“And maybe you could've met me and Neil in New Jersey,” Sadie said. She had been smiles and now she slumped. “I miss my truck. None of this would be an issue if we had the truck. We could just lit on out of here, running over any zombie that got in our way.”
“Your choice of words reminds me,” Neil said. “Where are we, and where are we going? The closest that I can put us is somewhere between Chicago and St. Louis. Aren't you from around here? Do you happen to know?”
Sarah stuck out her lower lip as she nodded. “Danville is a hundred miles east of here, but even if I lived closer, one farm looks a lot like another, so I don’t know for certain. I don’t even know exactly where on the Illinois River that Island was, and how long we floated down the river yesterday, I couldn't say. Two hours, maybe longer?”
“So you're saying you agree with Neil?” Sadie asked. “That we're lost.”
She shrugged to say: yes. Neil blew out in a gust. “Alright, we're somewhere between here, there and nowhere, but I wouldn't say we're lost. The Island is to the north—we don't want to go that way. We were warned against going west like we originally planned, so that leaves south…or south east toward Tennessee or one of those states.”
“I like the way you say one of those states,” Sarah said. “What you mean is one of those less important states.”
It was true, Neil had always looked down his nose at the southern states for their backwardness, and the mid-western states for their endless farm emptiness, and the Rocky Mountain states for their dry isolation. He shrugged as an answer.
“What about Southwest?” Sadie asked. “I could use some heat right now.”
“Same reason we don't go up into the mountains: no food,” Neil replied. “Not to mention water would be a difficulty as well. I think the southeast is our best bet. The winter will be warmer.”
Sadie was up for the idea, while Sarah was noncommittal. She stared out at the cold, miserable day and didn't say anything except, “How are we going to get there. I don't have any shoes.”
“I'll get you some, don't worry,” Neil answered quickly, getting up and searching, though it was in vain. The farmhouse could not provide for her since Farmer Jones' wife must have had feet twice the size of Neil's and wore something close to a twelve.
Because shoes weren't the only thing missing in their lives, Neil decided to go explore downriver, hoping to find a car or some food, or anything, really. They were without most of the essentials of life.
“I should go with you,” Sadie said. “You need me to protect you.”
“Hardly,” Neil replied and then he added in a whisper, “I need you to protect Sarah. She seems out of it. Keep an eye out for the zombies and an ear out for the soldiers. Hide in the loft if anything happens.”
After a few crackers layered with an inch of peanut butter, Neil took the M16 and the axe, and set out. He wore his now dry penny loafers and his khakis, and beneath he had on the long johns, which he had trimmed at the ankle with a pair of scissors, though still they stuck out from beneath his pants. A heavy leather jacket borrowed from Farmer Jones and an orange hunting backpack completed an outfit he would not have been caught dead in not long before.
At some point during the night, Indian summer had turned into early winter and Neil's teeth chattered as he walked. He feared the cold more than the zombies, mainly because he knew that he could escape them by plunging into the river. It was the last thing he wanted to do. The river hung with tendrils of grey fog that seemed to suggest a deadly cold beneath.
Still he kept close to it as he trudged, and he kept a sharp eye out for the undead, of which he killed two before he came on the first house. Thankfully both were smallish, women zombies, and better for him they came at him one at a time.
“Sorry,” he said around a grimacing face as he hewed the first with the axe—the M16 with its scant ammo was for emergencies only. He split her head and then took the time to clean the axe in the river where the second came sloshing toward him. She was having a rough time of the sucking mud of the river and he might have been able to simply walk away from her, however he feared her following along after him and surprising him while he was in the middle of taking a leak.
The axe was a good weapon. It had good reach and Farmer Jones had kept it sharp. After he killed the second zombie, Neil slung it on his shoulder and marched on to the distant farmhouse. This one was off the river a ways and so he approached it very carefully making sure to keep low.
A score of Zombies prowled around a squat rectangular outbuilding. Neil made sure to keep the house between him and it, knowing that if even one caught sight of him it would mean a wild chase back to the river. The back yard of the house was dirt and hen pecked. Chickens had lived there, but had died in their wire cages, their bones all that were left of them. Whether it was the chickens or something more, the house had a rancid odor emanating from it, which had Neil's teeth chattering from more than the cold.
He tried the back door, turning the knob slowly, hoping that whatever was creating the smell was truly dead and not just zombie dead. The door opened onto a back hall that was dim to the point of dark and though the door had opened without sound, Neil's first step sent an empty soda can skidding away in a fuss.
“Darn it!” he whispered.
It was as good a test as any that would alert him to the presence of zombies and with quick light breaths panting in and out, he hoisted the axe, ready to swing it at the first thing that moved. Nothing did and after a minute, Neil forced himself to take another step—this one came down on what he thought was glass, but what turned out to be broken china. He bent to squint down at the floor and saw it strewn with plates and cups, and this comforted him in the slightest.
When zombies made a mess it was incidental to their feeding. This mess had been done by humans, likely the soldiers from the Island, meaning there weren't going to be any 'live' zombies in the house. Still Neil was cautious and the smell had him nervous, though as he went room to room he grew somewhat used to it.
He found the source of the smell searing up from a couple of bloated bodies in the garage. The stench was so overwhelming that he gagged and went dizzy and shut the door again. Taking deep breaths to keep from vomiting, he went back into the house and stood in a hall until his stomach settled down. Wiping cold sweat from his forehead he took a towel down off a bathroom curtain where it had been left to dry ages ago and wrapped it about his face and went back to the garage to search, and among the bikes and the sleds and the boxes filled with odd junk he found something that had been overlooked: a compound bow and six arrows.
The arrows had him whistling. The tips were sharp as razors. That they were deadly there was no doubt, but against zombies he didn't know if they would be all that useful. Could an arrow pierce bone? It was a question that he didn't have an answer to. He had whistled at the arrows, but to the compound bow he grunted as he strained at the cable that ran circled about two pulleys—one at the top and one at the bottom of the bow—until his fingers ached.
“What the hell?” he whispered. What kind of bow was it that you couldn't draw back? Wondering if it had a safety, like a gun, he studied it closely, but there was nothing to indicate a safety and so he tried again, only this time he tucked his hand up into his sleeve so that the cable wouldn't bite as it did.
“Yes!” he said in a happy whisper as the cable came back. Strangely, the further he pulled the easier it became, so that when it was fully drawn it was nothing to hold steady. He decided to keep the bow, hoping that with a little practice it would come in handy.
Though the house had been long lived in, there wasn't more to it that Neil considered worth taking and so he left, leaving the out building to be explored by someone else. With the axe sticking out of his backpack, Neil continued his trek, flexing the bow at intervals, looking for an opportunity to use it.
Not a half hour later another girl zombie came shambling down to the river, ignoring Neil who had frozen in place near a bush
. He watched amazed as the creature actually drank from the water on all fours like a dog. This was a new phenomenon to him. So far he had only looked upon the zombies as something out of comic books that were created only to eat brains and frighten women into his arms. That it drank seemed absurdly unnatural to Neil Martin. In disgust he fitted an arrow into his bow, heaved back on the cable and let it loose with a satisfactory ffft. The arrow went into the river three feet from the zombie and Neil kicked at nothing in frustration.
The zombie didn't know where the arrow had come from. It only looked at the water, which had splashed a little in front of it. Neil got another arrow ready. “Hey,” he said, remembering not say yoo-hoo. “Hey you.”
This had the zombie's attention and Neil waited a couple of seconds as the thing got to its feet and presented him with a much better target. Neil even moved to his right so that in case of another miss he wouldn't lose a second arrow—which was very smart since the arrow whizzed past the beast harmlessly.
“Crap!” he said and grabbed a third arrow, but before he could fit it onto the cable he thought better of taking another shot and tugged out his axe instead. And only just in time. The zombie had been picking up speed as the ground beneath its feet had gone from mud to sand to hard packed earth.
In fact she was so fast that Neil didn't get the axe around in time and only hit the zombie on its arm with the side of the handle. And then the creature was on him like a rabid dog, biting and tearing, as maggots sloughed off its head to drop onto Neil's face and into his screaming mouth.
Chapter 35
Ram
Western Desert
Despite the death and the pain in her life, and despite the endless zombies that had them hiding or fighting with guns that burned to the touch, Julia saw the world as she hoped it would be instead of how it really was. She saw Cassie as just a wayward child who would come around eventually if given enough love, while in Ram she saw a man who could sit on his growing feelings without acting on them.
Indefinitely.
He tried to in all honesty, while Cassie tried in all dishonesty.
To Julia's face, Cassie had changed from a petulant demanding child to a girl aiming to please, but behind her back, she was vindictive and undermining. Cassie made it clear to Ram in word and deed that she would take over where Julia had left off when it came to sex, anytime he was ready. Once she had simply knelt in front of Ram with an invitingly open mouth.
“It'll pass,” Julia explained when he told her about it. “She has a need to act out.”
“Ok, so those are her needs, what about my needs?” Ram asked, feeling distinctly odd about saying it. He wasn't used to expressing his feelings beyond a grunt.
“Those are your wants, and I want them too,” she said, touching his arm. “We will have each other again, I promise. We just have to give it time.”
This mollified Ram—her words and the way she touched him so lightly. “It sure feels like a need to me, and a big one,” he joked, stepping closer so that he was right on top of her.
“You are currently fulfilling your most basic need,” she said, becoming clinical. She did this at times, retreating into the world of science, hiding behind five dollar words to avoid being human. That's how he saw it at least. She went on, pulling away emotionally and physically, “You have a hero complex. You don't value yourself unless you are protecting another. I saw it when I had the gun to my head, you changed right in front of my eyes. One second you were twitchy and your eyes were sort of lifeless and then in the next second you had pulled yourself together.”
“No, I don't think I have any complex,” Ram said, “You were in trouble. That's all. And why didn't I do anything to protect Cassie when she was being raped? And why did I leave those men back…back before? A hero would've stayed.”
She looked at him closely before saying, “Those men were men, and not just any men, they were warriors. Warriors don't need saving. And we both know how you think of Cassie, that she's tougher than she looks. Maybe I'm wrong. Unless there was someone else you were protecting before me. Someone who died?”
Shelton
“No one,” Ram said, looking away as if keeping an eye out for stiffs. “So what is my prognosis if I had this complex?”
“I don't know,” she said with a laugh, becoming herself again. “In the real world it could lead to neurosis or worse, but this isn't the real world any longer. Now it just may lead you to saving me. So don't look for me to cure you!”
Despite that it went against their mutual promise to “behave”, Ram leaned in for a quick kiss and then left holding her hand until distance parted their fingers. That was how their relationship grew. Secret looks, little touches when Cassie wasn't around, and knowing smiles when she was. Despite the lack of sex between them Ram had never felt closer to a woman.
They traveled in this way throughout the American southwest going from one tiny town to the next, eating into their food reserves and always finding just enough gas to make it one more day. Of weapons and ammo they were well stocked, having come upon a strange eight-wheeled military vehicle parked in the desert south of Albuquerque.
A soldier in dun colored battle fatigues stood outside it, while more sat within. Ram, sick with relief, hurried to them exclaiming, “Thank God! Am I glad to see you guys. We haven't seen another human so close…”
The standing soldier turned and its helmet wiggled oddly on its head. It had little flesh left on its face and so much of its scalp had been torn away that white skull was clearly visible. Ram's eyes went buggy at the sight and he froze in confusion as the zombie came at him. He would have died right there since he had left his M16 in the Bronco, but Julia, cool as the underside of the pillow, marched up quick and shot the creature in the face from five feet, making a hell of a mess.
Two more of the soldier zombies had to be destroyed as well, but it was worth it. In crates they unearthed were thousands of rounds of M16 ammunition. And better than that, in Ram's eyes was the SAW that had been strapped uselessly to one of the zombies.
“A machine gun?” Julia asked as Ram came out of the Stryker with it on his thick shoulder. “Let's hope it doesn't come to that.”
“If it does, hope won't save us, but a Squad Automatic Weapon just might.” He went to the Bronco and studied it for a while saying, “Hmmm.” And, “Maybe.”
“What you gonna do?” Cassie asked, sweat running down her face as she lugged the heavy ammo boxes to the back of the truck.
“I want to mount this on top, but I'm afraid I don't have either the tools or the skill. Well, what I really want, if I had my way, is for us to ditch the Bronco and take the Stryker,” he said this with a sigh, wondering how on earth zombies had killed three fully armed men in an armored personnel carrier.
“It didn't seem to help them,” Julia said as if reading his thoughts. “And, gas is already hard to come by.” She wasn't wrong in this either, as all military vehicles, Strykers were gas hogs and would leave them even more at the whim of fate. Fuel and clean water were the most valuable commodities in the desert. Even food was found here and there, though never in great amounts.
Because of the zombie menace in the larger cities the three avoided these, however, by their third day on the road they sipped the last of their water and they decided to chance Amarillo, in northern Texas. At one point it had been home to a quarter of a million people; not exactly a crammed to the hilt metropolis, yet still way too large when the zombie threat was assessed. Not willing to risk driving straight through the heart of the city they decided to slip by its northern suburbs first, only to find every Wal-Mart, Target, grocery, and convenience store had been looted long before. Even the homes were empty, save for the many zombies that is.
For the first time since they had met, the three worked as a team. Cassie would watch the street, while Julia and Ram searched from room to room. Singular zombies were dispatched by Ram, usually with a thrust of his wickedly sharp bayonet that he had affixed to the muzzle
of his M16.
If there was a herd, their plan was to run or hide, and this worked for the most part. They would scamper low around empty shelves and counters or sit in closets, waiting until the dead moved on, however twice the stiffs came too fast and the pair had to resort to firing their weapons. On both of these occasions the gunfire caused a swarm to coalesce around them that had to be seen to be believed.
The stiffs came out of nowhere and everywhere like roaches and Ram and Julia were hard pressed to make it back to the Bronco on both occasions. Sweating, and wild-eyed they would speed away only to slow after a few blocks and again creep along. The slower the car went the less the zombies seemed to care about its existence.
“This isn't working,” Ram said discouraged. So far, after two hours of searching and hiding and running, they had discovered a very stale box of triscuits and two cans of Mr Pib. Just then they were slumped down in the vehicle outside an office park where the streets were relatively empty.
“Why don't we try in there?” Cassie said, pointing at the three-story high brick office building.
“For what? Staplers?” Ram replied.
“I could use a desk lamp,” Julia said. “Or a computer to use as a paper weight.”
“Oh, yeah. I guess all theys got is junk,” Cassie said with a shrug. “It was a stupid idea.”
“It wasn't stupid at all,” Julia said. As always quick to prop the girl up. “Maybe they have something in there we could use.”
Cassie rolled her eyes. “Like what?”
Julia couldn't think of anything, but just then Ram imagined what the building would be like if there were actual people in it. What they'd be doing. What sort of work. What they'd be jawing over standing around the water cooler. Or where...he laughed all of a sudden.
“Water coolers!” he said excitedly. “How many offices have them? A lot I'm thinking.”
The Undead World (Book 1): The Apocalypse Page 25