The Apocalypse Fugitives

by Peter Meredith

  "I need the flashlight!" she yelled. When a murmured argument began, Deanna called out: "Jackie, please. I can't see what I'm doing. I'll give it right back, I promise."

  "Fine," Jackie griped. She came up to the truck and as always shot the light into Dee's face. Deanna squinted and held out her hand. It was slapped into her palm. "Remember, give it back," Jackie said.

  "Yeah," Deanna said, and then immediately forgot her promise as the light revealed, once again, the dreadful scene. Among the butchered bodies, two were still alive and moving. Deanna's fear was like an over-tuned fiddle string: tight, ready to spring wild at the slightest touch. Karen looked just like a zombie. Her face was the color of gravy while the rest of her looked to have bathed in blood. It didn't seem possible for her to be alive. And her moan…she reached for Deanna suddenly with a grasping, red hand. Dee screamed and pulled the trigger twice.

  Karen's body bucked from the bullets smashing into her, but still she didn't die. Blood gurgled up out of her mouth while her sad eyes stared up at Deanna in confusion and misery.

  "I'm sorry," Deanna whispered. "I'm really sorry." Karen's hand started to come up again and Dee almost fell out of the truck as she backed away. The hand hung there about a foot in the air and then dropped with an ugly thud as Karen's eyes closed at last.

  Deanna breathed a sigh of relief, but saw movement in the pile of bodies. With another scream just behind her clenched teeth, she shined the flashlight to the corner of the truck and saw a foot pushing through the tacky blood. She tracked the light from the foot, up to the face of Annie Maycomb.

  Annie had been the shiest of the whores. Deanna couldn't remember any conversation with her that went beyond: Can you pass the salt?

  "Don't do me like that," Annie said. Her stolen army uniform was rent in three places and was wet and stained almost black. She swallowed thickly. "Don't…I don't wanna die. Please."

  "But they want me to kill you," Deanna replied. "They voted on it. I have to or they'll kick me out."

  "Please, don't."

  "You're going to die anyways," Dee said after a glance at her bullet ridden torso. "This will just be quicker."

  Annie's green eyes began to drip tears. "I'm afraid to die. I'm going to hell."

  "No you're not. You are too sweet and too good for hell." Deanna knew she couldn't say the same thing about herself. In the course of one night she had already killed two innocent women and was slated to kill two more. Suddenly, the gun in her hand became as heavy as an anchor. She couldn't lift it even if she wanted to.

  "I'm a whore, Dee. They don't let whores in heaven."

  Since she was a whore as well, that struck Deanna painfully and she struggled to find an answer. Outside the truck, Jackie asked, "You done yet, Dee? Can I have my flash light back?"

  "Not yet," Deanna said. "I still have to take care of the girl in the other truck."

  "No, that was Terry Frazier she's already dead. Kay just checked."

  Annie grabbed Dee's slim calf and whispered, "Don't kill me."

  "Then I guess I'm done. Here, catch," Deanna said as she tossed the flashlight to Jackie.

  "Shit!" Jackie whined when she fumbled the catch and the light tinked off the ground. "You could have broken it."

  Mindy came up and shoved the girl aside. "Stop your whining, Jackie. Hey, Dee. How did it go? Those were two quick shots. You get them both?"

  "Yeah," Dee lied.

  "Good. Come on down. We're going to load up all the dead in this truck for now. We don't have time to bury them just yet."

  Annie gripped Deanna's calf harder and whispered soft as the wind, "Don't leave me alone with them."

  Deanna glanced around. Without the flashlight the colors were gone. Everything was shaded in black and the corpses looked bigger somehow as if the shadows had fused with the bodies. Staying was the last thing in the world she wanted to do, however her guilt was too great to be ignored. "I'm going to ride back here. I…I don't want to be around anyone right now."

  "If that's what you want," Mindy said.

  The bodies from the first truck were hauled awkwardly to the back of the second and pushed over the top of the tailgate. Bessy was last; she flopped in, looking like she was made of warm rubber. Seconds later, the engines began to rumble and the trucks took to swaying as they picked up speed. Annie's hand slipped out of Deanna's.

  "Annie?"

  "I'm still here," she said. "I'm trying to stay awake, but I'm very tired all of a sudden."

  "You should sleep, Annie. And you shouldn't worry about hell. There's nothing in the Ten Commandments about being a whore." Deanna had long since accepted the term whore. She knew that it was not just demeaning, it was also dehumanizing, but of course she no longer felt fully human. She felt like she was part of some sort of sub-species; a thing to be used by the real humans. All the women felt this way, all except Bessy and to a lesser degree, Mindy. They had somehow kept a portion of their humanity and it was this that had saved them—or had saved those that were still alive.

  "Thou shalt not commit adultery," wheezed Annie. It sounded like she had suddenly developed a bad chest cold.

  "We weren't committing adultery. It was…"

  Annie interrupted Deanna, "I'm married. His name is Ray."

  "But he's…" Deanna began and then stopped. Ray was almost certainly dead, but maybe that didn't mean so much to Annie. Clearly her love for him was as alive and strong as the day they had been married.

  "You can pray," Deanna suggested. "You can ask for forgiveness. I'm sure God would forgive you."

  "What…about…Ray?" she asked between wet coughs. "Will he…forgive…me?"

  "Yes," Deanna replied automatically. "If he loved you he would forgive you. Did he love you?" Annie nodded and Dee tried to smile as if this was the happiest news. The smile was wetted by tears. "Then let's pray together. Do you know the Our Father?"

  The Our Father is a not a long prayer, only ten short lines. Annie died just after struggling her way through: And forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who trespass against us. She choked on the fluids in her lungs and drowned in blood as the truck rattled on.

  Deanna finished the prayer without her. She started up again as soon as she was finished and repeated it until she was too hoarse to speak.

  Chapter 12

  Captain Grey

  Warrior, Alabama

  They are going to be in a world of hurt, Grey thought to himself as he eased through the brush. It was just after one in the afternoon and it was hot as all hell in his opinion. Though he had lived and trained and fought in far worse conditions, the stickiness that came with this sort of heat always made him cranky. And that was too bad for the dumb fucks who had kidnapped his friends. He was going to make them pay.

  He moved slowly through the wedge of forest—step, pause, step pause. His eyes were always up and out, scanning for movement, checking possible ambush sites. His ears were alert, vigilant not only for the ordinary human sounds, but also for abnormal activity of birds and squirrels. Both would jaw at strangers coming too close. He even focused his sense of smell, checking for cigarette fumes or the heavy colognes that men had taken to wearing to cover body odor. For many, bathing was no longer a daily occurrence.

  As of yet, he heard, saw, and smelled nothing, which wasn't unexpected. He was still three hundred yards from the Piggly Wiggly and it was unlikely that the raiders would post sentries so far out. Especially since the forest that weaved in and out of the town made it nearly impossible to spot anyone even thirty yards away.

  For Grey the heavy greenery was both good and bad. It meant he could sneak up very close to the super market, and move about with little chance at being detected. On the down side, since he was a trained marksman he lost a considerable range advantage. With his M4 he could hit targets at three hundred meters almost at will and that was without a scope.

  Judging by his map, the terrain would force him to come within one hundred and fifty yards. It was close enough for one
of his enemies to get off a lucky shot.

  "It is what it is," he whispered to himself. There had been a leathery old first sergeant he had known in Iraq who used to say that whenever he heard a shit detail coming his company's way. Grey had adopted the motto since getting worked up over things that couldn't be changed was a waste of mental energy.

  There was a lot about this mission he couldn't change that he wished he could: he was low on ammo, he was without a team, there were hostages to deal with, which was bad, the fact that he was personally invested in them made it worse. Another issue was the approach to the Piggly Wiggly. The dumbest goon had to see they would be most vulnerable from a sniper attack out of the west. It would be nothing to station a couple of men up in the woods right where he was walking.

  But then again, they probably weren't expecting an attack. Why would they? So far Michael Gates had done nothing except run and hide. He hadn't once put up a fight. This meant that the approach should be a walk in the park—and it was. He moved unseen, heading in from the northwest until he saw the roof of a house through the foliage; he was surprisingly close to the edge of town. He skirted around it to the right where the forest covered him for a time. When it thinned too much he stopped and leaned up against a mossy oak.

  Just in front of him, maybe sixty yards away, was a bank. Across the street from it was a feed store. Through a narrow gap between the two buildings he could see the supermarket. To the naked eye it seemed as vacant as all the other buildings in the dead town. Grey lifted the binoculars he had borrowed from Shawn Gates and glassed the building.

  There was little to see. The Piggly Wiggly's front windows had been replaced by inch-thick plywood. There were no guards visible at all, proving for a fact that these were little more than thugs he was dealing with. But where was anyone else? There weren't any zombies milling around so why weren't there any people out doors? It was likely hotter than hell in the closed up box of a building.

  "Strange," Grey murmured. "Maybe Clara lied. Maybe they aren't here after all."

  His mind went down that avenue for a moment before he decided to wait until all the evidence was in. He brought up the binoculars and searched the parking lot: among the smattering of dilapidated cars were two Humvees and three pickup trucks that had been slapped with green house paint. They were parked in a neat row, which told Grey someone was home. But where the others? Clara had mentioned thirty to forty raiders. That many men would require more than just five vehicles.

  They're on another raid, he thought. It was a distinct possibility. A group like this would wither and die if they didn't keep a fresh influx of stolen goods coming in.

  Grey swept the building once more and was just bringing the binoculars down when movement to his right caught his eye. In a flash he brought the glasses back up but couldn't see anything but forest. Had it been a bird or a squirrel? A falling leaf? His imagination perhaps? Or was there something or someone in the forest with him?

  As he knelt there, Grey felt a perfect calm descend over him like a veil. It was a feeling he knew only too well. It was that particular warm sensation he got right before the shit hit the fan.

  In one move he brought up his weapon and spun around, putting the trunk of the oak on his left shoulder.

  The sudden move triggered a reaction. Rifle fire crackled the air and something whizzed by him. He immediately dropped to the forest floor as seemingly from nowhere a whole mess of guns started firing in his direction. Some of the bullets blew past him, stirring the air close to his head, while others didn't come anywhere near him. They were trying to pin him down, but had already failed.

  The second he had dropped, Grey had fast-crawled to his right, keeping low, letting the knee high ferns and thick azaleas mask his movements. He scooted twenty yards and then slowly peeked over the brush. The firing was constant and loud; he could see the flash of rifles, the haze of heated air, and men scampering from tree to tree. More men were coming in from his left leaping over logs and bushes to get in position.

  Grey saw he would have to stick and move, and he would have to be quick about it.

  His M4 slid to the pocket of his shoulder and without even thinking, his thumb selected single shot. He lifted himself into a crouch, and aimed at a man in green fatigues who was standing up tall, trying to see where Captain Grey had gone. The man filled his sights, looking far too big to miss. Grey didn't miss. He squeezed the trigger gently, the M4 jumped slightly, and the man jerked and fell back.

  Grey dropped again, this time shuffling back twenty feet through a dense thicket of grasping vines hanging like a shawl from a stand of poplars. Some of his enemies had seen where the shot had come from and were ripping up the dense forest in front of him while others were still shooting where he had originally been. Grey, his face as green as the brush around him stopped after twelve seconds and peeked his head up again and was amazed at the volume of fire. They weren't playing around.

  It made him wonder how many men they had gunning for him. The number had to be at least ten if not twenty in total. If that was true that meant this was no chance encounter. He had been seen long before and they had been laying in wait for him. And that meant…

  He turned to his right to see if he was being flanked. He was. There were six raiders breaking from cover and heading in his direction. He was being pinned by the men in front so that these men could come up close and finish the job!

  In the same second this thought struck him, his M4 came up as his mind made instant calculations, range: seventy yards; running speed: five and half miles per hour; wind speed: three miles per hour; slope: three percent grade with heavy cover.

  Grey aimed center mass on the fourth closest man. He wasn't the easiest target; he was the best target.

  The man…boy really…was barely seventeen and where his patchy beard didn't cover his face, his zits were obvious. A bullet from the M4 tore through his chest, rending his right lung and blasting out his back in a spray of blood. His confused body staggered on another ten feet before it realized it was dying and he fell. The two men behind him dropped and began firing indiscriminately, spraying the forest, their bullets flying ten feet over Grey's head.

  Of the other three raiders, two were already dead at that point. Grey had known that if he had shot the man leading the attack right off the bat, all of them would've instantaneously ducked for cover. Instead the first three men had kept coming and with the forest exploding with gun fire from practically every direction they hadn't even realized they were being targeted.

  Half a second after killing the boy with the patchy beard, Grey fired again, killing the last man in the line of three, hitting him dead center and driving a hole that went through his sternum, the right ventricle of his heart and then out through his spine. He was dead before he hit the ground.

  Grey's next shot wasn't a good one. He rushed it, firing through cover at a streaking green blur. Still he hit his mark. At sixty yards he could hit a postage stamp, so a man-sized target at the same range was practically a gimme. The bullet took the man on the side, just above the liver and then, for some unknowable reason, the bullet had spun and rolled and tumbled hellaciously, creating a tremendous wound track that took out the man's descending aorta and part of his heart.

  The man was turned by the impact of the bullet, making it seem like he had been shot from a different angle. This caused some of Grey's enemies to begin firing at the trees and bushes fifty yards to his right. Others were still shooting where he had been originally and a few were withering the leaves just above his head with a torrent of lead.

  The battle was pure chaos which was truly his only hope to get out of it alive. Again Grey went flat on his stomach and again he wriggled backwards, using every bit of cover to mask his retreat: a downed tree trunk that he slithered along for fifty feet, a stand of gimp trees that he blended in so well with that a person couldn't have seen him from ten yards, and a little hollow in the ground that kept the bullets from finding their mark.


  Had the forest gone on for miles behind him he would have escaped with ease, but he ran out of cover in minutes and found himself on the edge of what passed for the suburbs of the sprawling town. He was right up to the fence of someone's back yard. Though it was only waist- high, he couldn't jump it, afraid to give away his position; instead he braced himself and heaved up on the bottom of the fence, the metal links biting into his hands.

  With adrenaline pumping through his veins like mad, the fence bent with ease. Grabbing his weapon he crawled under and then slithered through the tall grass, passing a rusty rake and a saggy football. Grey went around the side of the house and as soon as he was out of sight of the forest he took off at a run, heading due north on a neighborhood street.

  He felt dreadfully exposed, but it couldn't be helped. He had to clear the area while the raiders still thought he was in the forest, which, judging by the crackle of gunfire behind him, they still did. The shooting lasted almost twenty seconds longer and by that time he was a hundred yards up the road.

  Grinning at his escape, Grey took to the woods again where his camouflaged battle dress uniform made him impossible to spot from such a distance. As he walked, slowly and, once again carefully, he switched out the M4's magazine and had to resist the urge to begin hunting the raiders. As much as he wanted to kill the lot of them, there were too many of them on his trail and twenty to one odds were not his type of odds. He would escape and evade, and when things had calmed down he would come back, but when he did, he wouldn't come in so blind.

  He had been spotted, or more than likely the Subaru he had driven had been spotted. He dwelled on that as he made his way back north and east, leaving the confused raiders further and further behind. After an hour he felt he was far enough away to take a break. He drank and studied his map.

  "Where would I set up observation points?" he asked himself. The spots fairly jumped out at him. "I'm a frigging idiot," he groused. There were three very obvious places that any thinking person would use to keep track of vehicles heading into Warrior and Grey had pulled his Subaru off the road about five hundred yards from one. Five hundred yards was nothing for a good pair of binoculars.