by Steven Pajak
* * *
When Ravi came out of the tent, she removed her makeshift facemask and bloody gloves. She threw them into a plastic bag just outside the entrance.
“Please excuse me if I don’t hug you, Matthew,” she said, indicating the blood on her smock with the sweep of her hand. “But I am sure happy to see you.”
“Forget that,” I said and pulled Ravi in close and hugged her. Her face was warm against my neck. “I missed you something fierce.”
“You come to take us home now?” she raised an eyebrow.
“Not yet. You heard about Kat?”
“Yes. You’re going to get her back, right?”
“I will.”
“What can I do?”
“The woman they brought in, can she talk?”
Ravi nodded her head. “She’s in lots of pain but she can talk. Does she know something about Kat?”
“I think she does.”
She considered this for a second and then said, “She’s in the first area on the left.”
“I’ll try to be quick, but—”
Ravi raised a hand and said, “If she has information that leads us to Kat, get it from her. I don’t care how long it takes or what you have to do to make her talk. You get Kat and you take us home.”
She left me alone then, quite shocked by her comment. This was a very different, darker version of the woman who refused to be in charge of our medical section when I first offered her the position six months ago. This was definitely not the same Ravi who only three months ago refused to leave Randall Oaks because someone needed to tend the ailing. I wasn’t sure if I liked the new Ravi, but I had been spared an argument that would have wasted precious time, so I wasn’t going to dwell on it.
I grabbed one of the folding chairs and sat next to the injured woman. She flinched at the sound of the chair as it scrapped against the floor. Her head shot up and she looked at me with her unbandaged eye.
“I need to ask you some questions,” I said.
“Where’s the doctor? Why do you have me here like this? I’m hurting real bad.”
“I know you are. As soon as you answer my questions, the doctor will take care of you.”
“Please, just give me something for the pain.”
“Not right now.”
“Please,” she said. Her brow dripped sweat into her good eye and she blinked madly at the stinging. “I’ve been shot and I’m dying here. I need the god damn doctor!”
“You will die if we don’t patch you up soon,” I said. I squirmed a bit against the cold metal chair, trying to get comfortable. “So I suggest you let me ask my questions.”
“Asshole,” the woman said and spat at me. Her mouth must have been dry, however, because nothing but her hot, rank breath came out. She slumped against the bonds that held her to the chair and started to weep.
“What’s your name?”
She said nothing and continued to weep.
“What is your name?” I asked again.
The woman again did not answer. Instead, she hung her head and cried tears from her good eye.
Taking a deep breath to steel myself for what needed to come next, I reached out and placed my fingertips on the bandage that covered her wounded abdomen and applied a quick jab of pressure. The woman’s reaction was immediate. She screamed—”Mother fucker!”—and tried to push away from my probing hand.
Leaning in closer, my fingers eased up on her wound, I said, “If you don’t answer my questions I will let you die here. But I promise you I will make what little life you have left very painful and soon you’ll be begging me to just kill you.”
Sobbing now, tears running down her right cheek and mucous running from her nostrils, the woman starred at me with her brown eye with a mix of hatred and fear. She said, “Please don’t hurt me anymore.”
“That’s up to you,” I said. I sat back in my chair and lay my hand against her thigh, close enough so that I could reach out and tweak her again if she did not cooperate. “Now, let’s start again. What is your name?”
“Rose,” she hissed. “My name is Rosemary Anderson. Can I have some water, please?”
“Not now, Rose. Why did you attack us?”
She looked down a moment, then back at me. Her throat made a clicking sound when she swallowed. “Food and supplies,” she said.
“You attacked us to take our food and supplies?”
She nodded her head.
“What do you call yourselves?” Rose seemed thrown by the question, so I rephrased the question. “What is the name of your gang, Rose?”
Her nose wrinkled and she squinted as she swallowed again. “He calls us the Raiders sometimes. I suppose that’s our name. Please, I really need water.”
I considered her request for a moment, then got up from my chair and retrieved my messenger bag. From it, I pulled out a plastic pint bottle of water that was half-full. Uncapping it, I put the mouth of the bottle to her lips and slowly poured. Rose greedily gulped at the water and I pulled it away.
“Where is your gang located?”
“More please,” Rose croaked. She licked her lips and swallowed again.
“First give me a location.”
She shook her head. “We have camps everywhere. I don’t know them all. No one knows them all.”
“So, what, do you go around killing like this?”
Rose looked at me with her brown eye, her eyebrow raised defiantly. “Yes. We do what we need to do to survive.”
For a moment, I struggled to keep from digging my hand into her wound and tearing it open. The nonchalant way that people described their heinous actions simply as doing what needed to be done to survive disgusted me.
Letting my anger simmer, I asked, “What about the infected? How did they get them to be part of the attack? How do they…control them?”
“Water, please.”
I gave her another few swallows of water then put the cap on the bottle and set it at my feet. I put my hand on her thigh again, waiting for her to continue.
“I don’t know exactly how they do it, because I never watched them. But basically they corral them into the trucks and then they drive the trucks into the kill zone. They release the infected, you know, as a diversion to draw the attention of the people, and then the Raiders come in behind killing the infected and the other people. Then they take their stuff and move on.”
She kept saying they, as though she was not part of the act. My fingers twitched and again I had to keep myself from tweaking the bitch.
“They got nothing from here, though. I’m sure they saw the walls out there. They must have known this would be hard. So why attack?”
“They were testing your defenses. And they wanted the woman.”
That surprised me. I sat straight, knocking the bottle of water aside with my foot. “Wait, what woman did they want?”
“The blonde girl,” she said. “The one in charge.”
“Who wanted her?”
“He wanted her.”
“Who is he? Start making sense.”
“The leader. I don’t know his name; I only know what they call him.”
“So tell me what they call him.”
“They call him Road King or King Harley because he rides that big motorcycle.”
“Why did he want the blond girl?”
Now she stared at me, anger behind her one brown eye. “How the hell would I know? He doesn’t tell me his plans. He doesn’t even know I exist. I never met him face to face.”
I took a deep breath and sighed. “Okay, where did they take the blond girl? Don’t tell me you don’t know.”
“They took her to our camp.”
“Damn it, be specific,” I said. I squeezed her thigh firmly, enough to bruise her flesh. “Where is your camp?”
She didn’t respond other than to make a slight hissing sound when I squeezed. When I reached for her abdomen, she cringed and tried to slap at my hands, then cried out in pain from her own actions.
“Tell me where your camp is now or I will fucking hurt you bad. I’m not playing games, Rose.”
She was crying again. She sniffled and fixed her right eye on me again. “Please don’t make me do this. He’ll kill me if I talk.”
“I won’t let him get to you, Rose. Just tell me where my friend is and I’ll protect you. Please, Rose, tell me where the camp is.”
She shook her head. “You can’t protect me from him. He’ll kill me. He’ll feed me to the monsters!”
Before I realized what I was doing, I grabbed Rose’s hair in my left hand and pulled it backwards. She yelped in surprise, but the ear-piercing scream came when I slammed my fist into her wound and pushed hard.
With my face close to her, our noses almost touching, I shouted, “If you don’t tell me what I want, I kill you, Rose. I’ll feed you to the damn monsters, too.”
Suddenly, I kicked my chair away and got behind her. I grabbed her chair, tilted it back onto the two rear legs and started to drag the chair toward the doorway of the tent. “Get ready, Rose. I’m going to feed you to the monsters a piece at a time while you watch.”
“Stop it, God please, stop it. I’ll tell you where the camp is!”
I stopped dragging the chair and let it fall back on to all four legs. Back in front of Rose, I said, “Don’t fuck with me, Rose. This is your last chance. Where is the camp?”
“We have a camp at the Wal-Mart on 59 and 20 but they probably won’t go there, not right away. They’ll go to the outpost instead to wait for reinforcements.”
“Don’t make me ask, Rose.”
“The outpost is down the road, some shit diner called Kappy’s.”
“You’re sure about that?”
“Yes, I’m sure.”
“How many people are there at the outpost?”
“I don’t know,” Rose said. Then swiftly before I could cause her more pain, she blurted, “I don’t know how many of us you killed. There were fifteen of us before.”
I was quiet a moment, mulling over the information. Kappy’s wasn’t far, that was good. Their group numbered fifteen before the attack. We must have taken out a few of them, how many I couldn’t know. Maybe Phil could help by policing the dead and counting those he did not recognize.
“Can I please have something for the pain, now? Please. I cooperated.”
“Yeah, yeah, I’ll send the doctor with something.”
Ravi was waiting just outside the tent. Her scrubs were stained with blood and other dark material I couldn’t figure. She asked, “Did she give you what you needed?”
I nodded. “What’s her condition?”
Ravi looked into the tent for a moment and then back at me. “The bullet is still in her abdomen. She’ll need exploratory surgery to determine the extent of internal damage and stop the bleeding. I don’t have the equipment or the expertise. Even if we had a surgeon, she would most likely die on the table.”
“What are her chances, then?”
Ravi shook her head. “Frankly, Matthew, the woman is dead, she just doesn’t know it yet.”
“What do you suggest we do with her?”
“There are two choices. We can give her enough morphine to take her pain so that she passes in her sleep. Or we can treat her pain for as long as it takes for her to pass from her wounds. The latter for which I would not waste my time or our resources.”
“Sounds like there is only really one choice, then,” I said. Ravi shrugged her shoulders and stared at me, waiting for my answer.
“Put her to sleep,” I said. Ravi nodded and without hesitation, she was off to do the deed.
* * *
Phil sat on the wooden step just outside of the trailer where he and Brian kept the other raider they found wounded in the aftermath. He dragged on a cigarette and I noticed his hands were scratched and dotted with patches of dried blood.
“Everything okay here?” I asked.
Taking a last drag on the cigarette, he stood up and crushed the rest of the smoke beneath his boot. He blew out smoke, shook his head and said, “We didn’t get much. Your brother’s having one more go at him. I just…needed some air.”
I had no idea what my brother had done, but I knew Phil was thinking about Comedian. In retrospect, I should have considered that before leaving Brian and Phil together. Hopefully, this wouldn’t open the wound between these two even further now that Phil got a first-hand look at my brother’s handiwork.
Squeezing his shoulder, I said, “Well, I got what we need, so let me stop this. Why don’t you send someone down to move this guy to triage and meet me back here. We need a plan and we need to move quickly before we lose any more time.
“I’m on it,” Phil said and jogged off in the direction of the triage tent.
I knocked on the door, opened it, and stuck my head inside. “I need you,” I said, and then ducked back outside.
Brian exited a few seconds later. Winded, he said, “What, dude? I’m still working on him.”
“We’re done here. I got what we need and we’re going to move out soon.”
“What about this guy?”
“Leave him. Phil is sending some folks to take him to triage.”
“We’re just going to let him get patched up…use our resources…and then what?”
“I’m not worried about ‘then what’ right now. We can worry about that when we get Kat back.”
Brian came down the wooden steps, I thought to argue more, but instead he said, “If we don’t get Kat back, that fucker is mine.”
I stared at him for a moment, then said, “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. I can’t lose Kat. Not now, not like this.”
The hardness I saw in his eyes softened and he put his arm around me. “Ignore what I just said. We’re getting her back for sure, dude. You know when I’m mad I just say shit. You know, heat of the shit.”
I nodded and stood there, under my brother’s wing. I felt like I was young again, just me and my big brother against the world, and the world had nothing on us.
“So what did the bitch spill? Where did they take Kat?”
I had planned to wait until Phil was back, but it wasn’t much, so I told him what I learned. He did not ask about how I got her to talk and I certainly didn’t volunteer the information.
When I was done, he thought for a moment, then dug a smoke out of his dwindling pack. As he lit it, he looked at me and said, “I think we need to do this alone. If they’re a small group, like she said, and we go rolling in with the Calvary, who knows what might happen. No, we can’t risk that. We need to go in quietly—”
“Like ninjas,” I interrupted.
My brother clapped me on the back hard enough to make me cough. He laughed and said, “Yes, like fucking ninjas, dude. Slice and dice and slip out the back door with Kat. Enough said.”
And maybe we would be enough, but what if we weren’t? What if we went in alone and we were overwhelmed? I had no idea why they had taken Kat—they obviously wanted her for a reason, perhaps to bargain with—but if we went in there and were captured or killed, that might only anger them and they might end up killing Kat, too.
When Phil arrived a few minutes later, he had two large men and Sam in tow. As it turned out, the two men came to transport the wounded man back to triage. Sam, on the other hand, insisted she be part of the rescue party. I saw in my brother’s eyes that he had no desire to try to talk her down. Words would be futile. Phil also insisted he would join us. The group was still small enough that we could move easily without detection, but also with back up, if needed.
It took about half hour to get our gear together. Brian and I would ride our horses while Sam and Phil followed on a Kawasaki motorcycle. It was one of the few vehicles that still had fuel and it was small enough to maneuver and hide. Armed and dangerous, we left Randall Oaks and headed down the road to Kappy’s, a place for which I had memories both fond and melancholy.
Chapter 6
No Quarter
My brother a
nd I rode on the two horses, our ears filled with the sound of hooves against pavement, and the cold air stinging our faces and filling our lungs. With his hair blowing in the wind, Brian looked like the typical hero on the cover of any cheesy romance novel. The wide grin that spread across his face both surprised and unnerved me. I had not seen him this happy in a long time. But that grin made him look like the Joker, intent on evil and mayhem.
Behind us, Phil and Sam travelled together on the Kawasaki. Sam was behind the bars driving while Phil rode bitch. When I glanced behind, I could see their silhouette against the setting sun. I would not have traded places with Phil for anything. Although I never had the pleasure of riding with Sam, I’d heard stories about her fearlessness on the two-wheel death machine. To her credit, though, she had never spilled, but all the same, I was happy sitting astride this strong horse.
After ten minutes of hard riding, I pulled up on the reins and came to a halt about a quarter mile from Kappy’s at a point where the road came to a natural bend, hiding us from view should sentries be posted around the building. Here we would leave our horses and motorcycle, and then make our way up the incline where we would have a vantage point overlooking a small creek that Kappy’s backed up against.
I dismounted my horse and led him to the guardrail where I tied his rein and Brian followed my lead. Sam and Phil coasted silently to a stop beside us. As soon as the bike halted, Sam swung herself off and engaged the kickstand. Phil also couldn’t get off the bike fast enough. He hopped off the back and bent over with his hands on his knees. He took a few deep breaths before standing and readjusting the rifle slung across his back.
“I’m walking back,” he said.
Ignoring him, Sam took off her helmet and dropped it onto one of the handlebars. She stomped up to me and demanded, “Why are we stopping? We need to get to Kat right now.”
“Kappy’s is just beyond this incline,” I explained. “We have to go the rest of the way on foot or risk being spotted. We don’t know what we’re walking into and we need the element of surprise.”