He saw two men standing in the driveway with their hands up. Between them was the man initially struck by Mr. Poole. He was trying to sit up after having been knocked out cold. Lots of blood was on his face, visible in the fire light. Liam thought he heard men crying out on the lawn. He imagined there were some grievously injured attackers unable to surrender properly.
“Get on your knees, keep your hands up!” Phil was yelling out the front window. He had a serious look on his face as he studied the lawn.
“What do we do with these men? They obviously meant to do us harm,” Phil asked.
Victoria had helped Grandma back to her spot on the couch. Liam looked in her direction to confirm she was OK. He silently thought if she had been killed by these men, he'd have no mercy on them. As it was...
Liam responded. “I'm not sure we can just outright kill them. Maybe we could tie them up somehow and save them for the police when they come back?”
Victoria suggested they mark them with a branding iron and tell them they were being released, but they'd kill them if they ever turned up again. She'd seen that on television, but couldn't remember the show.
Phil was turned into the room at the moment more gunfire erupted from the front yard. Several quick pops went off. Liam turned around just in time to see Mel down the injured man. She then hurriedly went around to the remaining attackers and shot each one in the head as they tried to scramble away.
Phil just stood there, staring out.
Liam considered yelling for her to stop, but found it wouldn't come out. It was already over. The pair of women were down on the floor again, unaware who was shooting.
Phil recovered just as Mel finished the grisly business. “Mel just solved the problem for us. It looks like we take no prisoners.”
Liam couldn't tell if he was saying it with regret or pride.
Grandma was laying on her back, but in the dim light of the ever increasing conflagration across the street, Liam saw her make the sign of the cross. He wondered if she was praying for the deceased on the lawn, the soul of the executioner, or those in this room who now lived in an increasingly desperate world.
While looking out the window, Liam noticed movement near Poole's place across the street. A couple of men were standing in the shadows, looking toward Liam's house. Studying what went down? He couldn't really tell. Together they ran off into the dark of the woods over there.
Liam wondered if they just set the tone for the days ahead?
Out loud, he said, “Pray for us all, Grandma.”
2
While they were still alone in the living room, Liam, Victoria, Marty, and Phil were trying to answer the question whether what they just witnessed was necessary or wrong. In the few minutes they'd been hashing it over, no consensus emerged.
Grandma had the only answer they could all agree upon. “Maybe nothing is as simple as good and evil anymore. There is simply life or death.”
Liam recalled an earlier conversation with Victoria about living in a world where good people were forced to do bad things, but now he was less sure he could identify what those bad things might be. Staying alive and not worrying about those men searching them out to kill them later seemed pretty “good” in his book.
They were just about to join Melissa out on the driveway when they saw people running down the street, from their left to their right as they looked out the front window. A few were screaming wildly.
“What now?” Phil looked out the wide open window to see if he could see anything to explain the commotion. A few more people were running by, but nothing obvious was behind them.
“We better collect our people.” He yelled for Melissa to come inside.
Liam noticed there were fewer people in his yard now. No surprise there. The shootout had sent people scattering for safer areas. Several refugee bodies were left lying in the yard, none of them moving. Maybe a dozen or so people were still milling around, mostly on the side of the yard away from the driveway.
Liam moved back into the kitchen and was reminded of all the kids that had come through his door.
Melissa came in quickly from the garage, trailed by several of her shooters. She spoke to the parents in the kitchen, most of whom were carrying rifles slung over their shoulders. “Thank you for defending this house. I had no idea we'd be attacked so soon after approaching you guys, but I'm so glad we were able to work together.” Many of the parents stood quietly with their children, looking at Mel.
She sensed the uncomfortable atmosphere and guessed at their reasoning. “I know it seems harsh to kill those men, but trust me, there was no other way. The police aren't coming. We can't keep them prisoner forever. If we turned them loose today, they'd be back after us tomorrow to kill me; to kill your children. You saw how they killed that man. They were coming here to do that to all of us. I did what I had to do to protect these kids.” She motioned with her hands, sweeping across all the kids in the room. “Things are different now. You have to recognize that if you want to keep you and your families alive in this chaos.”
It seemed to settle the room somewhat, though Liam was troubled that he was adjusting to what she did, almost without question. His brain had gone too long without sleep so he attributed his newfound acceptance of the changing moral climate to exhaustion.
He spoke up. “We have a new problem. People are running down the street as if something is chasing them. It could mean more bad guys are up the hill, but they aren't stopping to ask for help, so it's more likely they are running from zomb—the infected.”
He didn't like to use that word in the company of kids.
“But we don't know anything for sure.”
He knew these folks had just saved his house, and they did it to protect their own kids. He couldn't very well ask them to go back out on the lawn. “Please make yourselves comfortable. This is my home, but you're welcome to plop your kids down anywhere you feel safe. I recommend the basement, in case there's more shooting, but we don't have any doors down there so if you want to get out of the house in a hurry, you may want to stay on this floor.”
Always think of escape.
“Just be ready with your guns.”
He had put his own pistol back in his waistband. He'd have to see if he could scare up another proper holster for it. Victoria had the one his dad gave him. He also considered getting one of his dad's guns.
When he went back into the front room, the situation on the street had already snowballed. Now there were tons of people running, and the source of their fright was evident by the shambling infected moving quickly down the street. Many of the zombies reached Poole's house and halted. They seemed agitated—or entertained—by the fire, even as they moved themselves too close to it. Some were catching their clothes and hair on fire as their numbers increased. More were coming.
No one was left on the front lawn. A few of the last people had come into Liam's house, along with most of the kids and their parents, but most of the survivors on his lawn had taken off running during the gunfight and never returned. The wave of fleeing people from up the street swept away any stragglers.
“Should we be running?” Liam really wanted to know.
In a quiet voice, Phil replied, “I think we're better off here for now. We have lots of ammo and a good defensive position. We can't all get in a car and drive off and leave our—your house—with all its belongings. We have too many young and old. I think, as long as we're quiet, they may focus on the people running down the street and that fire over there.”
“What happens at daybreak?” Victoria had a good point. Sunrise was only a couple hours away.
“I guess we'll burn one bridge at a time.”
It was really all they could do. Liam felt bad for the people running outside, but there was nothing anyone inside the house could do for them. The fire was giving survivors some time to escape, though he knew the zombies were relentless.
They had almost begun to relax. Then, BANG! A gunshot from the kitchen.
Liam ran to the kitchen, and was dismayed to see his sliding glass back door had been blown to smithereens. A man with a rifle was still pointing it out the open space. Many of the kids had begun crying and the parents were herding them in various directions away from the blown door.
Another zombie poked around the corner and the man expended another round in it. The shock sent the kids further into hysteria, and even Liam felt his legs quiver a little. There was nothing to stop the zombies from walking in his wide-open back door.
3
After the second zombie was put down, no others showed up, so Liam chanced a look out back. It was difficult to see much with the weird shadows being thrown by the fire across the street, but his backyard appeared empty of any infected.
“We're good for now. We need to secure this door.”
The kitchen table was a rectangle, so they turned it sideways and set it against space where they back door had previously been. They laid it longways, so they could shoot over the top. But he'd seen what happens when too many dead stack up. If they swarmed his back door, he knew they'd eventually create so many fallen bodies the others would simply climb over them and into the kitchen. It all depended on how much ammo they had.
Lots.
Victoria came into the kitchen.
“Victoria, would you mind taking Grandma downstairs, along with all the kids? Then come back up. We'll guard this door together.”
Marty was standing in the hallway, so she heard her name. “Liam, don't you do anything silly now. I'm just an old woman. If things get bad, you get all these people to safety.”
“I'll be safe. I promise. We're going to protect you all.”
Now Phil and Melissa were in the kitchen. It wasn't long before Victoria returned from her chores. They were standing in the open space where the table had been.
Phil was the first to speak. “I think we can defend this house against almost any number of zombies, at least in the short term. If we kill enough of them at the entrances, they won't be able to get in the house at all. But, if we kill a massive quantity of zombies we may have other problems with so many decaying bodies so close to us. While shooting an infinite number of them appeals to my baser side, we have to consider the long-term implications of killing indiscriminately.”
Liam sensed something between Melissa and Phil in that statement, but he wasn't sure what it might be.
“For now, all we can do is lay low and hope the gunshots didn't attract more of those things. There are so many guns going off right now, it might not have been noticed.”
Though his ears were ringing madly, Liam could hear guns up and down the street. How many of the infected were out in the darkness?
The plan was to keep the kids and the older folks down in the basement, and those with guns would stay on the main floor. They decided the best course of action was to be silent and hope the zombies passed them by. Killing zombies is easy, but cleaning up the dead would probably ruin the small house forever. They needed the infected to keep on moving down the street.
For the couple hours until dawn, the fire across the street kept most of the zombies occupied. Liam was able clean up, get some food, and get some sleep in the front room while Phil kept watch out the front, and Victoria and the others kept watch out back. He felt far from refreshed, but any sleep was better than none.
“The infected are beginning to break up across the street.”
When Liam looked out the front, he was shocked to see so many standing there. He estimated there were hundreds of them surrounding the much-reduced fire in Poole's former house. The periphery of the zombie horde was peeling off to search for new distractions. Liam knew what that meant.
There were a few zombies wandering around his own yard. He suspected they were around back too. Even though it was a warm June morning, he shivered at the sight of so many horribly disfigured and bloody people standing so close to his home. In all the books he'd read on zombies, he never once pictured them here on his street.
What did I think would happen?
Liam felt he should have anticipated they would eventually find his sanctuary. Just from what he could see, there were a couple dozen wandering his way. Could they sense there were people close to them? Could they smell them? Were they hearing something inside the house?
Trouble always seems to find me.
4
Once again, Marty was asleep. Had she known she would return to her dream world and see her husband's doppelganger, she probably would have tried to stay awake. He always brought portents of trouble. Or maybe everything which happened to them now was bad; it wasn't just him.
This dream found Marty and Al on a dark forest road, walking together. The great pines on each side blocked out the stars, though one or two winked at her from between the big branches.
“Hello, Marty. After our last meeting, I was afraid what I showed you was too much for you to endure. I know it was one of your darkest emotions. I'm sorry for that. But I'm pleased to see we are here now. This is just as important to witness as was Liam's green car on the bridge. We're coming to it up ahead.”
Rather than argue, Marty simply looked where he told her to look and walked where he told her to walk.
“Nothing to say, my dear?”
Marty was tempted to give him the silent treatment. It was something she rarely did with her real husband, so it didn't feel right doing it to this simulation of him, but his riddles and ill-tidings were wearing on her. The last vision he showed her of Victoria was madness. In the end, it was her indecision which passed for her silence.
“Fair enough. For now, we'll just walk. We have only a short way to go. But I want you to know you are far exceeding my hopes for you. When I first became aware of you, I admit I had my reservations—even knowing your potential—because of your age. But it wasn't long before I saw you in action with your Liam to know you have more depth than even I could see. Your perseverance after seeing Victoria die was the clincher. Now I'm confident you'll be able to do what I'd hoped.”
She couldn't resist such a juicy statement.
“And what exactly did you hope I'd do?”
“Find the cure, of course! As I've said before, your first task is to assemble your team in this place to properly wage the kind of sustained battle you must endure to see this to the end. We are doing this in a series of small steps, much like a computer program, if I might use but one allusion, to achieve the desired result.”
“You know, don't you? You speak of computers. Of all the people on Earth you could have selected—” She walked while inhaling deeply, “I'm probably the only person on Earth who has never touched a computer. There have to be lots of people with computers near the source of the plague who could do a better job than me at stopping it? Soldiers. Scientists. Heck, even someone a little younger. Why didn't you take your magic show to one of them?”
“All I can say is there aren't many people left alive who know where the plague came from or who made it. I didn't have a long list of candidates, and very, very few of them could survive...this place. Even my best guesswork—and I hate guessing—suggests there are only a handful of those candidates left alive. Call them 'source vectors.' As heroes go, you are actually one of the people closest to one of those source vectors.”
“Hayes.”
“Yes, Hayes. As a contact in the CDC, I believe he's important in finding clues to how the virus was made, how it replicates, and how it can be stopped. My research is incomplete because he is a remarkably secretive person.”
“Can't you just ask him? You seem to have a lot of powers. Go into his dreams and Scrooge the buh-jeezus out of him like you do to me.”
“I have access to a lot of information about the infection, but even I don't know everything, nor can I directly reach out to someone like Hayes. I do believe a solution is out there, a cure, but it is against my directive to give you any information that could change the natural course of events. I can't draw you a map, for instance, and say
go find the X.”
“That would save us all a lot of time, and probably save a lot of lives.”
“Always thinking of others. I respect that. I really do. But if I interfered now, I would become too much a part of this event. And my directives forbid such interference. Liam would describe this as something akin to my prime directive. That is why you are my champion in this crisis!”
“Oh my. Lord help us all if I'm the best champion you could find.”
“You'll do just fine, Marty.”
They rounded a bend to find a truck parked just off the road inside the coal-black canopy. Marty could hear screams from inside, muffled by the closed windows. She paused when she heard the noise, unsure what she should do. She wanted to help, but she had no weapons. Little strength. Not even a walker. Al took her hand and walked them both closer.
“As before, I'm truly sorry you have to bear witness to such evil, but this is one facet of your—” Al walked for a long time, saying nothing to finish that sentence. Marty was just about to remind him he was talking…
“—calibration.”
They were next to the truck. Some kind of SUV. Dark color. Lights off. The screams were diminishing, but crying could now be heard. Marty could imagine the victim having her blood drained from her, weeping helplessly as it happened.
“Why are you showing me someone getting assaulted by a zombie? As horrific as that may be, I've seen more than my fair share already.” She tried to pretend she was being brave, but she knew Al could read her mind. She was terrified.
“Brace yourself, Marty. You aren't going to like this.”
“I never do. Let's get on with it.” The crying was growing louder. But also—something else.
“I'm sorry for having to lay this on you but this is very much like a chess game. Good vs. evil. Dark vs. light. That sort of thing. You are my white queen, and you should know the truth of your adversaries. But first you should know the absolute truth of your allies. Their souls. It is this truth which will bind you, fortify you against evil.”
Since The Sirens Box Set | Books 1-7 Page 39