by T. W. Brown
As if to add credence to his words, there was a flash in the sky and a sharp peal of thunder. Kevin reached for his cargo shorts and then went about securing his prosthetic foot. Meanwhile, Catie hurried about gathering wood and piling it up under the initial protection of the thick trees that provided ample coverage until she could get the tarp over them.
Kevin chuckled as he set the tent up. All his life he had hated camping as a leisure activity. He had been an avid attendee of survivalist camps in the area, but he had not seen that as camping; that had been preparation.
Just as the first heavy drops began to fall, the couple retreated under the large blue tarp and warmed their hands by the fire. By morning, the storm had passed and they broke camp with a destination in mind.
By midday, they came to the ruins of a town that was under a fine sheet of green. Several of the buildings and homes had either collapsed or were on the verge. Dark shapes littered the ground in places where bodies had fallen and been left to the elements and local carrion eaters.
Kevin marveled at how fast nature was coming back. The documentaries had it all wrong. Unchecked, nature would reclaim this place within the next five years. Sure, there would be evidence that humans once called this home, but the flora was making fast work as vines pushed into cracks and climbed over every surface.
A soft moan brought his focus back to the present. A lone walker stumbled around a corner. It paused and then oriented itself on the couple. As Catie walked over and shoved her own steel-tipped hiking stick into its face and then returned to him, he was amused at how little zombies mattered anymore.
When they had first appeared, of course the reaction had been all wrong and humanity followed the predictable path into near extinction. These days, a zombie was no more frightening than a skunk. You were not afraid of them, but you did not take them completely for granted.
As far as zombies were concerned, they were now only a problem when you encountered one of the massive herds that milled about the country. It was the living that posed the real threat these days. And towns were always something to be entered with caution. Some were full of simple, hard-working folks, but others were warlike mobs, or lawless societies where might made right.
By nightfall, they had come to a ridge that allowed them to see the distant glow of lights of three small communities. Kevin noted that they were almost in the shape of a triangle if you drew a line connecting them. The one they had seen as they arrived a couple of days ago was at the bottom of that triangle and to their right.
It was about an hour before sunrise when Catie shook Kevin. “You need to wake up!”
Kevin batted her hand away and rolled over, but she was insistent. Finally, Kevin sat up and rubbed his eyes. They were in a hammock suspended about thirty feet above the ground. It was always best to be extra secure near settlements. That would be where you found the most zombie activity since they are drawn to sound.
It did not take him long to see what the reason was behind her waking him at such an ungodly hour. The settlement that made the top point in the triangle was on fire.
“That puts things on hold,” Kevin sighed.
“You think maybe the storm caused it? There was an awful lot of lightning last night.” Catie scrunched in close and pulled their sleeping bag up around her shoulders.
“Anything is possible.” Kevin knew that Catie didn’t believe that theory any more than he, but there was no use in getting all worked up over something they had no part in or control over.
As the sun rose, Kevin and Catie sat in the perch their hammock provided and scanned the area with binoculars. Nothing looked out of order. There were no large mobs of the undead or hints of roving bands that might be raiding the area.
“Still want to go down there?” Kevin asked as he slowly swept his gaze in a wide left-to-right pattern searching for anything that might be the cause of the fire that still burned in that village.
“Maybe they need you now more than ever,” Catie answered with grim determination.
Kevin was no fool. He knew why Catie was so behind this. He could even see her reasoning, but this felt too abrupt. There were plenty of smaller settlements that were not a world away from the place they had called home all these years. But then again, maybe that was precisely the point. They climbed down and rolled up their gear.
“Let’s get down there and see what is what,” Catie said as she slung her pack up and onto her shoulders, giving the straps a tug to cinch them up a bit.
The couple started down the hill and stopped when they reached the banks of a river. Just like the days when man first began to populate the Earth, settlements were usually next to a ready and clean water source.
The waterways had become much cleaner now that man was not dumping everything into them. Still, nobody was brave enough to risk not boiling the water first. Many of the major rivers near big cities were almost worse off now than before as the factories and such fell and sent all the toxins that remained into the water either directly or through runoff.
Still, out in what had been the sticks before the zombie apocalypse, things were noticeably cleaner. What was even more peculiar, Kevin could notice the difference in the smell of the air within an hour or so of leaving a camp or town. And, despite dismissing it at first as just his imagination, he could smell them before they arrived. To put it bluntly, humanity stunk.
They were just crossing the river at a flimsy rope bridge when a voice called out, freezing them in a very vulnerable spot.
“Stop where you are and state your business!” a man’s voice growled from somewhere in the brush just on the other side of the gently rolling waters.
“Just a pair of travelers,” Kevin called out in response, making it a point of raising his hands to show he was unarmed. Besides, whoever this was did not need to know that it was Catie who was the more dangerous of the two.
“And where you travelin’ from?”
The deep southern slur in the man’s voice reminded Kevin of the character from Deliverance that wore the cap and did those horrible things to poor Ned Beatty. There was something decidedly unfriendly sounding about this person.
“From out west, the Dakota territories,” Kevin answered after deciding that it really did not make a difference if he revealed that bit of information. It wasn’t like whoever this was could just up and launch an attack.
“C’mon, man, you take me for a fool?”
“Excuse me?” Kevin asked with a touch of confusion.
“Ain’t nobody come all the way out here from that far. Hell, you would have to have been on the road for—”
“Just over eleven months,” Kevin interrupted. “And I am not trying to take you for a fool. That is the truth.”
“And what brings y’all the way out here?” the man challenged.
“My family had a cabin in these parts back in the day. I came to see if maybe my mom or sister might have made it and perhaps still be living there.”
“I’m terribly sorry.” A man emerged from the bushes off to Kevin’s left, two more coming out as well, and then four more to the right. “I take it the place was empty.”
“Sort of.” Kevin let that answer hang in the air for a second to sink in. As it did, he saw knowing bobs of the head.
“Well, if’n you’re tellin’ the truth, I still need to ask what business brings you down here,” the man finally said after a moment of silence that seemed to be more out of polite respect than anything else.
“We saw three towns from where we camped last night,” Catie spoke up, deciding that she needed to assert that she was on equal footing. There was a trend in some communities to treat women almost as possessions or second-class citizens. It was always best to clear those sorts of thing up early.
“Also saw that there is a fire burning at one of them,” Kevin added. The faces on the men standing on the other side of the lazy river all reacted in some manner. He saw a mix of anger, agitation…and fear. “Look, we can understand if we
aren’t welcome at the moment,” Kevin continued when none of them spoke.
“Actually, it might be best if you were to come with us back to Falling Run…that’s our little town,” the man who was obviously the spokesman of the group said.
Kevin glanced at Catie who gave a slight shrug. He turned back to the man and his group. “Okay.”
“Ain’t you gonna take their weapons first?” a younger man asked as Kevin and Catie finished crossing the bridge.
“We can stop and go back.” Kevin came to an abrupt halt just as he was about to step off the bridge. “We don’t give up our things. If that is a problem, then we will gladly turn around and leave.”
“Name’s Clint,” the man who had originally been talking to them said, casting a nasty look over his shoulder. “The youngster is Jess. And no,” Clint said the word “no” loudly to emphasize it, “we won’t be takin’ your weapons.”
“But—” the young man introduced as Jess began to protest.
“We ain’t got time for this, boy,” another man snarled.
“Follow us and we will explain on the way.” Clint motioned with his arm for them to come.
Kevin was now more curious than anything else. He jumped from the bridge and turned to offer a hand to Catie. No surprise, she ignored his hand and jumped down beside him with a flip of her hair and a withering glance. The couple hurried and fell in step with the group of men.
“About three weeks ago, folks over at Rock Ridge, that’s the place you saw burning, they had some sort of illness hit them pretty hard. The problem was that Rock Ridge has the highest number of immune citizens. Over half of their population is known to be immune from the bite. Actually, lots of folks from our little town and the folks at Red Hill move to Rock Ridge when they find out they are immune—” Clint explained, but then Kevin had to interrupt.
“Is that still a common occurrence? The part about finding out if you are immune? I mean, I don’t know about here, but from what we have seen, the zombies are sort of coming together in larger and larger herds. The days of being bitten are almost as rare as a shark attack used to be back in the day.” Kevin saw the expressions on the faces of his “hosts” as they all reacted to his question. Something was up.
“Yeah…” Clint let that word hang in the air for a moment. “You see, word got out a few months ago that the folks at Rock Ridge were offering to supposedly test folks for immunity. They said that it was a matter of a simple injection.”
“Let me guess,” Catie came to a stop, crossing her arms across her chest, “they were injecting people with the infection. What did they use? Zombie blood?”
“That is what we reckon,” Clint agreed. “Only, I guess not everybody there was too keen on what was happening. One of the folks from Rock Ridge came down to our little town as well as well as Red Hill. They told us that there was a plan brewing at Rock Ridge to systematically wipe out all of the non-immune by infecting everybody.”
“They was gonna put zombie blood in our water!” Jess blurted.
After a nasty look and somebody giving the young man an elbow to the ribs, Clint continued. “That is basically the short of it. They was gonna infect the population of both towns and then scoop up everybody that was left. Said something about wanting to create a race of folks that could actually stand a chance of survival.”
“Master race,” Kevin muttered.
“Yeah…that’s sorta what we been sayin’ around here,” Clint said with a bitter tone.
“So then I take it somebody from either your town or over at Red Hill started that fire?” Catie asked.
“Actually…no.” Clint stopped and turned to face the pair. “The past year, the Rock Ridge folks have been upping their security. It had reached the point where we were preparing to hightail it out of this place and find a new home.”
“We’re just farmers,” one of the other men spoke up. “The folks at Rock Ridge are a damned army.”
“Or were,” Jess pointed out.
“So then what or who started the fire?” Kevin asked.
“That’s just it…we don’t know. A group of men arrived a few days ago on horseback. They asked to speak to our mayor and after they left, the mayor said that we were not leaving. When we asked why, he said that he was not at liberty to say, but then he added that nobody was allowed to leave the town until further notice.”
“And that notice came after the fire?” Kevin asked.
“Nope, but a few of us decided that something was afoot, so we made the decision to come out and take a look around after we heard the explosion.”
Kevin hadn’t heard any explosion. Obviously Catie had since she was nodding.
“So why were you down by the river?” Catie asked. “That’s south…the explosion and fire is to the north.”
Once again the men grew silent, and for the first time, Kevin realized that these men had formed a bit of a circle formation and the men were keeping their eyes open for something.
“We thought we saw—” Clint began, but the thunder of hooves cut him off.
Everybody froze. With the coming of dawn, a light mist was swirling, coupled with the smoke in the air from the fire less than two miles away, and it added a dreamlike quality to the vision as it unfolded.
Five black horses emerged through a small clearing in the dense foliage. The men were dressed in black as well and each had a gunnysack over his head with eye holes cut into them. A piece of coarse hemp rope was in place around their necks to complete the look.
“Whoa!” one of the men bellowed, raising his hand and bringing the group to a halt.
There was a single moment where it was as if everybody was frozen in place. Then, like a flock of quail flushed from the brush, everybody scattered. Kevin grabbed Catie’s hand and dove for a steep embankment that would likely spill any rider who might try to navigate it on horseback; provided that they could actually get the animal to attempt it in the first place.
Tossing his walking stick down, Kevin allowed his body to fall sideways and at a slight feet-first angle. Catie stayed on her feet, hopping like a mountain goat as large puddles of loose earth fell away under each impact as she jumped her way to the bottom.
Once they both reached the bottom safely, Catie had Kevin’s walking stick and thrust it into his hands as she led the way into some thick ferns and undergrowth that lined the edge of the river at this particular location. Kevin mistakenly thought that she intended to cross back over, but she yanked him back and down to the ground before he could exit their cover.
He turned to see her with a finger to her lips. The two of them remained still, and that allowed them to better hear what was happening just above them.
“Y’all can come out,” a voice yelled. “We ain’t here for none of you. We just here to take care of them freaks up in that Rock Ridge settlement.”
“Yeah, y’all is plenty safe. We just finishin’ God’s work and takin’ them ‘mune folk down,” another voice called.
Kevin felt his blood run cold.
He knew all too well the issues that some people had with those who showed immunity to the bite of a zombie: people like him…like Catie. If these folks were attacking the residents at Rock Ridge solely based on them being immune to the bite, then he and Catie were in the wrong place.
“Come on out, you ain’t got nothin’ to fear from us!” another voice shouted, this one female.
“Yeah, unless you one of them mune-ites,” a voice whispered from just above where Kevin and Catie hid, the horse stomping angrily at the ground as if in support of its rider’s sentiment.
That settled it for Kevin, he and Catie were getting out of here as fast as possible. Whether it was some long-standing issue, or something new brought on by the alleged plans of the people of Rock Ridge, this was no place for the two of them.
“I’m comin’ out, don’t kill me,” Clint’s voice wavered as he announced his intention.
Kevin could hear the horse above him shift just a bit. Dirt
came raining down on them.
“Where’s the rest of your group?” the female voice demanded. “We only make this offer one time. You come out, we make sure you ain’t one of them damned mune-ites, and then you are free to go.”
“What do you mean by making sure we ain’t one of them…did you say ‘mune-ites’?” Clint asked.
“Mune-ites, munies, call ‘em what you like. You know what we are talkin’ about,” the first voice said with a harsh seriousness in his tone that left no room for debate or discussion.
“Ain’t none of us one of them,” Clint retorted, seemingly unperturbed about the severe tone with which he was being addressed.
“Then you won’t mind if we are not willing to simply take your word for it,” the female voice of the riders scoffed.
Gripping Catie’s hand, Kevin gave a slight tug. When she resisted, he leaned in close, his lips brushing her ear.
“If we stay here…”
Catie turned, the realization of what he was hinting at suddenly putting a crease on her forehead. Kevin pointed toward an opening, and she nodded and led the way. As they reached the edge of this particular area of cover, Kevin heard somebody let out a yelp.
“That there is a bite scar!” somebody roared.
There was another series of shouts and then a cry of pain. The sounds of angry protests mixed with heated threats and warnings. However, one phrase came through loud and clear from Clint.
“Why’d you go and kill him? He weren’t with them folks at Rock Ridge!”
Kevin could not hear the response, but he didn’t need to; he had a good idea what these riders were all about. Catie hunched down low and clung to the edge of all the greenery that was thankfully in abundance as they followed the uneven meanderings of the river.
Once he felt that he could at least speak in a whisper without giving away their presence, Kevin tugged on Catie’s hand and turned her to face him. “Our best bet is to get back over that ridge.”
Catie nodded and shot a glance over Kevin’s shoulder. “They killed one of those people.”
Kevin knew that tone. Catie was not somebody who could let certain things go. It was in her nature to protect the weak and stand up for those who might not be able to stand up for themselves.