by Kirk Allmond
I was angry. I was angry at myself for being careless and overconfident. I was angry at these people. I didn’t see a single slow zombie in the crowd, and I got the feeling from watching them that these were humans. I saw several of them eating out of cans. I’d never seen a zombie eat anything other than people. There may have been one or two smart zombies driving them, I didn’t have enough intel to know for sure. Max was my only sure-fire way of knowing, and I certainly wasn’t going to bring any of them to him.
I searched below me and saw no sign of John’s corpse. I crawled slowly around the entire roof, searching with the night vision scope, and saw nothing. I felt reasonably sure that John had escaped, there were signs of explosions down there, broken trees, etc. There were still corpses down there. I counted fifty-five. I’d done the math; he only had fifty-one bullets. That means he had on several occasions killed more than one person with a bullet. ‘What’s better than never missing your target? Being able to hit two targets with one bullet. Only John,’ I thought to myself.
Feeling relatively certain that John had escaped, I set up the Barrett a few feet back from the edge of the roof, and settled in to watch for my rescue party, or to wait for this crew to find I’d escaped from my room. I wondered who they were, and what they were doing. I wondered if, when the time came, I could hit anything with this monster rifle. I could see people talking down there. I wished I had super hearing. Or super anything for that matter.
My timing was impeccable; I’d been set up for less than thirty minutes when I saw via night vision, John and Leo coming up the trail.
17. Retribution
I could see Leo and John in the scope as they crouched down about a hundred yards back from where John and I had stopped. Out of nowhere I saw three forms appear behind them. They must have been hiding in holes or underbrush for cover, which explains how they’d gotten the drop on us before. The three figures crept through the sparse underbrush towards my two friends, guns outstretched. I slowly inhaled three times before exhaling in a long, smooth breath, and squeezed the trigger on the monster .50 caliber rifle. It bucked against my shoulder, but the rifle itself absorbed most of the recoil. Leo shot off in a green streak at the crack of the rifle. The ghosting of the night vision screen actually made it easier to follow her; she left a trail of green behind her. A shift of the barrel to the left, breathe, squeeze, two down. At my second shot, John burst forward with a pistol in each hand, firing at everything that moved. He was wearing a dark vest against a lighter colored shirt; it looked like my tactical vest.
After my first shot, many of the enemy combatants turned to look for me, but when John started firing, they all spun around looking at the more direct threat. Knowing he would be shooting those closest to him, I dropped the barrel and started firing on the men furthest from John. I burned through my remaining nine shots in the magazine with nine kills.
‘I’m sure John could have taken twelve with nine bullets,’ I thought to myself, as I manually fed a shell into the bolt. I wished I’d been able to find several magazines, but even with single shots, it was still fast and efficient. Breathe, squeeze, bolt, shell, bolt, breathe. I got into a routine; I was a machine taking out the trash. For every one of them I killed, John was killing three. I stopped shooting, and started watching Leo, to make sure none could sneak up on her. Not that that was possible, but three months ago, someone moving so fast you couldn’t see them wasn’t possible either.
There was a small group on the far side of the killing zone, out of John’s line of fire; Leo was heading towards them, while he crouched down reloading magazines. I stood up and yelled, “Leave a couple alive!” When I stood up, on the opposite side of the field, a lone figure stood up out of a hole, raised a rifle and pulled the trigger. Leo and John both looked up at me right as the bullet hit me in the left shoulder, spinning me around and throwing me to the ground. I felt like I’d been hit in the chest by a sledge hammer. I fell with my head hanging off the edge of the roof, and laid there trying to catch my breath. It was as if someone had parked a car on my chest.
Leo became a dervish. She was a green blur of death. Her kukri in her hand, baton in the other, at one point she had three heads removed before the first one hit the ground. She was twisting and whirling and diving and rolling. She was graceful death. She was a river of green flowing between the men who were now running in a panic. Every now and then, almost in slow motion, one of them would stop and raise a gun. None of them ever got their rifles to their shoulders. Her machete hit the first three at the base of the skull; she drove her baton into the eye of another one. Leo switched mid swing from the kukri to the baton, clubbing the final two into unconsciousness.
The array of death and destruction was amazing. It brought to mind post battle scenes from movies about the Revolutionary War. Dead men lay in piles and singles. The difference was, there were no wounded. With the exception of the two unconscious combatants, every one of them was dead from either a hole in their head, or lack of a head. Following the fight, the silence was amazing. The entire fight took less than two minutes.
The second the last corpse fell, Leo ran around the building. I think she must have jumped up onto the dumpster, and then to the roof, because in no time she was at my side. “You dumb, overconfident, son of a bitch you’d better not be dead!” She yelled at me. I groaned as she rolled me over to let her know I was alive. “Hurts like hell!” I said with a smile as her face, red with anger at my stupidity
“Tookes, if you die, I’ll kill you!”
“Leo, given that we’re in the middle of the zombie apocalypse, I hope you will. Sit me up, I can walk,” I said. “But be careful!”
She sat me up, and moved around to my back. “Did it go through?” I asked when I could catch my breath. The pain was excruciating if I moved any part of my upper body. “I think my collar bone is broken.”
“Clean through. Pretty ugly back here, you’re going to be laid up for weeks, you big dummy. We have to get you off the roof and get the bleeding stopped. This is going to require some pretty serious stitching, and I’m not very qualified.”
“It’s going to have to be you or John,” I said, teeth clenched. “I’d rather it was you. At least you could do it quickly.” I grinned.
“Oh, Leo, I got you a backpack; you’re going to have to carry it for me though. And don’t forget my new rifle please!!”
I walked over to the access door, and wondered how in God’s name I was going to get down the ladder. I reached for the key before remembering I’d been shot. Moving my arm was a very bad idea.
“Leo. The key to the door is in my pocket. I can’t reach it; you’re going to have to get it.”
“Oh sure,” she said. “I have to do all the work,” she said as she reached into my pocket and retrieved the keys.
She put the pink camo backpack on her shoulders and picked up the Barrett. ”My God this thing is heavy.”
Clutching my shirt with my bad arm, I hobbled down the ladder with my other hand. I could barely walk. My back was shooting stabbing pain down my spine, my bullet wound was on fire, and my collar bone was poking the meat of my chest.
“Let's go get Sammie and meet my remaining captors,” I said. I felt like I was going to die at any moment. The only thing keeping me going was anger at whomever or whatever was behind this. There were not many humans left. Killing any of them was senseless, forcing me and my friends to kill living humans made me angry. Very angry, but that was nothing compared to how angry I was that someone might have been building an army to come get Max.
Inside the gun shop I limped over to the counter and dug out a can of trigger zip ties for making guns safe. I wished I had a pair of pliers and a blowtorch, I was about to get medieval on some hillbilly ass.
18. Information
I stood up straight, grabbed the hem of my shirt to give my arm some support, and walked towards the two unconscious figures on the ground, filled with righteous anger.
“Let’s get them in
side,” I said. “I don’t want to be out here in case there are more of them coming back.” Leo and John dragged the two inside, and set them up in a couple of chairs from the back room.
I smacked the first one across the face and yelled, “Wake up!” His head rolled to one side, and I slapped it back the other way as he started to come to.
“What’s your name, son?” I asked, my voice deadly cool. He was not bound, but I didn’t expect any trouble with Leo and John standing behind me.
“Butch,” he said.
“Butch. Tell me what was going on here.”
“They’ll kill me,” he said with a frightened look in his eyes.
“Butch. I’m going to kill you if you don’t tell me the truth. I may kill you by tying you to a tree along the road. Hopefully you’ll die of thirst before a zombie finds you.” Calm and cool, my only chance at getting the information I needed to keep Max safe was to be a bigger threat than the zombies that were controlling these humans. I’d spent the last several minutes wracking my brain trying to figure out what hold the zombies had over these people.
Leo stepped forward and put her hand on my good shoulder, and I shot her a look.
“Butch, tell me what’s going on,” I said coldly. “Why are you working for them?”
“They… They… They have my family.” he stuttered.
“Where? Where is your family?”
“At the high school in Culpeper. There are thirty or forty of them smart ones. The zed in charge is Watley. All the other zeds that can talk call him Mr. Watley.” he gushed.
“Butch, three of us took out your whole crew here. There are more of us, we can free your family, but you have to tell me what’s going on.” I said, softening my tone a bit.
“I don’t know nothin’. Alls I know is they said to come here and find some little kid, and tell them where he was, and they’d let me and my family go.”
“What was this kid’s name Butch, do you know? Do you have a description? How were you supposed to find him?”
“His name is Max. I don’t know what he looks like, ‘cept he’s blonde haired. One of them got a look at him somewhere, but he was in a silver truck and the window was all fogged, all he could tell was that he was blonde.”
With the front passenger side window of my truck shot out, there’s no way a back window could have been fogged. How could it have been fogged? Could that be what Max meant when he said he was hiding from them? I needed to have a talk with him, but I was so afraid of frightening him. He’d handled all of this so well, with maturity way beyond his years.
“When you found this ‘Max’ kid, what were you supposed to do?”
“You’re gonna go get my family? Give me your word.”
“Butch, if you tell me where there is a group of zombies who are looking for some human kid to do harm to him, I’m going to go kill them.”
“We was supposed to take the kid back to Mr. Watley. He was real interested in the kid.”
“Why? What did he want with the kid?” I asked, trying not to give away that it was my son they were looking for.
“He never said nothin’, and I ain’t ask. I just did as I was told, hoping to get away or do what they wanted and get my family back.”
“Leo, I’m done with Butch here. The other one is waking up, would you drag Butch out back and get rid of him?”
Butch screamed as Leo dragged him out of the room “You said! You gave me your word!”
“I’m a man of my word.” I said calmly as Leo took Butch out back and let him go.
“You! What’s your name?” I said as I slapped the second man back to consciousness.
“Huh? What? I’m still alive?” he stammered. “That chick, she moved like a zombie. I thought I was a goner.”
“Shut up. What’s your name?” I asked in same cold voice as before. I’d lost a lot of blood by now and was starting to get a little woozy. I had too much to do and no time for this injury. I had a two mile walk ahead of me, and one more interrogation to complete.
“Lance, Lance Fitzgerald. My buddy Butch and I, we were just walking through town, just the two of us, when this big zed jumped us. We thought we were dead, but he just said, ‘I’ll let you live if you go take over this gun store for me, just bring the guns back’…”
I cut him off with a slap across the cheek. “Don’t lie to me, Lance. Do not lie again.”
“Look man, I don’t know what you want to hear. Butch and I were jumped heading into to…” This time I hit him with a closed fist. Butch had too many details to be lying to me. He knew too much.
“Lance, I’m going to give you one more try,” I said as I took the big black .40 caliber pistol out of my waistband. “Don’t lie to me again. I’ve done a lot of killing today. My friends have done a lot of killing today. What’s one more?” I leveled the gun at his head. “Lance, if you lie to me again, I’m going to do you the favor of shooting you in the head so you can’t become one of them.”
This third time around, Lance told me the exact same story as Butch.
“Lance, thank you,” I said. ”Leo? Can you handle this one? We have a long walk, and I have to go get my rifle back out of the yard.”
I hobbled my way out to the yard, with no idea how I was going to make the two mile walk back to the house. ‘Just put one foot in front of the other, Tookes.’
19. Recovery
I put one foot in front of another, step after step. I made it the first mile on my own, before I had to put an arm around John. With a half mile left, Leo put my other arm around her shoulder. The last hundred yards to the door, they practically carried me. Over the years I have leaned on Leo and John for support in many ways. Never more literally than this day.
Once inside the house, they laid me down on the stainless steel table. I was pretty out of it by then, I remember hearing the words irrigate and infection. Those words were followed by someone hosing my shoulder down with magma. My entire upper body was on fire, and I was out again.
I woke up feeling like I was laying in a pool of hot water, hearing voices, and tried to talk, but my mouth was full of sand. I passed out again trying to croak out the word ‘water’.
The next thing I remembered was waking up and seeing John asleep in a chair. I turned my head a little bit, enough to see that I was in the master bedroom. John’s face was smashed against a book; I think that’s the closest he’s ever come to reading anything. I started to roll, but pain shot down my shoulder. My arm, tied to my chest, was completely immobile. I tried looking at my shoulder, but my neck was so stiff I couldn’t.
My mouth was still full of sand. “John.” My voice was weak. “Can I have some water?”
John woke up with a start. “You gave us quite a scare, mate. I’ll grab you a cup, and let your mum know you’re awake.” He practically ran out of the room.
A few minutes later, Leo, John, and Mom came walking in. Mom had a bowl of chicken broth, Leo had a big glass of water and a pitcher, and John had a grin on his face. They put the soup and water on the end table and both of them came over to the bed.
“Victor,” Mom said, “we’re going to sit you up. This is probably going to hurt. It’s been nine days since you were shot; you’ve mostly been unconscious for that time. Every time you were awake enough to swallow, we were pouring liquids down your throat. With no IV equipment, we were worried you’d die of dehydration. You lost a lot of blood. We’ll have a talk about your reckless behavior later. For now, sit up.”
With that, she yanked my good arm and Leo pushed from behind, together they sat me upright. I winced at the excruciating pain radiating down my chest and back, but it was actually less pain than I was anticipating. My chest was bound; my shoulder wrapped with tape and gauze, my arm was taped to my chest, in addition to having a makeshift sling attached. From this angle, I could see where the bullet wound was in the front, although I was happy to see there was no blood seeping through the gauze. It was going to leave a cool looking scar.
I to
ok the proffered glass of water with my good hand and drained it. Leo refilled it, and set it within reach, as all three of us worked to slide me back up the bed and lean on the wall with a bunch of pillows behind me. Once I was firmly established in an upright position, I considered drinking more water. Unfortunately, more water meant I was going to eventually have to walk to the bathroom and pee. That was a daunting prospect, but I had to get up and start getting strength back. There was the matter of the kids and families at the high school. No wonder we never found any survivors, the zombies had rounded them all up.
“John, what’s been going on around here the last nine days while I was on vacation?”
20. Fortifications
“We’ve been working on fortifications around here. Your brother Marshall is amazing. He’s built walls and chutes and lines of fire all over the property.” John said.
“Leo learned to drive the tractor; she’s a demon digging trenches. We’ve shored up the fences surrounding the whole of the property. Leo dug a trench and berm for about a kilometer from the back of the property down to the river along the front. It’s littered with big boulders, it will stop any vehicles,” John continued. ”Marshall built a gate out of telephone poles down at the end of the driveway.”
I was completely impressed. The amount of work they’d done was astounding. They’d completed almost my entire defensive plan in nine days, without any help from me. “Wow. You’re all amazing. Mom, how are we on resources? Food, fuel, water?” I asked.