by Tim Yingling
“That’s not hard to fathom.”
Debby got a good snicker out of the group, myself included.
“But, you also have to take into account that the zombies we ran into earlier today pretty much showed up out of nowhere. Almost as if they were guided to our location. I think that person has a personal vendetta against both of us, Sara.”
She didn’t seem to understand, and I didn’t want to explain it to her. I would lose my daughter all over again if I told her who I thought was guiding the SUV. Was Sara the main reason why that person was following us? Maybe. Was I going to throw her to the wolves to protect the rest of us? No, I was not. If we come in contact with the SUV then I would deal with the matter. Until then, I just had to get to my brother’s house.
“Which way are we going from here?” I looked directly at Sara for this question.
She pointed behind me to a three-story townhome that the black SUV just pulled into. Nobody got out, thankfully, but now there was the problem of them waiting for us to show up. The mission to check on my brother had just become a “black ops” mission. Sadly, there was only one person out of the group who could handle that type of mission.
I scanned the area to find a decent enough spot for everyone else to run and hide out. At the one-eighty mark, I saw it. The outhouse, although extremely overgrown and looking quite dilapidated, would suffice for what I needed these people to do; that only being to hide.
I pointed at the outhouse and said, “I want everyone in there.”
“Bull-fucking-shit we’re going to hide out someplace while you deal with those assholes all by your lonesome,” Phil said. He seemed to be bound and determined to want to help.
Kate chimed in. “I have to agree with Phil. We don’t know how many people they have over there. Or if they have any reinforcements. You’re good at what you do, but you’re not that good.”
I looked to Ernie and Linny. They seemed to be as indifferent about this situation as they have been about everything else. Debbie is the one who looked scared. Of course, you couldn’t blame her. I was talking about a suicidal situation if it was anyone else, but I had full confidence in myself. She didn’t know that though. She thought I was sending them away so I could go to my death.
I didn’t look to Sara or Tayvon as I asked, “And you two?”
Tayvon spoke first.
“I have to agree with everyone else on this matter. There is no need for you to do this alone. I will fight with you no matter the situation. I think I have proven that already.”
I looked to Sara.
“Considering that I can see who came out of that vehicle –”
I turned to see some familiar people from my past, but no names came to mind.
“– I know you can handle this situation without us.” She stopped to address the group. “Those people over there, they’re just pretending to be macho. Granted, they’ve survived this long, but they’ve only gone up against things that are slow and dimwitted. If Sarge is telling us to stay back so he can operate over there, I have no problem with that. Plus, I think you all know how I feel about killing people. I don’t want to do it and I don’t want to watch someone else do it.”
She called me “Sarge.” She hadn’t done that even though she heard all the others say it. I don’t know what it meant from her, but it was not something I liked. Her animosity toward everyone except Debbie stood foremost in my mind. I would not let my guard down for anything.
“Okay, how about this?” I asked the group. “Why don’t you all go look for a couple of rides for us tomorrow? We are going to find someplace around here tonight to sleep and then we will drive away from the sunrise tomorrow. Sound good?”
There was a soft groan of approval from everyone except Sara and Debbie. Sara wasn’t the one who I was worried about agreeing with me on this. Debbie, on the other hand, didn’t like the idea from the start. Tears fell from her cheeks while she looked at the ground.
“You all go away and wait for Debbie to show up.”
No one protested the matter, even Sara. Debbie stood her ground waiting for me to talk to her. I looked over my shoulder before I said anything. There was no change to the people across from the park. They stood outside the house awaiting our arrival. They would be waiting for a long time.
I put my hands on Debbie’s shoulders. “Sweetheart, I need you to listen to me closely. Can you do that?”
A soft nod from my daughter.
“The more inexperienced people I have helping me with those people over there the more I wouldn’t be able to concentrate on the task at hand. I have to do this alone so I can protect you all. You have to believe that I am going to be okay. I may receive a minor wound, but nothing that is life-threatening. Do you understand?”
She lifted her head slowly. “Daddy, I’m not scared that I am going to lose you again. I am scared for those people over there because of what you are going to do to them. I don’t want you to do anything to them. And how do you know that they are the ones that came after you in Commerce anyway?”
I didn’t have an answer for her. She was probably too young to understand what a gut feeling is. That’s all I had. I wouldn’t find out until about thirty minutes later I was right about who they were, but not about who they were following. She still needed an answer. Deserved is probably a better word, though.
“Debbie, it’s just something that I believe to be true. Right now, I need you to go with your mother. If you all can find a van, or big ass SUV like the one those sons-of-bitches rode in on, then that will be all the much better.”
Kate came around the corner looking more than a little impatient with me. “Are we doing this or not?”
I nodded to her, but talked to Debbie. “Go with your mother.” Once she was away from Kate, I said to Kate, “If I’m not back in one hour, or if the gunfire stops and you don’t see me come back into this park in less than ten minutes, you get all these people out of here. Where you go, I don’t want to know. I don’t need to know, just in case they keep me alive.”
She nodded to me this time. “But you did bring up a good point.” She pointed pass my left arm to the vehicle across the street. “That would be big enough to fit us all. Why don’t you try to wrangle that one?”
I laughed a little. “I’ll see what I can do, but no promise.”
She nodded once more. “Be careful.”
Without notice, Kate leaned up while pulling my head down to her, and gave me a kiss on the corner of my mouth. She guided herself to that spot, I didn’t have to move. It was a friendship kiss, nothing more. But it wasn’t a goodbye kiss. Quite to the contrary. It was a good luck kiss. With even less notice, Kate turned tail and ran after everyone.
I didn’t wait around too long to see which way they went after they went behind the outhouse. My main concern was if the enemy across the street had seen them. There was only one person from that group looking somewhat in this direction. He was actually looking down the street the way my group had come; which is the opposite direction his group had come. I was originally planning on backtracking a little bit down the road to the east to get on the other side of the houses since I knew what was already down that way. Now, I had to pull an audible and go the opposite direction.
I moved west, into the setting sun. The tree line offered me a bit of cover, but once you add in the growing darkness, I could move as quickly as I wanted. They wouldn’t be able to see me even if they were looking in the right direction.
Once I made it to the end of the beautifully unkempt park, I seen this direction was better than the other direction. The road curved to the north making it so I wouldn’t have to cross but this one road. I could go behind the houses and come up behind the people at Bobby’s house.
That’s exactly what I did. And it was smooth sailing.
The only thing that got in my way were the stray cats of the neighborhood looking for food. I heard them meowing from the time I sent everybody away. The silence offered that much. I
also figured that since I heard them, then the others can hear them as well. It shouldn’t raise any alarms as to someone being in the alley.
I had to step over a few of the little bastards as I moved down the alley. Why they were all in the one spot was a question I didn’t want to get the answer to. Even after I finished off these people, it still wouldn’t matter. We would be moving on the next morning, getting me one step closer to Hannah and my kids.
At the house, I noticed one thing. There was a flicker, and I mean a flicker as in a candle, of light coming from one of the upstairs windows. I looked around for a second to see if there was a spot I could climb higher to look through the window. The house didn’t offer much, but a big oak in the backyard did. Before I ascended the tree, I slung the rifle over my shoulder and checked to make sure my pistol was secure. It didn’t take me too long to get to a height that I could see into the house with. Once I looked in, I saw what I thought I would see.
There was someone other than my brother in his eldest daughter’s room. He had his own weapon and was waiting for me to come into the house. He didn’t expect me to climb up into the tree.
I unslung my weapon to take aim at him. Before I could get the rifle to my shoulder I spotted someone walking to the back of the house. He seemed to be just doing a patrol to check the backyard. A branch beside my head offered a good spot for me to put the rifle for the time being. I placed my pistol in a notch just above where the rifle now hung. With both of the weapons out of the way, I took out my knife and waited for the man to get closer to the tree. It would be a fifteen-foot drop. Nothing would seriously injure me, but put grave consequences on the man in the backyard.
He walked to the fence neighboring the next house and looked over it. I rotated with him as he moved to the back of the yard to look up and down the alley. If my calculations were correct (and if you can’t tell, they usually are) he would have to walk under the tree to get back to the front of the house. Putting him in harm’s way, in other words.
The guy didn’t even look up into the tree as he turned around. He took three steps and on the fourth, I made my move. I didn’t jump out of the tree so much as I fell feet first. My knees weren’t locked, and I was looking to land flat on my feet so I could roll to my safe area. In this case, my safe area being to my right. My arms were extended slightly, but lowered to my stomach so the knife would be able to enter the guy’s head before my feet hit. I had to offer a little more force once the initial cut had been made. Thinking quickly, I released my left hand from the knife and slammed it down onto the butt, driving it down to the hilt. I just completely lost that knife for a good reason.
Once I rolled out of the way, I popped back up to my left foot and right knee instinctively grabbing the downed man’s pistol for myself. I aimed at the side of the house he had come from first, then moved to the back door, and finally moving to the room the man on the inside was in. None of the spots indicated someone would be coming.
If I had to guess, I would say I had about two minutes before the knifed man would reanimate and start looking for food. I dropped the pistol and looked for the one thing I had lost. He didn’t have a knife to offer me, so I had to move on and make a lot of noise.
I climbed back up to the spot I left my weapons. I put the pistol back in the holster before I took the rifle. Wasting no time, I shot the man in the bedroom. His head whipped hard to the right, then came back to the left causing him to fall to the floor. Blood flew out of his head splattering the pretty pink wallpaper a darker red.
Not even noticing I did it, I dropped back down to the ground and trotted to the back of the house, switching hand positions with the rifle as I went. I already had it raised to my shoulder, moving towards the driveway when the first man came around the corner. One shot put him to the ground. The next man came around the corner firing blindly to my left. I’m sure he was trying to make it so he could get me by distracting me, but it didn’t work. It took me more than one shot to get him.
I stopped when I got to the corner of the house. I seriously wish I would have acted just a tad bit faster to offer me more light than what I had to deal with. The sun was completely down; the twilight still offered me a little bit to see when I looked around the corner of the house. And the person I saw standing in front of the SUV was someone I never thought I would see again. Mostly because I checked her house and it was empty with no knowledge of her whereabouts.
Erin’s body was unmistakable to me. She stood with one hand on her right hip and her left leg canted out. I had seen this pose plenty of times from her. It was her “business time” pose. The last two guns flanking her on either side didn’t help matters. They knew where I was. And now I was trapped with one already reanimated corpse and two more about to come back. I hadn’t lost yet. I still had an ace up my sleeve; or better yet, in the cargo pocket of my khaki’s.
“I went by your house, Erin,” I said. “When I didn’t see you there I thought you dead.”
A sly laugh came from the end of the driveway. “To me, you are dead, Byron. Once I saw you walking around with Sara and your daughter I knew I wasn’t going to get you to come in with me to protect Commerce.”
She must not know about Hannah. “Commerce was just a pit stop for me. I was stopping there to rest before I headed out for Pilgrim.”
“To get to your second wife and other kids?” Well, even Einstein was wrong once and a while. “I know all about them as well.”
I had enough of this game, and I think I knew where it was going. I pulled the grenade from my cargo pocket and pulled the pin, keeping the trigger lock on for just a couple more seconds.
“Let’s cut the bullshit, Erin. You know I don’t want to hurt you, but you are standing in my way from getting to my family. What do you want?”
“Well, I was going to offer you, and your daughter, a chance to join up with us. Anybody else in your group who wanted to join would be allowed. All except Sara and her boy-bitch.”
That’s it. I pulled the trigger lock but kept my fingers on the spoon. She was about to say the wrong thing.
“That was until you decided to kill four of my men.”
The man I had killed with the knife was milling around the backyard. He could hear my voice, but couldn’t tell where I was. The first man I shot coming around the corner was starting to stir, letting out groans of protest. I had to act fast if I wanted to get out of this.
“Let me stop you right there, Erin,” I said, catching my breath on her name. I was more than a little nervous. It wasn’t the fact I couldn’t throw with my left hand. It was more of the fact I was about to throw an extremely deadly object at a woman I still love to this day. She could have been the bearer of my children, but we both ruined that at some point in our circling of each other.
“Why do you need to stop me?”
I positioned myself an arm’s length away from the wall and got my arm cocked back ready to throw.
“Because I have a feeling you are going to say that now everyone in my group, besides myself, is going to be killed. Is that about the gist of it?”
There was no waiting on her end. “Yes. That is correct.”
“So, that includes my daughter, Debbie?”
“Yes, it does.”
“Erin, you of all people should know that you don’t threaten the ones I love. I will react with an equal or greater reaction to the threat.”
I reared back and let the fragmentary grenade fly. I could have thrown it with my right hand, but I decided against that. I didn’t want to take the chance of someone with an itchy trigger finger. It wasn’t the most beautiful throw in the world, but it did the job. After all, it only had to go fifteen meters.
In the quick flash, I got of Erin’s face, I could see I had caught her off guard. She knew what was coming, but her two boyfriends did not. Erin cut off what she was about to say and jumped to her right. There wasn’t much cover besides a couple of bushes and a hedge line, but there was enough.
I didn
’t see where the grenade went, but the SUV exploded. That much I know. I’m kind of glad it happened that way. The knifed zombie found me and was making its way toward me. The first one I shot found his footing and was turning around in the direction of the screech. If I had been standing anywhere else, the thing that happened to the zombies would have happened to me as well. The force of the explosion, and the ensuing pressure coming around the corner at an angle knocked the zombies back off their feet. There was a bit of wishful thinking on my part that maybe they would have died all over again, but they began to move as I moved.
I waited for one second after the big, deafening explosion to make my move. I turned the corner with the rifle at the ready position. The first thing I noticed was the hole in the side of the house. There was enough force to do that when the car was still a good fifteen feet away I started to count myself lucky. The second thing I noticed were the bodies on the ground. I only counted one. I turned to my right (my current non-firing hand) to search behind me. The other guy was sent flying forward. His legs stuck out of the garage door, mostly all the way in. I don’t think he will be giving me much trouble anymore.
There was still one person I was missing. Now, there was only one safe spot for her to go, that’s how I knew what she did. While we were dating, I taught her a thing or two about survival. Ten years later and it seems my teachings have stuck. I wish I could say that for all the women in my life.
I instinctively turned toward the hedge. Through the crackle of the fire and the sound of metal falling every few seconds, I could still hear Erin in the hedge. I walked down an additional twenty feet following a line of blood. She was wounded somewhere. From the way the smear looked, as if it was first dragged on the ground and then another object was dragged through the still wet blood, it seemed she had been wounded in the upper torso area.
I kept my eyes in front of me, following the trail of blood. I could hear the sounds of the zombies moving towards the fire. I paid them no attention as I didn’t need to. They weren’t bothering me. My only focus was on Erin.