Steve breathed heavily and paused with that realization. “On the Colonel’s property, they gave me some food, this uniform, and a gun. They invited me in and made me one of ‘em. I don’t remember a time when I felt like I belonged as much as I did with those folks.”
Skeptical, Emma asked, “So what’s different? Why the change of heart? If they are your new family, why are you helping us?”
Steve looked at Della. “I was raised a Christian.”
Emma rolled her eyes and allowed a disparaging, silent chuckle. Steve ignored it and said, “I was raised a Christian, that much of my upbringing stuck with me. And Christians don’t kidnap folks. They don’t steal and they don’t kill.”
Under her breath, Emma hissed, “That’s not been my experience.”
“Well, maybe you ain’t never met any real Christians. It takes more than just goin’ to church.”
Neil, sensing the anger rising in Emma, touched her on the arm and extinguished her burning fuse. He did so because he didn’t want Emma to embarrass herself. He knew and had seen Emma’s disdain for religion, but he also recognized the wisdom of Steve’s words. He was right, Emma had simply had nothing but bad experiences in her recent memory and her opinion had been formed as a result of those bad memories.
Emma bit back her comments, but seethed with resentment. She didn’t like someone else telling her what to say or how to say it. She knew Neil’s intention was good, but it didn’t make it any easier to take. She had a lifetime of feeling like she had to take it and she had no intention with whatever little time she had left to go back to that kind of a life. Hell, even her old job as a medical transcriptionist was built around someone dictating in her ear what to type. She breathed deeply and stared ahead.
Neil wanted to get away from these things, but he also came to the conclusion that to approach the high school in the truck would alert the militia to their plans. They needed to be able to get to the school much more stealthily. Of that he was certain, but beyond that the plan became very hazy.
The zombie roadblock likely saved all their lives. Had they not been in the road, Neil would have probably driven them straight into the waiting guns of the militia or whatever they were. Neil wasn’t too impressed from what he had heard thus far from Steve. They sounded like a bunch of assholes who no longer had the constraints of civilization to keep their behavior in check. But if they had automatic weapons and God knows what else at their disposal and the willingness to use that equipment on anyone deemed a threat, he was rightly concerned for their well-being.
He remembered a different way to get them to the road that ran along this side of the river separating them from Skyview High School. He just needed to get them far enough ahead of the zekes chasing them and then double back. That would be the easy part. Zombies were nothing if not predictable. Dealing with the militia would be a different thing entirely.
50.
Claire couldn’t contain her tears or her pain any longer. She had tried to be strong; she had tried to resist, but it was all for naught. She couldn’t kid herself. The agonizing scream leapt from her unexpectedly. She didn’t even recognize the voice as her own. It filled the room and then came crashing back down upon her.
She searched her mind feverishly, trying to remember if there was a question that she had failed to answer. What could she say to make the pain stop? What did he want from her?
Suddenly, a man’s face was filling her vision. Spread across the breadth of the face was a menacing, toothy grin. The man said with playful terror in his words, “This little piggy went to the market...” he dropped the toe he was holding between his fingers and flashed the blood-glistening garden trimmers, “How many more piggies do we have?”
She couldn’t remember. Was that the answer he needed to make him stop? Claire knew that it wasn’t the first toe he had cut from her feet, but she had lost count of how many he had removed. The first one had been her second toe from her right foot; the one with her silver toe ring on it. He was currently wearing that ring on the first knuckle of his pinky finger.
“I hope we don’t run out of piggies any time soon. I’m having so much fun with you. I didn’t know you could scream so loud. Did you?”
When no answer was forthcoming, Sullivan said, “Tsk, tsk, tsk,” and disappeared from view again. When she felt the blade brush against her skin and slowly close around her next digit, she didn’t wait for the pain to let fly a reverberating wail. She thought maybe she could hear an evil snicker as the sharpened blades came together again and slashed through another toe, which fell to the floor. He once again used the flat surface of a glowing red butter knife to cauterize the wound. He didn’t want her to bleed to death; not yet anyway. Where was the fun in that?
Sullivan had both of her feet held firmly between the ruthless jaws of a pair of table vises mounted to the workbench on which she had been strapped. Her struggling and frantic movement had left her ankles bruised and bloodied. As he picked up the toe and repositioned himself on the stool next to her, he said quietly while he stroked her hair, “The Colonel, he said he didn’t want you dead, at least not right away. But he didn’t say I couldn’t have a little fun before he talked to you. Are you having as much fun as I am?”
Again, Claire couldn’t find an answer that she thought might lead to the end of the torture session. Instead, she simply surrendered herself to her tears which came hot and heavy. She tried to blubber out an answer, but her words were as filled with tears as were her eyes.
Sullivan said with all the warmth of a serpent, “Your silence must mean that you are having fun. What should we do next?”
Claire closed her eyes and begged for any kind of delivery from this madness. She pleaded with the world to stop the pain. She hoped and prayed that Jerry would somehow make all of this go away. She needed him to come and save her. In her lucid moments, she tried to guess how long she had been a prisoner. It had certainly been hours. But had it exceeded days? She wasn’t sure.
Through her fear and despite her pain, she thought of the children. She was fearful for their fates. Her crazy torturer had never mentioned them. In fact, he had never said anything about anyone. He went on and on about nothing; telling stories about people whom she didn’t know who had done him wrong in some way.
When her wrist was moved and her clenched fingers separated somewhat, she could only dread what was coming next and her expectation wasn’t far from reality. Sullivan started with her pinky on her right hand and snipped it off one knuckle at a time, using the same heated knife each time to close the wound and stifle the blood flow. It was a routine he had either practiced to perfection or had been considering for a long time. The putrid odor of her own melting skin and singed hair filled her nostrils. Over the past few hours, she had smelled it so many times that it no longer solicited the same nausea.
Her mind flooded her senses with endorphins and helped her retreat from the agony. At one point she blacked out. Though her eyes were still open, her consciousness had thankfully fled.
When she awoke again, she was alone. Her hands and feet throbbed so intensely, it felt as if they buzzed. She was loath to look at the damage done to her body but she couldn’t resist. Slowly, her vision inched across the ceiling above as she forced her eyes down toward her extremities.
She couldn’t help the gasp that escaped her. She knew it was coming but it surprised her just the same. She was not able to recognize the mangled flesh as her own. The pinky fingers on both hands were largely gone. The pinky on her left hand still had a lone knuckle but her right one was gone. The ring finger on her right hand was gone down to the last knuckle too, the ring her parents had given her was gone as well.
Claire couldn’t see her feet, but she couldn’t imagine they looked any better. The swelling in both feet made wiggling her toes out of the question. For all she knew, all of her toes had been hacked from her feet.
She wondered about her respite and how long it would last. She was fairly certain she could wr
iggle her wrists free, but she realized she would not be able to make an escape. Her feet would be of no use to her. Claire would be forced to crawl away on her hands and knees and she had no illusions about her chances under those circumstances. Still, she had to try.
Moments later, she was pulling herself along the cold tile floor of the shop classroom. Once, long ago, she remembered her mind in such a hazy state and crawling on the floor, but that time had involved an entire bottle of cheap vodka and a gallon of orange juice.
Likely resulting from the shock her system was experiencing, she shivered and quaked with each labored breath. With willpower and adrenaline, she forced herself to keep moving through her teeth-chattering fever. It took her several agonizing minutes to cross the room to the closed classroom door where she stopped and wept. There was no way she would be able to stand to open the door.
Her torturer would return and find her on the floor. She knew she would pay a terrible price, but she was terrified of the possibilities, and she had no choice but to wait for him to return and deliver her punishment. That was her last thought as she thankfully fell into unconsciousness.
51.
Sullivan walked slowly through the empty, barely lit school hallway, enjoying the echo of his heavy footfalls. He had been summoned by Colonel Bear and was dutifully reporting. He didn’t like being taken away from his work, but he rightly figured his guest wasn’t going anywhere anytime in the near future.
He walked into the school office and was greeted immediately by Sherry and Terry. They were two pretty-ish young women who played the part of the Colonel’s secretaries. Neither of them really did anything, but they were willing to carry on the charade. It wasn’t like the phones were ringing or visitors were coming in to see the principal or anything, but it added a level of normalcy for those who needed it. The Colonel liked having the pretty girls jumping at his voice and doing his bidding. Sherry and Terry weren’t their real names but he couldn’t think of anything else to call them and he didn’t care enough to actually learn their names.
He smiled as he rounded the corner and stepped into the office. Sherry—or was it Terry?—smiled back and said, “He’s expecting you.”
Sullivan stifled the urge to say, No shit? He’s expecting me? Is that because he sent for me? He simply nodded and walked into the Colonel’s office, shutting the door behind him. Sometimes he hated people and their simple minds.
Once the door was shut, Sullivan said, “You rang?”
The Colonel was a big man, with an ego and voice to match. His larger than average head and thick neck appeared to be amorphously spilling outward from his overly tight-fitting military colored golf shirt. There was no definition between the soft, pink flesh of his neck and his head. His jaw line barely distinguished itself. There were no rolls however. His abundant skin was distended just enough to give him the appearance of a close relative of human beings, but something that still seemed otherworldly. If he were a comic book character, his name would probably have been Blob Man or something like that.
His size and weight, of course, turned him into a perspiration machine. Typically, the Colonel’s forehead would be adorned with beads of glistening sweat and his shirt would have damp patches in all the typical places. The air in his office was heavy with moisture and the not-too-subtle aroma of body odor.
While everyone else bitched about the smell, Sullivan, an idea man, had learned tricks to help him deal with it. For instance, on that day, he popped in a fresh piece of Big Red chewing gum as he walked into the office. The strong cinnamon scent, discouraged to venture far from its source, hovered around his nose and warded off the assault the Colonel’s limited sense of hygiene might try to mount.
Sullivan sat in the large, plush, leather chair in front of the Colonel’s desk and smiled. Sullivan hadn’t realized his forehead and left cheek bore the evidence of his time with Claire. Both were speckled with drying blood. The Colonel noticed his second in command’s adornment and handed Sullivan a towel. The large man said, his breath shallow and labored, “Ya might want to clean up before you go wandering around. No point in inciting the civvies.”
His voice dry and humorless, Sullivan replied, “If you say so, sir, but what’s the point? No disrespect intended, you understand.”
“Sullivan, you may not know it, but we will need those people eventually. If we get them all up in arms, we may be forced to make certain adjustments which probably won’t sit too well with them. At least not yet. We need to ease them into totally accepting everything we say or there’ll always be someone willing to stand up to us. If they think they can’t get by without us, well.... life could be real easy for all of us then.”
Sullivan hadn’t bought into the Colonel’s bullshit about establishing a new world order. He didn’t see how one world order was any different than the next. He wasn’t any more interested in telling someone else what to do that he was in letting someone else do the same to him. He’d lived his entire life having to pretend to care about what others thought and said and did, and now wasn’t any different. The Colonel, though, pretty much let him do what he wanted, and Sullivan could appreciate that kind of management.
“So what’s the plan then?” he asked.
The Colonel sat back in his chair which creaked and popped due to his excessive weight. He laced his fingers together behind his head and neck, which didn’t seem to have a defining line separating the one from the other, and exhaled a long, satisfied deep breath. “Tell me about the teenager you brought in. Any chances he might become a new recruit?”
Sullivan smiled. “Carter’s already working on it. He’s pretty good at those things. I’m sure he can get it done.”
“Good. And the woman?”
By that time, Sullivan caught scent of the Colonel’s ripe breath. He stood up and walked over to the window, so as to subtly escape the hovering odor.
“Sullivan...”
With a sinister slant to both his eyes and his voice, Sullivan said, “For what we want of her, she doesn’t need to be on board with your...vision. She just needs to be...well plied. Believe me, she won’t have any fight left in her when I get done.”
“She’s no good to us dead, Sullivan,” The Colonel admonished.
“She’s no good to us at all. She’s just another liability. Ya might as well let me have my fun for once. I listen to you and I follow your orders. Don’t I deserve a little R-n-R? Haven’t I earned it?”
The colonel wrinkled his face into a question. He asked with his head tilting slightly, “Earned what? What are you plannin’ to do?”
Sullivan smiled a grin that still had idiomatic canary feathers fluttering around it. “I earned you not asking any questions on this one. I earned no interference. And afterward, you can tell me what to do and when to do it, but let me be right now. Like I said, I earned it.”
The Colonel leaned farther into his chair and somehow projected enough of his musk to fill Sullivan’s nose. The gum was failing him, and he was becoming bored with this discussion. He needed to go back up to his room for a few minutes. There was a bottle of Johnny Walker that was calling out his name. And then it hit him. The bottle. He could be real creative with that bottle. And if it broke, he could use the pieces. His creativity pleased him immensely.
Leaving the room slowly, Sullivan said over his shoulder so the two women could hear him as well as the Colonel, “I got it covered boss. The woman will know her place at our feet...just like all women should know.” He shot the two women in the front office a smile, from which they cowered and looked away.
52.
Neil slammed his hand against the steering wheel in frustration. He continued to wait for some revelation. They needed a plan and he’d be damned if he could think of one. He knew they were both outnumbered and outgunned. He wondered if the militiamen were expecting them. He also wondered about the discipline of the militia forces. Would they have pickets on watch outside their defenses or would they simply hide behind their walls and wai
t?
Really, zekes weren’t tactically creative. Neil and his group had used that against them many times over the past several weeks. They didn’t use subterfuge or stealth. Zombies were nothing if not predictable. They simply came at their quarry relentlessly, overwhelming any resistance through sheer hunger and rage.
If he knew that, then maybe this Colonel guy knew that too. There really wasn’t much need to have people outside the walls so long as there were diligent lookouts atop the walls. Neil needed to think of a way to use that against them.
In the road ahead, shuffling along the pavement like a stray dog, a lanky, bony wraith saw the shiny, silver truck barreling toward it. The zombie raised its ashen arms and started to head on a collision course with the truck. The ghoul, which had once been a woman, perhaps a housewife, a mother, a neighbor, was showing the advancing signs of decay through the tattered shreds of clothing that still clung to her emaciated frame and trailed behind her like a fluttering war banner. Her teeth were fully exposed, the skin around her mouth having curled away. Her cheekbones protruded through gaps in her skin, as did some of her ribs and part of her right shoulder. Some of the bones peeking through were the result of the wounds which had claimed her life in the first place. The closer she drew to the truck, the more fearsome she became.
Neil looked over at Emma, expecting to see an approving nod, as he edged the truck into a more direct path toward the thing in the road. She wasn’t even acknowledging that Neil was looking at her. She was too busy looking at the zombie too, at least that was what she wanted Neil to think.
Of course Emma saw him look over at her and she knew exactly what he needed, but she also knew that he was also expecting to look over and see Meghan giving that nod. Emma wasn’t willing to be that person; she just didn’t have it in her anymore. Her affection for Dr. Caldwell had caught her by surprise, almost as much as his affection for her did. She hadn’t found much luck in love in her life.
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