The fight lasted maybe ten minutes. We made very short work of the twenty-three zombies who had decided to see if we had an expiration date. When it was done, I had killed four. I guess the real number would be three and a half seeing as how Sass and I shared one of those kills. I felt way more tired than you would think a guy would get from only killing three and half zombies. I walked over to the side of the road and picked my backpack up and, placing my bat back into its sleeve, slung the pack over my shoulder and looked around to the others saying, “Let’s find some place to hide and eat some breakfast. I don’t know about you all, but I’m starving.”
Amanda looked at me, but I could tell she wasn’t going to fight me on this one.
“Come on. Let’s get up here out of their line of sight and take a quick five.” Amanda said.
A quick five means you may get three minutes before she’s yelling at you to get off your ass and get your head back in the game. That was fine with me. Three minutes was plenty of time to do what I needed to do. There was a strawberry pop tart calling my name and, as God is my witness, that call was going to be answered.
FOURTEEN
We were sitting in front of the huge doors that led to Home Depot. I was looking at the building, it was huge. Could there really be that many tools that you would need a building that big to house them? As you have most likely guessed, I am not a do it yourselfer. There have been very few times in my life where I have had the desire to hold a hammer in my hand and more than half of the hammer related excursions that I can remember involves a car that was named the “Rabbit” for some unfathomable reason. It seems that the starter had to be coaxed every so often, and much like the Russian cosmonaut from the movie Armageddon, beating the living crap out of the machine was the approved method of making it work. To this end you would pop the hood and whack the motor with a hammer until it started. It wasn’t a perfect fix, but man did it help you burn off the stress of having to drive a piece of crap car around town.
I have never participated in any home renovation. I have never built anything with my hands. I am not Mr. Fixit. I’m the guy who calls you up, if you’re one of my friends, and say, “Hey, um…do you know how to fix stuff when the house breaks? I’ll buy lunch.”
You would honestly be surprised at how much free labor those three words will buy you. Anytime I needed my cousin for anything all I had to say was that I would buy lunch and he would almost be to the apartment before I could hang up the phone. I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking to yourself that if I lived in an apartment then shouldn’t the landlord be the one fixing everything. Yes, in a perfect world that would have been exactly what would have happened, however, I lived in the only apartment known to man or beast where that wasn’t the case. The landlord wouldn’t fix or replace anything. When I moved in the landlord said that the appliances came with the apartment and that they were all in working order. Believing this, I thought that I was making at least a half way intelligent decision in signing the papers they set before me. It wasn’t until about two days after I moved in that I realized the refrigerator didn’t work. As well, the stove didn’t cook things that you put inside it and only one burner on the top of it would heat up. Upon getting naked and stepping into the bathtub, I discovered that I had no hot water and for one spooky night I had to sleep in the apartment with a front door that was missing the internal locking mechanism. Now you may be shaking your head and asking me why I hadn’t noticed any of this before I rented it and my only defense is that I had never rented a place before. I didn’t know what I was doing. I simply had no clue. I was surrounded by the beautiful fog of joy that is called getting out of your parent’s house. How did I manage to pay to replace all of these nonworking things in my apartment after the landlord told me that option triple z in the lease was that the renter will repair or replace anything that is broken or is found to be nonworking during the course of his time in the apartment?
A friend of mine was taking HVAC classes at the local community college and I had him ask his teacher if he knew what the problem with the refrigerator could be. His teacher had worked as an appliance repairman for like ten years, so he knew his stuff. It turns out that there is a little button inside a hole at the very top of my frig, if you put your finger up in there and twist the little knobby thing it resets whatever needs to be reset to make the thing work. I would have to do this once or twice a week. It wasn’t that much of a pain in the butt, you just listened to see if the thing would rattle every so often. If it quit rattling, then you needed to twist the knobby thing. This repair cost me absolutely nothing and it had worked all the way to the day the zombies showed up making refrigerators a thing of the past.
The stove, water heater and front door all just needed parts replaced. My cousin took me to buy new heating elements for the oven and four new elements for the stove top. We had to buy a new pilot light thingy for the water heater and a new door knob for the front door. We went back to the house and had everything replaced in under an hour. The cost for these repairs was parts and lunch.
So, what’s the point of my story? To be honest with you, I’m not sure. I kind of lost my destination during the journey, but that particular train of thought lasted long enough to eat breakfast. And now that my strawberry Pop Tart was residing in my belly, I sat and studied the building. Home Depot is huge. If I were to go in there looking for an item to fix my home I think it would take me a year to find it. As I let my vision slide down the building I could see Fred sitting on my right. Fred did not look happy.
“Do you think the kidnappers went this way?” I asked.
“No.”
“What makes you say that?” Sass asked taking the last bite of his granola bar.
“For the same reason that I don’t think we should be going this way. We are much too close to the Head Hunters. We are in more danger than any of you can even imagine.”
I looked out at the road then back to Fred. “Maybe we are gaining on them since we are staying closer to State of Franklin.”
Fred actually laughed at me. “I doubt that Charlie. We have already had to make a huge detour to avoid a mob of zombies that your dog brought down on top of us and then we had to fight off a second group up here. I can see no way that we could be further down the road by going through the middle of zombie central and heading for Head Hunter territory. They are making better time and are not putting themselves at risk.” Fred said this with notable anger in his voice. The anger wasn’t about his kid missing though, he was angry that we were putting ourselves at risk by getting to close to the mysterious and deadly Head Hunters. To me this seemed odd. I wouldn’t care how we went down the road as long as we were going. I would be focused on nothing more than getting my little girl back if I were in his position, my safety be damned. Fred wasn’t this way. To me it seemed that he knew she was okay, and he wanted to make sure that he would also be okay when we got to the Med Center and had our reunion. Maybe that was the only way he was going to be able to keep his head screwed on straight during this journey, but then again, maybe it meant something else. I just couldn’t shake the feeling that he couldn’t be trusted. It all kept coming back to that first question. How did they get the girl in the first place? If I believed Fred’s story then I should be buying everything else he is telling me, but if I don’t believe him then I shouldn’t believe anything else he says. If I don’t believe him then he should be nothing more than a hammer for me to use to knock this Tabitha woman’s kingdom to the ground and teach them that this is not how we do business in our new world. The only problem with that was, for the life of me, I couldn’t think of a way to use him to generate the desired effect on his wife and her kingdom which sat up on high, raining pain down among the locals. Fred was nothing but a tool for me to use, I just needed to know how.
“You’re thinking that they went straight on up the hill from the car into the houses?” I asked.
“I don’t know. They could have, or they could have taken the
road that swings around K-Mart. I don’t know this area that well, but I do know that behind these shops are houses and traveling through there is much safer than the path you have set us on.”
He wasn’t openly challenging me like Daniel did or Jericho does on a daily basis. He was simply telling me that he didn’t agree with me. Somehow this was harder to refute because he wasn’t trying to take over. He was just telling us that we were doing it the wrong way.
“Everyone up. We’ve sat here long enough.” Amanda said standing up from where she had been sitting with Jane.
“We are going to hug this building all the way to the end of it.” Jane said. “We don’t abandon this path unless we are in danger of being surrounded. Do not enter the parking lot for any reason. Stay near the wall at all times and don’t stop. We won’t be going fast, but we will be in constant movement.”
“I do not want to fight at this location. If we have to run and drag them to the opening at the end of the buildings, then so be it. We do not fight.” Amanda said then looking at Marky Mark she added, “You will not fight until you are told to. Understood?”
Marky Mark shot Amanda a wink and said, “You’se know it babe.”
We began picking our way forward with Amanda leading the group and Jane bringing up the rear. I wondered how Amanda had taken the lead from our resident sniper. It wasn’t that I didn’t agree with the decision, but Jane had been on point until now and it just seemed weird for Amanda to take over so suddenly. I felt that there had been a discussion during our downtime that I would have liked to have been a part of. Was there some danger that I hadn’t clued into yet? What was there about this area that they saw as a threat? I started looking around but couldn’t see anything. I was directly behind Amanda. Picking up my pace I caught up to her whispering, “What’s going on?”
“What do you mean?” She answered.
“Suddenly you’re on point and Jane is book ending us. What do you know that scares you?”
Amanda didn’t answer or slow down.
“Damn it, Amanda. Did it ever occur to you that this may be information I might need to know?”
“On the contrary this is information that you defiantly do not need to know. I know you Charlie. I know your weaknesses. If you were to know this information, then you would put us all in danger. Personally, I do not want to die today. Do you?”
I was quiet for a minute thinking about her words then she repeated, “Do you?”
“No. I’d rather wake up tomorrow still breathing.” I said, after a moment’s pause I added, “I thought we were over these trust issues.” I said this in tone that caught her attention and she actually took a second to look at me.
“It’s not trust in you as a person I am having trouble with Charlie. It’s trust in your ability to effectively lead us at the moment.”
This hit me where it hurt. “And why is that?”
“Have you looked at yourself lately? You look like you’re at deaths door. Your skin is pale. The circles under your eyes have deepened considerably over the last week or so. You are physically falling apart. I have spoken to Jane and Jack both about this and they have noticed as well.”
“I’m not feeling a hundred percent, nobody is.” I said in my defense.
“It’s more than that. Your judgment is starting to become affected. More than I have noticed this.” Amanda raised her hand which stopped everybody behind her. She turned and looked at me. “I know how heavy Jim’s death weighs on you. Veronica has spoken to me about this.” And after a few seconds of quiet she added, “About the dreams.”
Veronica. Perfect. Even out here she sneaks up and smacks me down. Now the other members of the council had doubts about me. Doubts placed into their heads by Veronica. The fact that she had gone to Amanda, the very woman she was jealous of never even entered my mind. I was mad at her for sticking her nose where, I thought, it didn’t belong.
“Veronica doesn’t want me out here. She would say anything to get me benched.”
Amanda nodded. “That was my first thought. However, what I see with my own eyes is hard to refute. Have you looked at yourself lately Charlie?”
No. I don’t like looking at myself anymore. This was something I couldn’t tell her, but it was the truth.
“Are you sleeping at all at this point?” She asked. The concern on her face was visible from orbit. I decided it would be best to try and alleviate some of that concern with my own particular brand of humor.
“Nope. It’s just sex, sex, sex. All night, every night.”
Amanda didn’t smile at me, but she did say, “Not exactly what I was asking and just a bit too much information.”
Joke launched, crashed and burned. I decided to try some truth. Not all of it, but some.
“Yes. I am sleeping…a little. Not a lot, but a few hours a night. I am still in control. I am still able to lead us.”
“So you say. As leader, I am sure you trust me to do my job and keep us safe correct?”
I was being outmaneuvered. I could see it, but I could do nothing to stop it. “Yes. I trust you to do your job.” I said knowing what was coming next.
“Good. Then we are in agreement. You do not need to know.”
“I didn’t say that.” I said.
“Yes, you did, now be quiet, we are in danger here and you need to respect that danger.”
This brought even more questions into my mind, but I didn’t voice any of them. I bit my lip and contented myself to watching Amanda walk the rest of the way to the end of the Home Depot building. The building continued on as HH Gregg and Michaels craft store became visible in the distance, then the building bent back against itself and the other stores were lost from view. I looked out across the parking lot and saw that on the other side of the street was the shop I could have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in once upon a time. The proud blue building of Best Buy stood out against the early morning sky. I had this quick fantasy flash through my head of the last, living members of the Geek Squad rolling out of the Best Buy building in the zombie killer gear that they had built from various computer components. They would look like badass Ghostbusters on steroids. Lasers would flash into the light of day and zombies would be imploded, exploded, and cut in half. They would destroy everything in their path and when Zombert the zombie god of decay showed up to put down the Geek Squad uprising they would cross the streams and everything would turn back to the way it was. All the zombies would be vaporized and we would be left to pick up the pieces.
Statues would be built to the members of the zombie busting Geek Squad and there would be a national holiday dedicated to its brave members. I smiled at this momentary distraction from the world around us. In reality Best Buy sat empty, vacant of light or life. No mad scientist Geek Squad members were in there with soldering guns piecing together a zombie blaster. Nobody was going to ride out of the blue building across the street and save us all from the hordes that hunted us and Zombert, the zombie god of decay, didn’t really exist…I hoped.
“So far, so good. We don’t stop again till the next corner of the building past Michaels.” Amanda said and turned to walk away. Before she could get going I grabbed her arm.
“Tell me.” I said.
“What?” Amanda said turning to look at me this time.
“Tell me what you’re scared of.”
Amanda leveled a gaze at me that told me I was not going to get what I wanted.
“I thought that we had settled this.” She said in an irritated tone.
“You settled this, I didn’t. Tell me.”
Amanda shook her arm out of my grip then looked me dead in the eyes and said, “No.” She turned and began to walk away. I was so shocked by this that I couldn’t do anything but watch her go. By the time my mind registered that I should not have let her start moving, it was too late and not only was she gone, but Sass had passed by me as well giving me a “what the hell?” look as he passed. I wanted to grab him and say, “They're sharing secrets,
her and Jane. We’re in danger and they won’t tell us why. Why won’t they tell us why?” I knew just how much of a nutcase I would sound like if I did this, but I felt like I needed somebody else to speak out against this.
I didn’t say or do anything. As much as half of my brain, the half that had been getting way too comfortable allowing paranoia to creep in, wanted to declare Amanda and Jane turncoats and force them to spill their secrets. The other part of my brain was asking me “Why do you care so much? She is the only reason you’re still alive, don’t you think that buys her some trust. If she says you don’t need to know then you don’t. End of story. Why do you care?”
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