The Apocalypse Fugitives

by Peter Meredith

  Unexpectedly, the hard metal weapon was shoved into her hands. Deanna thought she would be happy to be finally armed, but as Joslyn squirmed further into the back of the truck like a rat in a pile of garbage; Deanna was abruptly thrust to the tailgate. Gone were the human shields and the soft press of warm bodies all around her. Suddenly, she felt more naked than she had been earlier when she had on only the pair of high heels.

  "Oh shit," she whispered, realizing she was afraid beyond anything she had yet felt. She shook and shivered and there was an iron taste of terror in her mouth. When the trucks stopped just beyond the bank of the river she had to hold her legs together to keep from urinating on herself.

  They were at the bridge gate.

  Just across the bridge from The Island, a small perimeter had been set up; it was heavily fortified and heavily gunned and heavily manned, although at night the men tended to keep as quiet as possible to keep the zombies from rushing the fencing.

  Now there were questions in the dark: What the fuck is this? Whose idea was this? Who's gonna open the gates, cuz I know I'm not.

  The women in the truck couldn't answer these questions of course. Even if they had satisfactory answers, which they did not, their high voices would give them away in a heartbeat. Someone, Bessy probably, replied in the only way she could: with her gun.

  In the near dead silent night, the gunshots seemed like explosions. They went off one after another like a thundering hammer, and then there came the grinding of gears and the roar of the engines as the trucks lurched forward crashing through the gates. All the women in the back cringed down as low as they could, all except the women at the tailgate. Next to Deanna was Bambi Gustuvson and next to her was Jenny Fine.

  "Guns out!" Bambi ordered. She had a pistol just like Dee's and thrust it over the gate. Deanna's gun was clutched between her breasts and no sooner did she point it out at the shadowy forest than the dark night was lit up by the flashes and thunder of automatic weapons—the soldiers were firing back!

  A hail of bullets swept across the trucks, shredding the canvas, pinging off the heavy metal sides, and thumping home with a wet sound. Unearthly screams erupted around her. They were so intense they tore into Deanna's soul and stained her mind with terror and pain-driven madness. Assaulted by those screams, her courage failed her completely.

  "I don't want the gun," Deanna cried, turning to find Joslyn. She was a dim figure, a vague shadow crawling among others of her kind. They seemed no more human than a pail of earth worms struggling over each other. "Take it back," Deanna screeched. Joslyn crawled away faster, her hands now black with someone's blood.

  Bambi pulled Deanna back around just as the trucks took a turn in the dirt road. "Shoot your damn gun!" Bambi yelled and then pointed over the tailgate. The view from the back of the truck was enough to paralyze Deanna. The forest perimeter seemed alive with strange insect-like beasts that shot flame. All around her the air hissed insidiously with near misses, while closer came the horrible soft thuds of bullets striking meat.

  One of these hit inches from Deanna.

  Bambi was shooting her pistol hot when she stopped and said, "Oh." It was a confused syllable, incongruent with the violence all around them. She touched her neck which was covered in a splash of black; her fingers disappeared into a deep hole that seemed to go right through her. Bambi's eyes fluttered and she fell into Deanna just as the two of them were covered in a hot mist of blood.

  Someone else had been hit.

  Judging by the screams and the mayhem in the truck it looked to Deanna like everyone had been hit. Jenny Fine had her jaw shot away. She gurgled and choked on splinters of bone and white teeth but kept firing her rifle. She was a creature out of a nightmare, firing and reloading until another bullet took the top of her head right off. She fell back and just like that the raw thuds ceased and a second later the hard pings also stopped.

  The soldiers had been using Jenny and Bambi's muzzle flashes as an aiming point and without them to shoot at they were left to fire at the shadow struck forest and the vague sounds of the retreating trucks.

  Then they took another turn and The Island was out of sight and the night around them sank into silence. In the bed of the truck there was misery. Someone turned on a flashlight—women were crawling in pools of blood and across the riddled canvas were red blotches and a splash of pink and grey.

  Some unrecognizable women cried, "We made it!"

  Deanna puked over the tailgate.

  Chapter 6

  Jillybean

  Lewis Smith Lake, Alabama

  The little zombie, her brown hair going in all directions, her clothes ripped and ragged, and her face looking smoothly grey, paused for a moment, staring at the ground. She drooled convincingly.

  Are you sure about this? Ipes asked, looking around at the forest. The forest was close and sticky, the trees and the vines and the grabby-bushes pressed in on all sides. He couldn't see more than a dozen feet whichever way he looked. Anything could be out there! He was so afraid that his mane was at all angles and the tips of his ears quivered.

  Jillybean didn't see what had him so on edge. The forest was empty as humans saw these sorts of things. Though she had already tiptoed by a million or so insects, and every type of mouse, mole and vole, and all sorts of reptiles that slivered or scurried out of her path, she hadn't seen a single human and hardly any monsters.

  It's not like she failed to notice the squirrels that chattered and the birds that quarreled and the buggy bugs that buzzed and hummed, it's just that she categorized these things as "natural" and she was looking for the unnatural, for the out of place.

  "Yes, I'm sure about this," Jillybean said in an undertone. Sweat dripped into her eyes and with a willpower beyond most adults, she let the salt burn—there was no telling if a half-dozing monster was even then looking at her. If there was one, all it would see was a little girl monster with a zebra tucked in her ripped up and stained shirt.

  What if you get lost? Ipes persisted. Who knows where we're heading?

  "Oh stop, you big chicken. You saw the map the same as me. West is the lake, east is I-65, north is to our right and south is to the left. How hard is that?"

  Ipes snorted and looked around at the forest. All I see are different kinds of trees. There's a really big one, and that one has soft leaves, and I think the one with all the pokey needles is a pine tree. What I don't see is a sign that says which way west is, or south or any of it. Think about it, Jillybean: we could get lost forever in a forest like this.

  "I thought zebras don't ever get lost," Jillybean said. "You told me that more than once."

  Well, I'm more of a city-zebra, you know. I can tell perfect direction as long as I can orient myself on the nearest McDonald's. It's a rule: if you can still smell french fries then you aren't lost.

  The little monster's stomach rumbled. "I wish you hadn't mentioned french fries." She put the idea of food out of her mind and concentrated on where she was going. Jillybean wasn't lost. Her path, an old streambed that hadn't seen a stream in two-centuries, showed her precisely where to go.

  Amid the dirt and the grasses and the pretty blue and yellow flowers, and the quartz-shot rocks, and the lines of army ants marching, Captain Grey had given her plenty of clues. Besides the boot prints he left in the sand and mud at every opportunity, there were kicked-over stones showing their damp ends and plants that hadn't been just stepped on, but cruelly ground under foot.

  Ipes, who made a business out of worrying, made a mental leap from fear of being lost to: What about the monsters?

  "What about them?" Jillybean shot back. She liked to pretend that the zombies didn't scare her, but they really did. Even the littlest, gimpiest, most toothless monster filler her belly with a queasy sickness. And Ipes knew it.

  What if you don't see one? Or hear it? What if your disguise doesn't work and it comes out of the bushes and gets you!

  "The monsters don't scare me," she said to Ipes. This was a lie, clear
ly. She thought about it frequently: what if, despite all of her precautions, one of the zombie-monsters got her? Or what about the squirmy thing that hid under the bed? What if it knew her foot was out of the covers? What would happen if the crawly wet things that hid in the sewers were to suddenly come out and show themselves to her?

  Once upon a time, her Daddy would have scoffed at such things and Jillybean would've been soothed. Now she was stuck relying on blind hope; that and the knowledge that so far she had been able to either outrun or outwit anything that had come her way.

  They scare me, Ipes confessed.

  "Everything scares you." As if to make her point a bumblebee as big as her thumb, rumbled by and Ipes hid himself. Jillybean's eyes widened slightly, however her curiosity was greater than her fear. She wanted to reach out and stroke its soft looking fuzzy body and she wanted to investigates its stumpy looking wings and measure what she was sure had to be a gargantuan stinger.

  Not everything scares me, Ipes replied, when the bumblebee danger had abated. But the monsters scare me and they should scare you, too. What about that one? Aren't you scared?

  Ahead of her was an old one, wrinkled, with grey hair to match its grey skin. After a quick glance, Jillybean paid it no attention which was the right thing to do. She could only moan a trifle louder, trust in her disguise, and keep to the trail.

  The zombie ignored her and when it ambled away she tried to pick up the trail again, wasting a half hour searching in widening circles for the least sign of Captain Grey and his captors. They weren't woodsman and from the various tracks she counted their number to be at least eight. Finally, on the smooth edge of a fern's leaf she spied what looked like a huge brown loogie. It smelled nasty.

  That's tobacco, I think, Ipes told her. You found their trail again.

  He wasn't enthused, but Jillybean hurried forward excitedly and nearly blundered into a whole mess of monsters. They were a stinky lot, which is saying something since even normal zombies smelled of the worst of humanity: decaying teeth, vomit, feces, and the sickening putrescence of gangrene. These Alabamian monsters had such a full stench Jillybean found herself close to gagging; that would've meant her certain death.

  She fought it back and allowed herself to moan louder to ease the feeling in her tummy. That part, at least, was easy to fake. They were strewn across her path grazing on the vegetation, and she was forced to circle wide around them. In a few minutes she had left them far behind and picked up the trail which ended shortly after.

  Jillybean found herself in a wide clearing that smacked right up to Lewis Smith Lake. From there the trail just died. She wandered around, confused to discover the tracks of lots of humans. They went every which way except out of there.

  "This doesn't make sense," she said. Prints everywhere but leading nowhere. And there were more prints, some clearly made by women. She started circling again, this time ignoring the footprints. Instead she focused on the other clues: a pile of oddly placed branches on the ground that when pulled up revealed a deep fire pit that had been well used. Off to the side near the clearings edge she saw a stack of wood, again covered by branches. Why cover wood?

  Maybe they're coming back, Ipes said in her head.

  "Maybe," Jillybean murmured under her breath. High up on the trunk of a tree she saw the initials A.G. and J.G. freshly carved in the center of a heart. She wandered closer and stood staring up, looking just like one of the vacant-minded monsters. She saw where someone had a worn a path up the boughs of the tree. On the branch next to the initials she noted tic-marks etched into the bark. There were twenty three of them.

  What did they mean?

  The number of days they were here, Ipes suggested. Or how many people were here?

  Jillybean figured it was the number of people who had been here, but if that was so, where did all they go so fast? There was a matted area of grass where a group had habitually sat; and there was a little hollow at the base of a tree where a smoker stashed his butts, and to the side were the ruts in the dirt where a folding chair had been placed, day in and day out for some time.

  A group of people had been here, that was for sure, and Jillybean figured they would certainly leave a trail out of there, but she was wrong. She circled around the clearing twice and only found the one trail leading in.

  Perplexed she went to the water's edge and looked out. The western sun hung low over a small tree-covered island that sat in the water about a hundred yards out. Beyond that, the lake was empty save for the windy wrinkles on its surface.

  I didn't hear a motor, Ipes said, reading her mind. A boat was the only way a group of any size with a prisoner in tow could have gotten out of there without leaving a trail. A sailboat, you think?

  "Uh-uh," Jillybean said in a whisper. "Not with the wind coming at us. I think we'd still see them."

  So where'd they go? They couldn't have...

  "Shhh," Jillybean hushed her zebra suddenly. She'd heard a hollow thump that had sounded familiar. What was it? A heel kicking a plank of wood? Someone striking a barrel? It was a touch metallic and...there it was again!

  The sound centered on the little island and when she looked that way a second time, her eyes widened. The island had moved.

  That's not possible, Ipes said in an awed tone.

  "That's because that's not an island," she said. "Islands don't move they especially don't move into the wind." The island was slowly, very slowly heading further out onto the lake. Already it was further than she felt comfortable swimming to, especially as a pretend monster; she just wasn't that strong of a tadpole.

  With a sinking sensation in her stomach she realized that Captain Grey was on that strange, tree covered boat and that he was lost to them.

  Chapter 7

  Captain Grey

  Lewis Smith Lake, Alabama

  The Floating Island was ingenious, but also indicative of the group's cowardly mindset. It was made up of nine flat-hulled pontoon boats that had been lashed together three across and three down creating a rectangle sixty six feet long and thirty wide. The boat's motors, awnings, and comfy chairs had been thrown away, leaving a wide flat deck, around which a mass of fake plants had been attached; Christmas trees and plastic ferns making up the main of these.

  Up close, the trees were clearly fake and the "island" obvious for what it was, however from thirty yards or more, it seemed to blend in with the backdrop. On the whole it was a good illusion however it forced the group that had created it to live an illusionary life.

  Twenty-three people lived on the island; suburbanites who had somehow found a way not to starve during the apocalypse. Generally they spent their days on shore where they had a tiny bit more freedom, but at night the plank was drawn in and the island anchored out on the lake where the zombies couldn't get at them. They were a timid lot. They spoke only in whispers and walked hunched over so their movement couldn't be seen. They slept in small green tents, two per pontoon and of possessions they had next to nothing.

  Captain Grey had been hustled to the very back corner of the Floating Island and now sat with his back up against the fake greenery. He was eyed by the group and despite their obvious advantage over him he saw the fear in their eyes; it was well placed. There wasn't a man among them that he couldn't kill with his bare hands—if they weren't tied behind his back, that is.

  "Are we far enough out?" Shawn Gates asked.

  Grey had a list going in his mind: names with faces. The group that had captured him was open with their words; they chatted quietly, but freely. He'd been their prisoner for all of two hours, most of which had been spent tip-toeing through the forest, and already he knew almost everything he needed to know about them.

  Their leader, Michael Gates stood a few inches over six foot. He had a saggy gut that had likely once stuck out a good two feet back when food wasn't an issue; his hair was a sandy, receding, blonde and his eyes were a nervous blue. Strangely, he seemed uncomfortable making any decision, even the simplest of ones. Lifting
himself into a half-crouch, he looked over the fake shrubbery toward the nearest land and said, "A few more yards, I think. I guess it depends on what we're going to do with him."

  "We're going to torture him. That's why you wanted him alive, right?" Shawn asked.

  "Yeah, I guess," Michael agreed reluctantly. He turned to his son, Cody who was steering and said. "That's good, cut the engine."

  The "engine" was simply an electric motor that was hooked up to a couple of car batteries. Cody clicked it off and then stepped to the next boat and pulled a pin on a spool of rope. The spool spun round soundlessly. "Anchors down," he intoned as if it was part of some sort of grave ceremony.

  Shawn came to stand over Grey. He was slighter in build than his brother but was otherwise very similar in appearance; all except his eyes that is. His eyes were an angry and very intense blue. It was clear he hated his prisoner with a passion. He pulled out a picture of a teenage girl and shoved it in Captain Grey's face. "Where is she? What have you done to her?"

  Grey barely gave the picture a glance. "I don't know her. I've never seen her before."

  A curse leapt from Shawn's mouth and he would've punched Grey in the face but his brother jumped up and pulled him off. "Just hold on, now," Michael said, as the pontoons rocked back and forth with a thumping noise. "We need to settle down for the moment. We have to think about this."

  Fred Trigg laughed. "You captured him so you could torture him, what's there to think about? Or are you just going soft, Michael?"

  Michael glared him back down. "I meant we have to think about how we're going to do this. Just punching him in the head randomly isn't going to get the information we want."

  "We should wait until sunset," John Gates suggested. "And go out to the middle of the lake and do it. That way if any of his bandit friends are around, they'll get a good earful."