The crackling of a walkie-talkie came next. “Don’t lose her. I’m on my way.”
Haven stiffened immediately at the sound of the eerily familiar voice.
“Copy that.”
“Won’t be hard to find them in this fucking ghost town,” another voice stated, his footsteps growing closer to the Jeep with each word.
Haven’s stomach somersaulted when she tried to remember if Houston had locked the doors of the Jeep.
“Probably inside looking for supplies. Between our stash and theirs, the boss will be real pleased.”
Someone jostled the passenger side door handles, and a shadow fell across the blanket as the stranger blocked out the sunlight coming in from the window.
“Hey, grab my crowbar. There’s good shit in here.”
Just as he said the words, the door to the pharmacy opened.
Houston and Brett came out, guns raised and aimed at the four men surrounding the Jeep.
“Stop right there,” Houston commanded, keeping his voice level.
The men all turned around at once.
One wore a gray hoodie and sunglasses and swung his crossbow up at them.
Another one, a Hispanic man in his early twenties, wearing a bulletproof vest and a camouflage jacket held up a shotgun.
The man beside them was dressed in baggy, dirty jeans with a skull t-shirt over a long-sleeve black turtleneck. His face was shrouded by a brown ski mask, but his eyes were still visible, angry and hardened.
The last one had facial hair that was surprisingly well-groomed into a goatee. He also wore aviator sunglasses and a black baseball cap. Houston didn’t like the way he smiled at them.
Two of them were younger than Brett; the other two were Houston’s age or older.
“How are you folks doing on this fine December morning?” the man with the goatee asked, his voice smooth and pleasant.
Houston kept his gun trained on him. “That’s our shit. Leave it alone.”
The man’s smile faltered for just a moment, and he ran his hand over the hood of the Jeep. “Oh, this belongs to you?”
It took every ounce of self-control in Brett not to roll his eyes. “Don’t play dumb. You saw us in it earlier.”
The guy with the crossbow sucked his teeth. “I don’t think that’s true. The folks we saw earlier had a woman with them. And a kid.” He grinned wide when he said the last word, revealing yellow teeth. “I don’t see either of them with you. Far as we know, you’re a lying sack of shit.”
Brett almost lunged at him, but Houston put a hand to his chest. “That’s ours, and you know it!”
The other men, except for the one with the goatee, started laughing.
“You’ve got balls, kid,” the man with the crossbow chortled, but stopped suddenly. “You’d better shut the fuck up before I cut them off and shove them down your throat.”
Brett’s eyes grew wide, unable to hide his horrified expression.
The man with the goatee took off his sunglasses and held the lenses up to the sun before using the bottom of his shirt to wipe them clean. “Come on now. Can’t we all be friends? We have a pretty big camp not far from here run by a real nice guy, a native from around these parts. Likes to keep people safe. Why don’t you follow us back? Let a brother help you out. My name is Cliff.” He extended his hand, but when neither Brett nor Houston did the same, he retracted it and looked around them. “Say, did you have a woman and kid with you? Or is Jeffrey over there full of shit?”
“He’s full of shit,” Houston responded, his tone cold and bereft of any humor. “Keep moving, and we won’t put bullets in your bellies and leave you for the zombies.”
Cliff tapped his fingers along the hood.
“You heard him!” Brett shouted in agitation. “Get the hell out of here!”
Lifting his hands defensively, Cliff backed toward the white truck. “Alright, take it easy. You heard them, boys. Let’s move on. We don’t need their Jeep anyways. Got all we need back at camp.”
“Not enough distractions,” one of the men muttered angrily, but not quietly enough for Houston to miss it.
Cliff ignored him and calmly smiled before turning and walking to the truck.
“Enjoy the apocalypse, gentlemen,” he told them, waving dismissively.
Brett curled his lip. “I should just shoot them right now,” he hissed at Houston.
“No. Let them go. They didn’t end up doing anything to us.”
Houston kept his gun on the men until the truck reversed out of the parking spot, Cliff’s eyes not leaving Houston’s. His fake smile had disappeared.
Shaking his head, Brett replied, “Something is off. He’s way too cocky to let us just walk away. He knows. He didn’t buy what we told him.” He swallowed hard. “It’s not safe to be a woman or a kid now. We have to protect them at all costs.”
Houston laid a hand on Brett’s shoulder. “You let me worry about that. I’m not going to let anything happen to any of you.”
As Brett went back to the store to retrieve their supplies, Houston turned and watched the white truck disappear over a hill.
Something in Cliff’s smile made him feel sick. It was a knowing smile, one devoid of kindness, one that hid secrets and horrors and promises of unspeakable things to come.
Staring at the gun in his hands, Houston wondered if he should have followed Brett’s advice and just shot Cliff and his men right there.
“Hey,” Kennedy said, standing at the entrance of the observation car with a tray of food in her hands.
Colin grinned when he saw her, a little shyly as he remembered their last encounter at the shower stall, then sat back on his heels and wiped the sweat from his forehead with a dirty hand.
She walked in slowly, looking around the car at the small garden Colin had built. The seedlings he’d planted in the troughs were already starting to sprout, little green clusters standing out starkly against the dark soil.
“Wow,” she remarked. “I’m really impressed.”
He waved her off. “Nah, it’s nothing really.”
“You’ve been putting in a lot of hours here, but you can take breaks for meals, ya know.”
She handed him the tray, and he took it from her and set it aside.
“Well, it keeps me busy. I like the work.”
“You’ve got to be hungry.”
“Aye,” he agreed. “I am. But I want to finish up here. Then I’ll eat.”
She bent down and touched the tomato plants they’d removed from the pots and re-planted, fingering the tiny green tomatoes growing from them.
“This is amazing.” She paused and turned to him. “Would you mind if I joined you for a bit?”
He motioned for her to sit down beside him. When he did, she rolled up her sleeves.
“I don’t have a green thumb though, not like you anyways. Don’t judge me,” she prefaced.
“Hell, Red, I don’t even know what I’m doing.” He gestured to the little green plants in front of them. “See these? I planted the seeds too close together when I started, and now that they’re growing, I can tell I need to space them out more.”
She studied them. “So you’re just going to pull them up?”
He nodded and handed her a trowel. “That’s the plan.”
Smiling, she started gently digging around the plants. “And here I was thinking you were a gardener in your former life.”
He chuckled. “Hardly.”
She pulled out the first one, carefully keeping the roots from tearing, and placed it between them. “Speaking of, what did you do before all this?”
He dug another out with his hands, and she couldn’t help but glance at him when he leaned forward, his shirt gapping enough that she could see his chest, see the muscles tense as he moved.
“I was a bartender,” he answered. “Moved around a bunch. It was a job I could pick up wherever I was, easy money.”
“I bet you have some interesting stories.”
He grunted.
“Not as good as yours, I’m sure.”
“Yeah, I don’t know if you’d call them ‘good.’ But they’re definitely memorable.” She sank her fingertips into the soil, savoring the coolness of it. It had been a long day, and she was exhausted, but as she gardened beside Colin, she felt the tightness in her neck and shoulders gradually fade away. “This is actually pretty relaxing work.”
“Aye.” He was surprised he liked it as much as he did. A year ago, the old Colin would have laughed at him.
“And your dad, what did he do?”
She immediately noticed his expression fall, but he quickly recovered.
“He worked airport security in Atlanta,” he replied nonchalantly.
Kennedy removed another plant and dusted her hands off on her cargo pants. “That’s a mighty long way from Scotland.”
“My parents divorced, and he came here for a fresh start. I hadn’t seen him in a while. Finally decided to pay him a visit.” He dug into the soil vigorously. “I should have done it sooner.”
“Better late than never,” she encouraged.
“Yeah. He was a good man. Neither my mum nor I deserved him.” Colin rubbed his forearm across his face, seemingly wiping away sweat, but Kennedy could feel the emotion the topic elicited emanating from him.
She wasn’t sure if she should change the subject, but decided against it, sensing he wanted to talk. “I see where you get it from then.”
“You didn’t know me back then, Red. I don’t think you’d have liked me. Maybe you wouldn’t have even wanted me on the train.” She started to protest. “Really.”
“Come on,” she said, nudging him lightly with her shoulder. “You couldn’t have been that bad.”
Colin shrugged. “I wasn’t bad; it’s just that I wasn’t… great either.” He smiled ruefully. “It’s crazy that it takes a bloody zombie apocalypse to make you turn the microscope on yourself. How being alone with no one else left, being your only companion on the whole planet… how sometimes it forces you to realize you don’t really like your own company all that much. You don’t like that person looking back at you in the mirror.”
Kennedy took the trowel and made a hole a few inches deep.
“I was just out for myself my whole life, doing what made me happy, what felt right in the moment. I didn’t really care about anyone else. I had all this bottled up anger about my parents, and I just cut them off and went out on my own. I partied hard. Kept me from thinking about my past mistakes, the mistakes I was still making, the mistakes I was sure to repeat in the future.”
“We all make mistakes in life,” she offered, but inwardly, she was thinking about her brother and his family. How she could have done something… anything… to try to save them.
“I have a lot of regrets,” he said, so quietly she hardly heard him.
“I do, too,” she replied, and she sat back on the ground, the trowel still in her hand. “With my family. I was with them when it happened. And I froze.”
He looked at her with understanding, then quickly went back to digging. “I’m sorry about the other day, by the way. With the shower,” he apologized, his cheeks flushing.
She cleared her throat. “That was my fault. I should have knocked.”
The somberness in his features disappeared and was replaced with humor. “You know what they say about public speaking, how you should just imagine everyone in the room naked?”
Kennedy scrunched her eyes in confusion. “I think you’re supposed to just imagine them in their underwear, but go on.”
“Well,” he continued, “whatever it is, I guess we can safely say that we’ve been there, done that.”
They both laughed, and she turned to him. “I’m glad you’re here, Colin,” she said with sincerity.
“Me, too.”
Bark. Bark. Bark.
Haven shifted in her bed, sighing softly as she turned over.
It was still dark outside. They’d gone back to the farmhouse to retrieve Colin’s sword just as the sun dipped below the horizon, and since it was too late to start the journey to West Virginia, they decided to spend one more night and leave in the morning.
Bark. Bark. Bark.
She moved again and groaned. Texaco normally didn’t wake them up to be let out when it was still dark.
Suddenly, the barks were cut off by a quick whimper of pain.
Haven’s eyes flew open.
Something wasn’t right. Her body responded slowly, groggily, but she sat up in bed and listened.
“Houston?” she called out.
He was on guard duty that night. It had been her turn, but he refused to let her take the shift, insisting she get enough rest for the journey ahead.
When she didn’t hear a response, she swung her feet over the side of the bed.
Her eyelids were still heavy with sleep as she went down the stairs.
“Houston,” she said again. No response. She shivered and wrapped her arms around herself, wishing she was wearing more than just an oversized t-shirt and underwear.
Haven looked in the kitchen, but the room was dark and empty. She went into the living room, yelping when she stepped on Texaco’s rawhide bone.
She frowned and examined her foot, hoping the sharpness of the dog’s treat hadn’t broken skin.
Glancing around, unease began to settle into her heart.
Where was Tex?
She was about to grab her jacket and pants and go look for Houston outside when bright lights filled the windows of the house.
Haven’s hand fell to her hip, grasping for the firearm that wasn’t there.
She scurried over to one of the windows, careful to stay out of sight. Just as she edged forward to peer out of the corner of one, something large crashed through the glass.
Her skin prickled, goosebumps popping up along her arms.
The black and white fur was unmistakable.
Texaco’s limp body lay on the living room floor before her.
Haven’s hand clasped over her mouth, barely muffling her scream as her eyes filled with tears.
Even though something evil and horrible waited outside, Haven ran toward the pup and collapsed beside its unmoving body.
The sweet, forever loyal dog who gave the ultimate sacrifice to warn them of danger, was dead.
“Haven!” a voice boomed.
Haven’s head lifted, tears streaming down her face as she sat in the center of the living room cradling their beloved pet, not caring that she was fully in view, illuminated by the headlights shining into the house.
She knew the voice. She had recognized it over the two-way radio that morning when his men said they’d found her.
Cade.
“Haven?” This time, the voice was small and scared.
Haven turned around and swallowed hard. Mark stood at the base of the stairs, a horrified expression on his face. She tried to block Tex from his view, but he strained to see around her. When he noticed the animal in her arms, his eyes rimmed with tears, and a silent sob escaped him.
“Haven!” Cade screamed again.
Gently placing Tex’s head on the carpet, she rose to her feet and ran to Mark, grabbing him before she raced up the stairs.
Brett was just coming out of his room, his hair disheveled and his lids half-closed. “What’s going on?”
“They found us,” she said as she pulled on her jacket, jeans, and boots. She reached for her pistol and extra magazines.
Brett looked to Haven then Mark, taking in the boy’s tears.
“What happened? Where’s Houston?” he asked, immediately awake.
“I don’t know.” She tried to stay calm, but she was very afraid for Houston. Cade was here to kill.
Brett was fully dressed moments later, and the two of them put Mark between them as they ran downstairs.
Just as they made it to the bottom, a foul odor hit their nostrils. Several shadows bobbed up and down in the kitchen and living room, a writhing blanket of darkness moving as one unit t
oward them.
Mark clutched his backpack, his hands quivering. “We can’t go out there. There are too many.”
“Back door,” Haven directed.
Brett scooped up Mark and took off. The boy clung to his shoulders, eyes wide as the monsters rumbled through the house, gray arms outstretched as they moaned and wailed in hunger.
Haven stayed a few feet behind to protect them, acting as a barrier between her family and the zombies.
The house was dark aside from the moonlight that glimmered through the windows. A coat rack in the hallway leading to the back door cast terrifying shadows, and she fired at it once, until she realized what it was and briefly cursed herself for wasting precious ammunition.
She could hear scraping against metal and saw Brett fumbling with the old lock on the back door, frustratingly jiggling a skeleton key into the rusted opening.
Looking around for something to bottleneck the flow of zombies hot on their trail, she grabbed the sharp corners of a wooden table and slid it sideways along the carpet, then flipped over chairs while she was at it to try to buy them a few more seconds.
The creatures slammed into the table with a loud thud, the table uncomfortably sliding forward closer to them, and they reached over one another to grab Haven, mouths wide and fingers clawed. Their numbers seemed to multiply at an alarming rate; the table would be no match for them. In seconds, the ones in the back started crawling over the ones pressed against the table. They stretched themselves over the wood surface until they clumsily tumbled to the ground in front of the chairs.
She felt a short-lived sense of relief when one of them struggled to get up only to have another zombie stomp down on its spine, impaling it on a chair leg. It flailed around angrily, arms waving at her. The other zombie crept forward with lengthy, heavy steps, smashing the fallen one’s stomach further down on the chair leg with a wet sucking noise. Haven fired at it without hesitation, but the bullet skimmed the zombie’s cheek instead.
“Open the damn door already!” she bellowed to Brett, taking aim to fire again.
“It’s stuck!” he yelled back. He started throwing his shoulder against the door, Mark doing the same beside him with less efficacy.
The Good, The Dead & The Lawless (Book 2): The Hell That Follows Page 13