The Apocalypse Fugitives

by Peter Meredith

  "Then show me one," Deanna shot back.

  "Dee, stop it!" Joslyn hissed. "Just put down the gun so we can get out of this alive."

  The other women were all in agreement and Deanna wavered in her mind, but then Yvette Harden who'd held onto an AR-15 since the night before slid it over so that it rested next to Mindy. It was such a cowardly move that it goaded Deanna into saying, "Let me see a grenade first, Major Grant. Then we'll give up."

  "You're being unreasonable," Grant replied. "It sounds like your friends want to do the right thing and you're stopping them."

  "Let me see a grenade and I'll give up," Deanna repeated.

  Grant lifted his voice, "Ladies, she's standing in the way of your freedom. You can't let her do that. We can end this peacefully or we can do it the hard way. It's up to you."

  "No it's up to you, Grant. Show me a grenade. You said you had plenty of…"

  Veronica interrupted her, "Dee, what's your problem? We can get out of this, just put down your gun."

  Deanna shook her head. "No, I don't think we can get out of this. He's lying about having grenades, which means he's just trying to scare us into giving up."

  The women looked uncertain while Grant chuckled. "Deanna, Deanna, Deanna…Who would have thought that a dumb as shit, fuck toy like you could have seen through me so easily. Yeah, I don't have any grenades, but it doesn't really matter, I have enough firepower to kill you and all your friends. You should do the only reasonable thing and give up."

  "Maybe we should," Joslyn said. "I didn't kill anyone and I didn't know Bessy and Mindy were going to. They just said escape." Kay, Jackie, and Yvette agreed. The rest only looked around hoping someone would say something that would make it all better. Deanna wasn't that person. She knew she had to fight; she had already killed or wounded two or three of…a thought struck her.

  "We're not giving up," she said. "If you've got so much firepower why haven't you used it? I think it's because you're not in all that good of a position. How many men do you have, Major? You only came with three Humvees so I bet you don't even have twelve guys, probably less than that, and I killed at least two of them and wounded another. That's why you're doing all this talking. You know we can hold out up here all week if we need to."

  "I was just trying to save lives," Grant said.

  "The lives of your men, maybe," Deanna shot back. "I think we're done talking."

  "So be it."

  The major went back down the stairs and there was more whispering as the soldiers planned their next assault. Deanna looked back at the other women appraising them and finding them wanting. "All of you who want to take the chance at getting strung up by the neck, now's the time to leave. Go see how forgiving and merciful the Colonel is." Deanna paused to see if anyone would budge, but none did.

  "Then we fight," she said. "Connie, come up behind me. If something happens to me you gotta step up. We can hold them off for a long time, just be careful with how much ammo you use. Someone else get behind her."

  Deanna wiped the sweat from her forehead and sighted down the shotgun waiting for the smallest movement. It was a long wait and when the soldiers struck it was from a direction she wasn't expecting. There was a flash of light in her periphery and screams from the women; Deanna didn't flinch. She stared down length of her dun colored weapon guessing that what was happening behind her was just a distraction.

  A hand came down on her shoulder. It was Connie, shaking her in a panic. "Dee, they set fire to the church! What are we going to do?"

  She turned to see one wall of the church in flames, the fire was clawing its way up. From below them harsh black smoke came billowing up. "Watch the stairs," Deanna ordered. She went to the balcony and saw a soldier splashing fuel on the pews. Her shock at seeing what was happening was so great she was slow to realize how exposed she was.

  Joslyn pulled her down just as a rifle bullet zinged by. "We have to give up!" the smaller woman yelled in Deanna's face. "Let us give up, please."

  Deanna shouted back, "No!" She hopped up and fired her shotgun, missing the soldier. He ducked away all the same and the fire began to peter out.

  "Fuck this," Joslyn said. "I'm not going to be burned alive. I'm getting out of here." She made it to her feet only to have Deanna tackle her.

  "We can't. Not yet," Deanna told the struggling woman. "We need to see what they're planning…no, Yvette stop!"

  Yvette had leapt up and was down the stairs before Deanna could do anything about it. Seconds later there was a single gunshot.

  Kay crawled to the stairs and screamed, "Yvette! Yvette!"

  "What just happened?" Jackie asked. She looked stunned, as if unable to comprehend the bestial nature of humans; most of the women wore the same look.

  Beneath Deanna, Joslyn had stopped struggling. "They want to kill us," she said with sudden realization. "What do we do? We can't fight our way out and we can't stay or we'll burn alive."

  "It won't be so bad," Veronica said as if in the middle of a dream. "My brother was a firefighter and he always said people rarely died from the actual fire. It was the smoke that got 'em. First it knocked them out and then they died in their sleep from lack of oxygen."

  Deanna crawled off Joslyn and went to the edge of the balcony and popped her head up for a split second. Just as she dropped back down someone hiding behind the altar on the other side of the church took a shot at her, missing high.

  "The fire's not really going yet," she said. "If we can stop them from making it worse, we can buy ourselves time."

  "Time for what?" Joslyn asked. "Do you have a plan?"

  There was no plan that could get them out of the fix they were in. "We can pray," Deanna said. "We're in a church, right? Sorry but…I can't think of anything better to do. In the mean time, someone get Yvette's gun. We have to keep them from adding fuel to the fire." No one budged, so Deanna went over to the gun and handed it the closest person: Jackie Broderick and pointed out the simple features, "Click off the safety, aim, and shoot. It's easy when you know how."

  The two went back to the railing where Deanna counted to three quietly. They both hopped up, but there weren't any soldiers below them. Deanna dropped back down, but Jackie was slow to move and the gunman behind the altar shot her in the throat. She was dead before she hit the floor of the balcony. One of the women cried out and another moaned in misery.

  "That's your fault," Joslyn hissed, pointing at Jackie's corpse. "She didn't even know what she was doing."

  "Go back to praying and shut the hell up," Deanna seethed. A part of her couldn't help but agree with Joslyn. Jackie had been barely able to wield her flashlight let alone a gun. "Fuck," she whispered. "Someone pray for a miracle."

  Their miracle came a minute later when gunshots from outside caused everyone to look up. "Joslyn get up to the belfry and see what's going on," Deanna ordered.

  "Fuck you. I'm not going anywhere."

  Deanna crawled to the stairway and went up through a cramped little stair to a tiny open area. Above her was an iron bell, with a clapper the size of a baseball bat. Below her the unknown town spread out like a living map. She could see quite a distance, but what concerned her was up close. Zombies were approaching, marching in by the thousands, attracted by all the gun play that had been going on.

  "That's not a miracle," she said.

  Chapter 21

  Deanna Russell

  Southern Illinois

  From ground level the zombie threat wasn't as dire appearing as it was from Deanna's point of view. The soldiers mistakenly thought they were facing only a dribbling of zombies coming at them in a slow parade one or two at a time where in truth they were facing an army of them. Deanna almost warned the soldiers of the flood heading their way, she even raised her hand and pointed, but just in time she bit back her cry.

  It wasn't a miracle she was seeing, it was retribution, maybe God's retribution, and she wasn't about to get in the way of that. With a last glance at the unnumbered horde lumbering
toward the church, she turned and fled back down the tiny stair to the balcony.

  "Forget the fire!" she cried, she then lowered her voice to conspiratorial whisper. "Zombies are coming, like thousands of them." The whisper was unnecessary. The gunfire out front had picked up in intensity sounding like fireworks to those inside the church.

  "If there's zombies we have to get out of here," Connie said, desperately. "We could go with the men. They'd take us back, right?"

  Veronica gave her a look that suggested Connie was a simpleton. "They'll shoot us if we go down those stairs. I think…I think we should barricade the stairs. That's probably our only option."

  The idea was a good one, the implementation was impossible. There were three rows of pews on the balcony level and unlike the ones below in the church proper these were attached to the floor with heavy slag bolts.

  Seeing this, Veronica started shooing everyone to one side of the first pew. "If we all pull at the same…"

  The sound of the gunfire suddenly changed and everyone stopped. At the top of the stairs, Connie said, "It sounds like the soldiers are leaving. Oh my God, They're leaving us here."

  All ears were cocked listening to the focal point of the firing retreat ever so slightly from the foyer of the church and into the parking lot. Then they heard, intermingled with the shooting someone yelling orders at the top of his lungs, "Back inside! There's too many. Back inside."

  Seconds later there came the sound of boots pounding on the pavement and desperate gunshots sounding pitifully thin compared to the wave of moans that washed over the church. Above all of this however were the screams of a man being eaten alive—they sent goose bumps flashing in a wave across Deanna's skin.

  Below them Major Grant was yelling, "The pews! Get them back in the doorway. Forget Hanson, he's dead."

  The women sat as if listening to an old time radio show; they could easily imagine what was happening in the foyer: zombies piling at the doorway fighting relentlessly to get in and the soldiers fighting with equal determination to keep them out. Next there a came a thrumming, a vibration along the walls stretching down the length of the building.

  Joslyn, her brown eyes wide, her forehead creased with worry lines asked, "What the hell is that?"

  As answer one of the stained glass windows came crashing in. The heavy intricate panes were very tall, almost fifteen feet in height and weighed close to two hundred pounds each. The sound of them coming down was startlingly loud and sharp enough to hurt the ears. These glass explosion walked down the walls as the zombies engulfed the building pounding on every surface trying to get in from any angle they could.

  Deanna lifted her eyes just above the balcony rail in time to see grey beasts climbing across the vibrantly colored shards, uncaringly ripping open their own bellies. Some became impaled and squirmed, heedless of what had to be miserable pain as other zombies climbed over them.

  The soldier's guns were banging away, knocking down zombie after zombie. Heads flew apart and black blood pooled like oil, still they came on without stop. It was obvious the soldiers weren't going to be able to hold for long.

  Deanna ran back to the stairs. "Don't even think about coming up here, Grant. We'll shoot anything that moves."

  "If you do that then we all die!" Grant yelled back. "Let us up."

  "Fuck you, Grant!" Deanna yelled back. "You're only getting exactly what you deserve, you bastard."

  Connie elbowed Deanna in the side. "No, Dee. We need them."

  A snarl turned Deanna's full lips as rage struck her. "No we don't! We're not whores anymore. We're not their playthings and the one thing we don't need is their version of 'protection'. From now on we live and die as individuals, as women, not as someone's property. Anyone who thinks different can go down there, just like Yvette did and see what happens." The thought of silly Yvette running downstairs into the arms of the people who had abused her for months burned her stomach with hate.

  Connie shrank back from her anger, but Deanna grabbed her by the arm to keep her from abandoning her post at the stairs. "It'll be alright, Connie. We can hold out up here for a long time."

  As they were talking the situation of the men below had gone from urgent to dire. One man suddenly screamed, "I'm out of ammo! Someone give me a mag."

  "I'm out too," another said, the fear in his voice unmistakable. "Major, we have to do something!"

  Deanna took aim down the shotgun's length. "Get ready, Connie. They're going to come any second." Connie took a firmer grip of her AR and began to whisper a prayer. Deanna nudged her and joked, "You sure you want to do that? Your last prayer didn't work out so well."

  Connie barely cracked a smile before Major Grant stuck his head around the corner of the stairs. His anguish was obvious on his handsome features. "Please Deanna, listen to reason. The stiffs are all over us. If you don't let us up it'll be murder and it'll be on your head."

  She was all set to dig her heels in and tell him to go fuck himself when Connie gave a suggestion: "They could surrender to us."

  Grant hesitated as his men's desperate cries grew pitiful. After a few seconds he nodded to Deanna. "We give up, ok? The fire was just a trick. We weren't going to really burn you out. Ok? Deanna, please. Let us go up there as your prisoners, please. On the life of my men I'm begging you."

  Deanna heard the fear in his voice and felt her heart moved to pity. It was an ache of deepest empathy matching her own fear of the zombies which was like cold iron stabbing her in the gut. The empathy made her want reach out to help or to forgive—she crushed out the feeling.

  There was no room for such weakness now. Besides, what would they do with prisoners? Let them go when everything was safe again so they could come back with more men and more guns? Or would they hold a trial for the men even though the only possible outcome would be a death sentence?

  It was better to let karma deal with the soldiers and as everyone knew karma was a bitch sometimes.

  "You're begging on the life of your men, but what about Yvette's life?" Deanna asked. "Your men killed her in cold blood. Or what about Jackie's life? Or Bessy's, or Rachel's? You killed them, you and your men did that. So don't think that begging will mean anything to me. If you come up here we'll kill you."

  Grant was quiet and Deanna guessed he was figuring out a plan of attack. Deanna nodded to Connie. "You ready?"

  "Yeah." Connie was shaking and wouldn't stop swallowing as if her tongue was too big for her mouth.

  Deanna reached out and rubbed her shoulder tenderly before yelling, "Come on, Grant! Time to die! You know I can't miss from this range." The shotgun was hard against her cheek and her finger was gripping the trigger with so much force that it was halfway back.

  There was a hesitation below which she didn't understand. Every minute that passed would only mean more zombies surging from all directions. If it had been her, she would've attacked by now since the idea of being eaten alive was horrifying to her; it was far worse than getting shot. The only reason she could think of to hesitate was if the soldiers didn't realize how weak the women were in weaponry and ammo. If they thought there were a dozen women with guns waiting to ambush them on the narrow stairs, they probably wouldn't try an attack.

  "Veronica, back me up with that…with that machine gun," Deanna yelled loud enough for Grant to hear. Veronica was holding Yvette's black assault weapon in the most tepid manner: out, away from her body as if she didn't want to get her shirt dirty. Deanna motioned for her to put it up to her shoulder. When she did, Deanna turned to the other women. Joslyn was the next closest. "Jos, here take the pistol and get my back, um everyone else make sure you're loaded all the way up with bullets."

  Joslyn didn't take the pistol; she mumbled something and stepped back closer to the other women. Deanna glared for half a second and then turned her attention back to the stairwell. "We've got ten guns up here for you, Grant. Don't keep us waiting all day. What? Are you too chicken to stick your head around the corner again?" She would shoot thi
s time if he did and Grant seemed to know it.

  "Fuck you, bitch," Grant seethed. He then yelled to his men: "Ok...ok...We have to make it back to the Humvees..."

  "No way! There's too many stiffs," one of them yelled back.

  "Shut the fuck up!" Grant screamed. "Use the diesel. We'll fire the church for real this time. We'll make a lane. We might get a few burns but it should keep the stiffs back."

  Connie grabbed Deanna's arm and asked, "What about us? If it's a big fire it'll trap us up here."

  Deanna looked at the other women; they were all staring back with the same clueless expression. "I don't know," Deanna said.

  "We should go with them," Joslyn suggested. "Like follow them out and then scatter."

  "No, there's too many zombies," Deanna replied. "I don't think even the men will make it."

  "We just can't sit here and do nothing," Joslyn shot back. She pushed past Deanna and paused at the top of the stairs. "They just lit the fire," she said, breathlessly. The stench of burning diesel billowed up on a thick black smoke. Intermingled with it was the nasty smell of burning hair and human flesh. Joslyn stepped back, afraid. She pulled her shirt up covering half her face as the air in the balcony grew thick and hazy.

  "They're moving," Joslyn said, lifting her face from out of her shirt. The soldiers, who had been shooting their guns with regularity, making sure they didn't waste any ammo, now started blazing away trying to clear a path through the undead. Once again the focal point of the shooting began to shift; they were heading outside. Joslyn cried: "It's working. Come on before the fire gets too big."

  However she didn't lead the way, she only pointed and tried to tug Deanna in front. Deanna pulled back, hesitating. She was quite honestly afraid of everything they would find at the bottom of the stairs: the fire, the zombies, the soldiers. Each was equally deadly and the idea of confronting all three at once seemed like the closest thing to suicide imaginable.

  "I'll go first," Connie said when she saw Deanna's hesitation.

  She had only taken a step when Kay asked, "What about Mindy?"