keep the chill off. If you can find something to burn fuel in — I don’t know, a barrel or something — we shouldn’t have any trouble finding something that will burn.”
“Good thinking. I’ll take care of that. I want to visit the chopper again. There are supplies in it that we are going to need,” Jack said as he turned to face the front of the building. He wanted to survey the crash site before going down.
“Mr. Wages?”
“Yeah, Doc, what’s up?”
“Mind if I accompany you?”
“Sure. Call me Jack,” he said. His face split into a smile and held his elbow out.
The doctor smirked, took his arm, and then looked at Jack sideways. There was something about this man, she thought, that seemed . . . well . . . innocent. His smile was genuine and his humor dry. She liked that. In the short time that she’d come to know him, she marveled at how comfortable he made the others feel. The look in his eyes said that he counted himself less important than those he protected. It was as if he was living on borrowed time.
As the two looked down at the crashed helicopter, Shirley told Jack her story. She talked about her kidnapping and her initial arrival at Berkley’s camp. She spoke about the rape tents and her run in with the Colonel as she tried to protect the women in the camp.
“Jack, I have never looked into eyes that were so void of humanity,” She said and shivered. “He’s truly a monster.”
“I— I watched him order the execution of civilians who were expecting to be rescued.” Jack’s eyes became distant. “He set a woman on fire and laughed as she ran around burning to death. It was the daughter of a dear friend of mine.” There was a pause. “His name was Davis.” Jack’s throat constricted as the familiar rage boiled in his chest at the memory.
“I’m sorry. The men he keeps around him are just as bad. They torture and hurt people for the joy of it,” Shirley said.
“Well, some will never hurt anyone ever again.”
Shirley asked, “What do you mean?”
“Where do you think we got the chopper?”
The two looked down on the wreckage. The parking lot was scarred and ripped where the aircraft had crashed and slid several yards across the pavement. The craft was lying nearly on its crushed side. The long rotors had been sheared as they struck the pavement. The short, twisted, metal blades splayed like claws from the helicopter’s warped crown. Hundreds of bodies marked the route where the blades flew after they were severed from the chopper. Piles and piles of corpses were strewn about the downed craft. It looked like pictures of the holocaust.
The parking lot was still filled with over a thousand walking dead. The creatures moved past light poles and around automobiles that looked more like Matchbox Cars from their new perspective. On the hill in the distance was the whitewashed rear of the shopping center where Jack and his companions had spent the night. It was where they had briefly faced Berkley’s men.
Pointing to the hilltop, Jack told Shirley about his run in with members of Colonel Berkley’s crew, how Denise had saved the day, how they had pilfered the Blackhawk and about the crash. He still didn’t understand what went wrong with the flight.
“We saw you,” Doctor Shirley said.
“When?”
“We were moving across the parking lot over there,” Shirley said, pointing to the far left side of the parking lot where a narrow access road came through a stand of trees whose leaves were touched by autumn. “We were running from Berkley. We knew he would come looking for us. If he thought we had somehow survived when the monsters overran the camp—.” She let the sentence hang, scratched her nose and continued. “It was an irrational fear, I know, but you would have to understand the terror we felt at the prospect
of Berkley or his men catching us again.
“When we saw the helicopter, we were sure it was Berkley. We’d heard that he and a few men had left the camp by helicopter. So you can imagine what we thought when you guys came flying across the parking lot.
“We slowed our pace and did our best to blend in with the dead around us. There was an explosion that sounded like canon fire and then the helicopter began to spin, wobble and belch black smoke. Jack, the ground shook with the impact. I’m surprised you guys are still alive, frankly.” She looked down at the wreckage again.
“The doctor in me couldn’t keep away. We managed to get within about ten feet of the craft when we saw Charlie pulled from the open side door by a couple of rather vicious creatures. Charlie started screaming. The ruckus actually saved his life. It caught the attention of several more and they began to tussle. They dropped him. That was when Alexandra swept in and scooped up the boy. She took a nasty blow to the scalp in the process.”
“Shortly afterward, we heard you screaming and then gunfire erupted from the mouth of the door, killing several of the creatures near us. We were moving away from the helicopter when you climbed out in the middle of them.” She looked back at Jack. “You were pretty scary. You looked like death.” She shivered and then continued. “Jack, if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I would have said what you did was impossible. We were forced to flee for fear of being mistaken for the dead. Even after you had calmed down, we were afraid to approach you, especially when you armed yourselves with machine guns. So, we bided our time.
“When that wave of undead rolled out of the west from the business district and smashed into the mall, I was sure I would never see you guys again.” She looked over her shoulder and sighed. Denise was preparing the women for their excursion. “I’m glad you survived.”
“Me, too,” he said and then after a moment added, “You said the Colonel was in that chopper?”
“Yes,” She said. “Why?”
“I killed a large black man—a lieutenant, I think.”
“That would be Samuels.”
“Denise shot two more from the roof of the building. One was a young man with short-cropped hair and a cruel smile. He tried to rape Carol.”
“Sounds like Primrose, at least, I hope it was him. What did the other man look like?”
“He had a tattoo on his face—,”
“That would be the Russian everyone referred to as ‘Zeek.’ He was really rough on the girls in the rape tents.” Putting her head in her hands, she massaged her brow and continued, “Most of the girls were bedridden for days when he finished with them. Hope he died knowing a woman put an end to him.”
“What about Simpson,” Jack asked throwing a thumb over his shoulder. He was almost afraid to hear the answer. Every fiber in him told him that he was a good kid, maybe a little misguided. What if he wasn’t? What if Denise was right?
“The girls loved him. They knew that when he stepped into the tent, they could rest from their ordeal. He’s the shy type, uneasy around women. He never laid a hand on any of them wrong. He would just talk to them or let them catch a few minutes of needed sleep before the other soldiers would start complaining about Simpson taking too long. The girls owe him a debt of gratitude.”
Relief evident in Jack’s voice, he said, “I was hoping—.” He shook his head and grinned.
“What about Berkley?” the doc asked.
“Well, I’m not sure. Everyone was killed except for one and he ran from the chopper right into a wall of undead that was fifty or sixty deep. Looked like a suicide run, if you asked me.”
“We’ve got less than an hour before it will be too dark to gather supplies. We need to move,” Denise said from behind them.
The two turned from the side of the building. There were things to do. All the faces on the roof were turned expectantly toward them.
“I hope they ate him slowly — very slowly,” Doctor Baker said under her breath.
“Not me. I want a piece of him,” Jack murmured, stroking the handles of his machetes.
“Wouldn’t the best revenge be living and surviving?”
“No, the best revenge . . . is revenge,” Jack said.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
T he velvet curtain of night settled over the camp and Jack sat on the edge of the roof with his feet dangling, looking out across the dark city. Behind him, four of the large two room tents huddled in a circle facing one another. They encircled a large fifty-gallon drum. Tongues of orange, yellow, and red fire licked their way up the wooden slats of two oak bed frames as they jutted out the top of the barrels. The air above was a shimmer of warmth and heat. A handful of feet from the barrel were two dozen lawn chairs, now empty.
He didn’t have to turn around to know that flashlights were being wielded like sabers from behind the tents as adults and children alike were bathing themselves, washing away the blood and gore that had saved them from horrendous deaths. The laughter and giggles from the children were like chimes chasing away the darkness that threatened to consume the whole world. The hope of humankind rested in those tiny voices.
The dark night concealed the ugly in the world around him and just for a moment, he saw the world as it might have been. It was a world that would have held little promise for a man who was destined to spend his life on parole, always being governed by more rules than the ordinary citizen, and many times finding rejection in the eyes of so many who would refuse to get to know him because of his past. He was a convicted felon — a murderer — who had spent the majority of his life paying for his crime.
For the first time since his initial incarceration, Jack was not consumed with condemnation for the crimes he had committed more than thirty years ago. He could not change what he had done. He could not crawl into a time machine and get a redo. No.
“Jack!” a little voice screeched at him. Gravel spewed out from under small tennis shoes.
When Jack stepped away from the edge of the building, Charlie Mason flung himself into the air at him. He caught the boy and proceeded to tickle his belly. The boy kicked and thrashed in Jack’s arms and his high-pitched laughter filled the night drowning every other voice on the roof. Charlie’s hair was damp and his pajamas new and crisp. Jack finally set him down and the boy ran laughing into a tent.
“Come back here you little monster!” Jack snarled and received muffled giggles in response.
A flicker of light waved through the darkness above the shopping center on the distant hill catching Jack’s attention. There were people out there. It gave him reason to pause.
No, he thought to himself again. He would no longer live his life looking through the rearview mirror. There was a world out there that needed a man who could perceive the world as it was and do it with eyes wide open. There were other people out there — survivors — who needed help, who needed him. Yes, it’s time to start putting things together again.
“Jack, you going to get cleaned up?” Alexandra asked.
“Yeah.” Time to clean up.
* * *
Torres looked over at Blankenship as the large deuce and a half growled to a stop on the highway about a quarter of a click from the shopping center. The sun was nearly down. The military surplus store was dark and the only movements in the parking lot were the dead. The Blackhawk was gone. Between the highway and the shopping center was the small, yellow and blue Photo-mat the Colonel had mentioned.
“Where’s the chopper?” Blankenship asked as he rolled down the window. The night air was crisp and felt good on his warm skin.
“Don’t know,” Torres said. “Will find out from Colonel soon enough.” Torres pulled the vehicle forward enough so that it faced the Photo-mat and then flashed the headlights. Once. Twice. From within the little shack the two soldiers saw movement.
“How do you think the Colonel’s going to take the fact that we are all that is left?” Blankenship asked, looking sideways at the Mexican.
“He no be too happy,” Torr
es responded and then pointed toward the Photo-mat. He put the truck in gear and it growled and then lurched as it moved toward the figure moving in their direction.
The men watched as a shirtless Berkley jogged through the growing shadows. Over his shoulder, he carried a body that eventually took the shape of a young woman or girl. She was stripped of her clothing so that all that covered her was heavily stained underclothes, which did nothing to hide the shapely curve of her inner thighs and slender buttocks.
“Mmm,” Blankenship mumbled at the sight.
* * *
Randi’s muscles were beginning to cramp from being hog tied in the same position all day. She nearly wept when the soldier returned and cut the cord tying her ankles to her wrists. She gasped past the gag in her mouth, her chest heaving. The man then spent the evening talking to her as if she was a child. He meticulously described all the things that he intended to do to her and what he would make her do for him. The finer points were particularly horrifying in their detail. In fact, she was sure that some of what he described wasn’t even possible. Yet, the more the he talked about it, the more she began to fill with a sense of dread unlike anything she’d ever experienced.
This man was not like Billy or Daryl. He wasn’t some fruitcake out to have his way with a woman because he couldn’t get it any other way. No. This man was a hunter — a predator — who wanted to pilfer her hope, steal her courage, and leave her whimpering in horror. He looked at her with eyes that were as cold and dead as any walking corpse she’d met. At times, she thought she could feel his eyes burn on her skin as he gazed on her body, lingering on her cracks and crevices.
“I’m curious, love,” he said at one point, his voice thick with lust. “Do you have a high threshold for pain?” He slid his right hand along her rib cage and then under her brazier. Pulling her tender flesh between his thick calloused fingers, he squeezed until she yelped and then squeezed harder until she was wailing past her gag, thrashing in a futile attempt to escape. Hot tears dripped on the floor from eyes that burned with rage. “A fighter. I like that,” he teased.
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