“Colin, you coming?” Kennedy called out to him.
He grabbed his sleeping pad.
“You won’t be needing that,” Mitch said, waiting for him. “We got enough beds and couches for all of y’all.”
The two-story farmhouse was well-lit and welcoming. Laughter and chatter could be heard from the driveway.
“How do you guys keep the zombies out?” Colin asked Mitch as they stepped onto the wrap-around porch. There was a swing and four rocking chairs covered in crunchy leaves, unused since the weather had gotten cold.
“We have a decent fence surrounding the ranch, mainly to protect the cattle. The rotters are usually too dumb to get past it. We’ll find them tangled up in the barbed wire later. And someone regularly walks the perimeter, making sure there are no weaknesses in the fence or any rotters that snuck through. Came out in the morning a couple of times and found them feasting on our heffers.” Mitch rested his hand on the doorknob. The others were already inside, cheerfully catching up with Mitch’s family. “We do the best we can out here. Even though we are pretty secluded, it ain’t easy as the property is so large. Passed down from my grandfather. Sometimes they get past the fences, but not one—not one—ever got all the way to the house. And as long as I’m living, they never will.”
Mitch opened the door and gestured for Colin to go ahead of him.
Kennedy was standing by the kitchen table and smiled at him when he came in. To his surprise, Johnny B. was at the stove, helping two women with a roast chicken. He spooned the juices and spices from the pan over the top of the chicken.
“Damn, Margaret. You sure know the best way to a man’s heart,” he told the older woman, pulling a morsel of chicken off and popping it into his mouth.
Mitch wagged his finger at him. “Now don’t you go tryin’ to steal my wife!”
“Or go eating all the chicken!” Kennedy added.
Margaret blushed and pushed some stray hairs into a bun. “Who’s the handsome stranger?” she asked her husband before handing the younger woman a basket with rolls. “Jenny, put these on the table along with the butter.”
“Colin,” the Scotsman said politely, reaching forward to shake her hand. His mouth watered as the delicious aroma from the basket wafted past his nostrils, and he licked his dry lips involuntarily. “You have bread and butter?”
Jenny nodded with a dimpled smile, freckles sprinkled across her nose. “Don’t you?”
Colin shook his head. He’d been eating granola bars and canned goods for as long as he could remember since leaving Haven and the others. His kilt had never been so loose before.
“Where’s that nice accent from?” Margaret inquired.
“Scotland, my lady,” he answered.
“How wonderful!” Margaret responded enthusiastically. “Welcome to the U.S.! Wish you were seeing it under better circumstances.” She crumpled a napkin in her hand and frowned, but her face brightened when several more of the family came in to join them. They all introduced themselves to Colin and gathered around the big dining room table.
“Let’s all say grace,” Mitch said, taking a seat at the head of the table and reaching for Margaret and Kennedy’s hands who sat on either side of him. Colin sat beside the redhead, awkwardly holding her hand. He had never been a praying man and watched as the others bowed their heads and closed their eyes before doing the same himself.
“Lord, we thank you for the bounty you’ve provided us. We thank the hands that prepared it. We thank you for family and for friends, old and new.” Colin felt Kennedy squeeze his hand at this. “We ask that you rid the earth of this dark pestilence. Protect us, keep us from harm, deliver us from evil. To thine be the glory. Amen.”
“Amen,” Colin found himself repeating. He let go of Kennedy’s hand.
She handed him a basket covered in a checkered cloth. “Have a roll. No one makes ‘em like Margaret.”
Colin cut a sliver of butter with his knife and spread it on the roll. The flaky golden crust melted in his mouth, and he closed his eyes, savoring each bite.
Margaret came around and added a couple of slices of chicken to his plate.
“Thank you, ma’am,” Colin told her. “This is the best food I’ve had in a long time.”
“Just you wait until dessert,” Mitch said. “We have some of the freshest, plumpest, sweetest blueberries you’ll ever taste. Jenny and Bea—my two girls—pick ‘em and then make cobblers. Now granted we don’t have sugar or other luxuries like that, but those blueberries are sweet enough on their own.”
“Blueberry cobbler is my favorite,” Kennedy declared, holding her fork up. “Girls, we can’t wait.”
“You sure you don’t want to come back with us?” Grady asked them.
“Hell no,” Mitch replied. “Colin here is saying you guys don’t have bread and butter. Don’t sound too good to me.”
“Well,” Kennedy explained, “Colin is new to our group. He hasn’t been to the camp yet.”
Colin raised a brow at her. “So you do have bread and butter.”
Kennedy took another bite of chicken and smiled smugly. “We got something better.” She winked at him.
Mitch’s expression suddenly turned serious. “Heard something interesting the other day.”
The way he said it made Kennedy pause, her food instantly forgotten.
“You know I’ve got a few friends down the road. Farmers, like me, but on a smaller scale. They’re saying they heard on the ol’ HAM radio they might’ve found a cure.”
Kennedy’s group gawked at him all at once.
“What do you mean?” Kennedy managed first.
“HAM radio?” Colin followed.
After calmly wiping his mouth with a napkin, Mitch placed it on his plate. “A HAM radio,” he began patiently, addressing Colin, “is the best way to communicate when everything goes to hell. Great range if you have a good transmitter. You just need a license, but I got mine years ago before all this shit went down. Although I guess a license ain’t necessary nowadays.” He turned to Kennedy. “Don’t know how much truth there is to it. Might just be rumors, but I trust the folks I heard it from. They’re saying there’s a guy up north in West Virginia who found a cure.”
“Could be a trap,” Johnny B. murmured as he took another helping of chicken and a roll. “Ain’t no way they found a cure.”
Colin pensively shoved some crumbs around on his placemat. “Is he saying he can bring people back? After they’ve turned?” His thoughts immediately went to his father, and he felt a burst of hope.
Shrugging, Mitch sighed and lifted his hands. “Guess anything’s possible with the good Lord’s mercy and grace. Next time I see my friend, I’ll ask. But he mentioned the broadcast was calling for families to bring loved ones who’d recently been infected, but hadn’t yet turned.”
Colin’s shoulders slumped, as if he’d been deflated of any remaining optimism.
Mitch shifted in his chair to face Kennedy. “Might be something worth lookin’ into if you can spare folks.”
Kennedy didn’t respond, knowing there was no one to spare at the moment.
Margaret reached out and touched Kennedy’s hand, breaking the silence. “Well, we just think so highly of what you and your boys are doing.”
Kennedy nodded appreciatively. “Thank you, Margaret.”
For the next two hours, they sat at the table laughing and carrying on, stuffing themselves until they felt constricted by their waistbands. By the time they finished eating dessert, there wasn’t one crumb left on the glass casserole dish.
Even though he laughed along with them, Colin wondered how they could stay so upbeat in times like these. Luckily for them, the Cannon family seemed to have evaded the brutality stemming from the outbreak.
Later that night, as Colin lay awake on a sofa in the den, reflecting on all he had lost in just a matter of months, he found himself saying a quick prayer, as foreign as it was to him, that Mitch and his family would continue to be spared so
that there would still be a few good people left in an otherwise miserable world.
They left the Cannon farmhouse early the next morning, Kennedy, Colin, and Johnny B. in the pick-up, and Grady and Jackson in the tanker truck.
Margaret had packed them breakfast, a meal of bacon, biscuits, a small jar of blueberry jam, hard-boiled eggs, and a glass jug of milk.
Colin sat in the back by himself, enjoying the extra space to stretch out and savor the feast before him before it was back to granola bars and canned food.
Suddenly the truck jostled about, causing the spread of bacon and biscuits Colin had carefully laid out on a napkin beside him to bounce off and land on the floor mat, and the hard-boiled egg to roll underneath the seat in front of him. “Hey!” he yelled at Johnny B. “Watch where you’re going!” He tried to pick up the remnants of his breakfast, but they were covered in dirt.
When he felt the truck come to a complete stop, he looked around in bewilderment. “I don’t get it. I thought you said you had a camp or something,” he grumbled, disappointed. All he saw was forest and endless trees.
Kennedy smirked. “Eyes to the front, Braveheart.”
Colin squinted and leaned forward to get a better view through the windshield.
“Well, I’ll be damned.”
Chapter Seven
Colin had never seen anything like it before.
A behemoth train sat idly on the tracks, glimmering like a shiny silver snake in the sunlight.
It wasn’t just a camp.
It was salvation on wheels.
“I’d say it’s a little better than tents and gardening grannies, wouldn’t you?” Her green eyes were bright with amusement.
Craning his neck so he could see it all, he finally turned to her, mouth agape.
She shrugged nonchalantly, but she couldn’t conceal the pride in her voice. “We do this pretty regularly actually. One of our folks here mapped out some locations not too far from the tracks to find large quantities of fuel. It’s the same process each time we stop—we have our little tanker truck that we keep parked close to the tracks and get the diesel, hop into the vehicle we normally leave at each stop and snag some supplies, come back to the train, and move on to the next place. The goal is to keep moving, to never stay too long at any particular stop. The rotters can’t touch us and it allows us a lot of freedom of movement.” When Colin didn’t respond, she gave him a lopsided grin. “You can pick your jaw up off the ground now.”
“Here I was thinking you were just going to lead me somewhere and take advantage of me,” he quipped.
“Who said I wasn’t?” She laughed when his eyes went wide.
When they got out of the truck, Colin slowly walked up to the train with cautious steps as though his mind was playing tricks on him, and there was really no train at all, like a mirage in the middle of a desert. “I still can’t believe this beast is real. Where did you find it?”
“That’s a story for another day.” She gestured over to several people headed in their direction. “Now for the fun part. Roll up your sleeves and hold up your skirt. Time to load her up with what we found. As good as she is about keeping us safe, you can hear her from a way off, so the rotters start congregating pretty fast when we stop.” She pointed to the top of the train where a handful of men were pacing back and forth with unusually long spears in their hands. A couple of them held up binoculars, shifting from one vantage point to another.
He looked back at Kennedy and was stunned to see she had her gun pointed at him.
Colin retreated in shock.
When she pulled the trigger, he almost pissed himself.
He shut his eyes, preparing to feel the hot lead penetrate his body and slice up his insides. The pain never came, and he opened one eye carefully. Kennedy was calmly checking the area. Whirling around, he saw a zombie sprawled out behind him.
“You’re welcome,” she said.
“Your guards suck,” Colin told her, slightly embarrassed. He should have heard the zombie creeping up from the woods, but he was too busy ogling the train. He side-stepped over to Kennedy, making sure his ankles were out of reach from the fallen zombie. It looked dead dead, but one could never be too careful. Her earlier advice about the crawling ankle biters hadn’t been forgotten.
She glanced at him. “I thought you were a ‘seasoned’ survivor.” She made air quotes with her fingers.
“Sorry, I was a little busy staring at your apocalypse train.” He counted the number of cars it hauled. “How much fuel does this thing need? I feel like you’d constantly be filling it up.”
“A hell of a lot, that’s how much. The way we were doing it before was really inefficient. We would have to hotwire a bunch of pick-up trucks and fill them up with big containers of fuel. With a train this big, we’d sometimes have to make multiple runs back and forth. It got risky, especially with so few actually trained to fight rotters and not many to stay back and guard the train. But things are changing for the better.”
“How so?” Colin asked.
“We’ve been on the hunt for a tanker truck for a long time. We’ve seen some here and there, but it wasn’t until we got to the refinery that we found one.” Colin ran his hand along the steel and bits of fading paint of the locomotive as she spoke. “We keep it parked in the woods, pretty well-hidden, and just grab it when we stop here. Then we don’t have to hotwire pick-ups and make a bunch of trips to fuel this baby. We can send a team in the tanker to get fuel, and then another team to get supplies—cuts down on time and manpower ten-fold. I’m hoping to triple the number of runners I have now so that Grady, Jackson, and Johnny don’t have to go out every time. I need them here, too. Hardly anyone on the train has had defense training. If we had more space and the means to do so, I’d love to start teaching them.” She sighed. “But this is where we are at right now, and we are going to make the best of it.”
He admired her optimism. Their eyes met, and Kennedy gave him a small smile.
She started walking back to the train, then shot him a look over her shoulder.
“I hope you’ll join us for good. We could use someone like you.”
“Hey. Drop what you’re doing, and come over. I want to give you something,” Kennedy called out as they hauled in the last of the supplies from the truck. A couple of passengers were sorting through everything as they brought each load to one of the cars near the front.
Colin wiped the sweat from his brow, leaving a long smear of dirt along his forehead. His clothes were filthy, and he was certain he reeked to high heaven. But the last hour had been good for him. He was so focused on the work that he didn’t have time to think about much else.
“Give me what?” he asked her.
“The grand tour. You’ve earned it.” She gestured for him to follow her to an eight-foot ladder on the side of the first car.
He looked at her questioningly.
“Too tired?”
Grunting, he grabbed ahold of the ladder and made his way up. “If I can get up that blasted billboard, I can do just about anything.”
“As long as you have your lucky skirt on,” Johnny B. interjected, handing Colin’s crowbar up to him.
“For heaven’s sake, it’s a kilt, man,” he insisted, snatching his weapon from the Marine and knowing it was futile to protest.
Once he was on the fourth step, he crossed over onto a narrow corridor that led to a room with more switches and gauges than he could count. An older man, likely in his late sixties, had a flashlight in his mouth and was bent over gadgets and gears Colin had never seen before.
“Afternoon, Tucker. I hope we aren’t disturbing you.”
The man looked up and stood, nodding to Kennedy when she came in. “No, ma’am. Just checking on the circuits to make sure she’s ready for our next adventure.”
“Colin, meet Tucker, our resident engineer.”
The man wiped his palms on a dirty rag hanging from his belt and shook the Scotsman’s hand firmly, genuinely. “Welcome
aboard, Colin. We’re glad to have ya.” The skin around his eyes crinkled deeply as he grinned at him, lines from years of laughing and living a full, happy life. Somehow in this new world riddled with sadness, this man was able to channel the joy from his old life and reflect it to others. Colin realized he liked Tucker immediately.
“How’s about a tour for the newcomer, sir?” Kennedy asked him.
Tucker took his baseball cap off his head and held it with both hands, his thin, gray hair matted down with sweat. “Anything for you, ma’am. Well,” he began, “this here is where I spend most of my time. You can see all the buttons and levers and such. Each one does something unique to keep her running.”
Colin studied the colorful buttons on the control panel. “As a kid, I always wanted to sound the horn.”
Tucker chuckled. “That’s right, son. Nothing like the sound of a train comin’ down the tracks. But unfortunately, I can’t let ya do it. It’s pretty loud and attracts lots of attention, ‘specially from our undead friends so we just use it in case of an emergency.” Colin nodded in understanding. “Everyone who lives on this train knows if they hear the horn, there’s trouble. Means time to get into lockdown mode.” Tucker motioned to the entry way of the car. “The horn is hardly the best part of the train though. Come on, son; I’ll show you around.”
Colin didn’t want to appear too interested, but the kid in him was absolutely ecstatic. Before his parents divorced, they would spend two weeks each summer in France, Switzerland, and Italy, hopping from country to country by train. While his mother couldn’t stand being cooped up in such restricted quarters, he and his father would explore every nook and cranny. On one trip, his father became friends with the conductor who graciously offered to introduce Colin to the engineer. Much to his delight, he’d even let Colin take over the controls for a couple of minutes. It was one of his favorite memories from his childhood.
The fact that Kennedy had managed to wrangle a home for so many people from an actual train scored her some major bonus points.
The Good, The Dead & The Lawless (Book 2): The Hell That Follows Page 8