This Rotten World | Book 4 | Winter of Blood

by Morris, Jacy

  Then he was spinning and being dragged down the street with an arm over Rudy's and Amanda's shoulders. His men turned to stare at him in concern, pausing to make sure their leader was ok. "What are you waiting for?" he bellowed. "Move your asses."

  The shot from his pistol had been unmuffled, and he could still hear the faint ringing in his ears. How far could the sound of a gunshot carry? No background noise, dry air, a 9mm handgun… shit. He might have just alerted every Annie within a mile that lunch was on.

  He cursed with every step, at his own stupidity and at the pain in his hip. It flared with every jostle, every slip of boot as the snow compacted underneath him. When they were a block away from the Fred Meyer, he attempted to walk on his own, and he could, but just barely, and only with the proper amount of swearing.

  His soldiers looked back at him periodically, checking to make sure that he was still there.

  Epps called back to him, "Where are we going, sir?"

  He wished he had an answer. He wished he wasn't in so much pain. Then maybe he would have had an actual good answer instead of the one he gave. "We're going to go up to the next major cross street, and then we're going to head west.

  That was good enough for Epps. He turned around, and they kept up a steady pace. They would have to switch people out if they were going to make any real time. There was no way Rudy and Amanda could drag his ass to the Oregon coast, some 70 miles away. It was going to be a long day. Tejada looked up at the sky. The sun hid behind the gray clouds, casting a silvery light upon the world. I'll see your ass tomorrow. I swear it, you big, yellow bastard.

  Chapter 5: Apocalypse Anonymous

  Joan placed the back of her hand to Katie's forehead. Her skin was burning up. Katie sat in a rickety chair to the side of the bed Joan reclined on. If it wasn't for the pain in her leg, she would have switched positions with the woman in a heartbeat and forced Katie to rest. She looked like she needed it more than Joan did.

  "Tell me again what happened."

  "I was out there, and then I just had a flash of heat in my shoulder. Then I began to burn up, to get like really fucking hot."

  "Was there any pain?" Joan asked.

  "No. I was just exhausted, and my head started to feel funny, and I was hot."

  Joan sat back on the bed, eyeing the scar tissue in Katie's shoulder. It sounded like an infection of some sort. The darkness around the scar tissue concerned Joan the most. It looked like dead flesh, black and gray, and not something that anyone would want to see on their body.

  "Do you think the baby will be ok?" Katie asked.

  I'm not sure that either of you is going to be ok. "You'll be fine," Joan said. "You both will. All you need to do is rest." Joan had no way of knowing if this was true or not, but it was better to stay positive than to say, "I have absolutely no idea what is going on."

  A fevered sweat clung to Katie's waxy skin, and she looked as if she was going to pass out at any moment. She spoke as one who was half-asleep and not aware of what they were saying.

  "I hope it's a boy," Katie said dreamily. "I had a boy once. Did you know that?"

  Katie swayed in the rickety wooden chair, and Joan could see what was going to happen. "Dez! Can you come in here?" she called.

  Dez muttered a few swear words, and then she was there.

  "What is it?" she said.

  At that moment, Katie fell over on her side. Dez, without thinking, moved to catch her and prevent her from crashing into the ground.

  "Lay her down on the bed," Joan said. She struggled to move off of the bed herself, grabbing her spear to leverage herself up and off the sagging bed. Pain shot through her leg, but she didn't have time for the pain. She hobbled to the chair as Dez struggled with Katie's limp body.

  Dez managed to lift the top half of Katie's unconscious body onto the bed, and then lifted her legs up. Katie didn't stir or wake at all.

  Joan used the butt of the spear to hop around the bed and come to the right side where she could get a better look at Katie's wound. She pressed her hand to the wound. It felt like fire.

  "Shit," she said. It was her official diagnosis.

  "What's wrong with her?" Dez asked.

  "I wish I knew."

  Joan stood, chewing her lip and wishing she had anything at her disposal besides her own two hands. A lab, a thermometer, another dozen or so doctors with more experience than her, any of them would do nicely.

  "She gonna die?" Dez asked, turning to her with those haunting green eyes. They were circled with bags, and Dez didn't look so hot herself.

  "I don't know."

  "Well, Jesus fuck, what do you know?"

  Joan looked hard at Dez. She saw the girl for what she was, damaged, traumatized, and she bit back a harsh response. "We're just going to have to keep an eye on her."

  "She's gonna die in the middle of the night and turn into one of those things."

  Joan had considered the possibility, but she didn't think so. Whatever was making Katie ill was taking its time about it. "I don't think so."

  "Now, if you said 'know,' then I might feel a little more convinced. But 'think' doesn't cut it for me."

  "Fine, then I know so." Dez regarded her with a cold, calculating look.

  "No one leaves her side," Dez said. "One of us needs to be with her at all times."

  Joan nodded. "We can't tell anyone else. None of the others can know. They'll want to kill her."

  "Fuck 'em," Dez said. "They didn't lift a finger to help me. If this goes ass up, I don't care what happens to them."

  Joan shared her sentiment to a certain degree, but she didn't actually want any of the others to die. There weren't enough people in the world for that. Every life was important now. But Katie's life was the one she most cared about. She knew her, had survived with her, had even seen glimpses of the person she could be. Beneath her cold, almost sociopathic exterior was someone who loved hard. She didn't show it, but Joan knew the feelings were there. How else could she explain the depths she had gone to in order to save Clara from certain death. She had risked it all for her best friend, and though Katie hadn't pulled off the daring rescue, she had tried as hard as she could.

  "It's agreed. No one gets in here."

  Dez nodded, and Joan pressed a hand to Katie's forehead. Still warm. With her leg sending wave after wave of nauseating pain to her brain, she asked Dez to bring her the chair so she could sit and wait… and think.

  ****

  Theresa, Tammy, and Liz sat around the campfire, just as they had done when the men were still alive. They missed their men, but they didn't talk about it much anymore. They were gone, buried, their graves hidden underneath the snow, marked only by river rocks that Tammy had arranged into a cross.

  Tammy was the religious one, which only made sense. She was the type that would believe anything if you told her it was true.

  "What do you think they're doing in there?" Liz asked.

  Theresa glanced at Liz from the corner of her eye. She couldn't look her full in the face on most occasions. That thick hairy mole on her face made her stomach turn for some reason. She was a good person. She listened. She did what she was told, and you could count on her. She wasn't bad in the sack either.

  "How should I know? They could be having an orgy for all I know."

  "Ewww… you think they would?" Liz asked.

  Liz didn't sound averse to the idea, even though she pretended to be. Tammy blushed red. Tammy knew that sometime over the last few weeks, Theresa and Liz had gotten closer. Tammy knowing didn't bother Theresa at all. It was a different world now, and one had to find comfort where they found it. One day, Theresa was sure that Tammy would find her way into her bed, and she wouldn't kick her out.

  When she had worked at Appleby's, she had worked with several lesbian employees. They were people just like her, trying to make their way through the world, trying to find anything to make it worth living in. If that thing came with a vagina instead of a dick, she wasn't anyone to judge.r />
  She had been one of those people once, trying to find a light in the darkness. She thought she had found it at the camp, among like-minded people who just wanted to make it through this disaster. She had been with Reed and Chad since the beginning–– since they came back to the trailer park with a frazzled Dez Bronson in tow.

  Chad had called a meeting, gathering up all of the trailer park residents and offering them his vision of survival. Not everyone had agreed with his plan. Most of the residents of the park walked away. Why wouldn't they? Who was Chad that anyone would follow him? He was just a fieldhand, a handyman, a person struggling along in the world just like her. But she looked at the red stains on the soles of his boots, and she knew that what he was offering was a chance to keep living, and to be honest, she had a crush on the man. She knew she couldn't compete with Dez in the looks department, but she had her ways of making men like her, for a short time at least.

  In the end, they had packed up their trailers, one by one, driving them along backroads and parking them around the abandoned ranger station. They had built a life out there, the men hunting, the women cooking. They spent their nights trying to get pregnant. It was a good time, but it didn't fulfill her.

  She placed a hand on her belly. The baby inside had been more active lately. Those movements kept her from going crazy. Liz and Tammy were fine folk, decent, if a little dull, but it was the baby that kept her company at night. In the darkness of the trailer with the muffled snores of Liz and Tammy in the other room, she would lay on her bed, the palm of her hand on her belly. She would imagine what type of child grew inside her. Who would that baby be in this new world? Would they be a leader? A survivor? A hunter?

  Then sometimes her mind would wander, and she would wonder what would have happened to that baby in the old world. What would that baby's life have been like growing up in a trailer park with a single mom who worked at Appleby's and occasionally liked to get rip-roaring drunk? Ok, not occasionally. Theresa liked to think she would have been able to put the drinking to the side if she had a baby, but she knew that wasn't entirely true.

  Her drinking was the entire reason she was a waitress at Appleby's who lived in a trailer park. She had her first sip in middle school with Sarah, her longtime friend. After that, she would steal from her parents and get drunk with Sarah every weekend. When they caught her with vodka in her water bottle at school, everyone told her she had a problem. But she was a teenager; she didn't listen.

  As Theresa got older and more out of control, her parents had basically given up on her. She flunked out of high school. She was too busy with boys and booze, and weed had become sort of fun to smoke as well. Most of her money from her waitressing gig went to alcohol. Most of her tips went towards buying weed. A trailer was all she could afford. But she lied to herself; she lied and made herself believe she was happy.

  The first few weeks at the ranger station hadn't been so bad. There had still been beer then. There had still been some hard alcohol too, a couple fifths of whiskey and vodka. But when the liquor dried up, that's when life had gotten harder. She had become ill with alcohol withdrawal symptoms. She liked to think of those times as the time she had enrolled in AA, Apocalypse Anonymous, where there was only one-step to quitting– not having anything to drink. It was a hell of a way to quit drinking.

  The throwing up was the worst. Being stone-cold sober and throwing up was not a fun deal. She had thrown up plenty of times over the course of her life, and while it was never fun, the haze of alcohol made it tolerable somehow. Throwing up while sober and nauseous with a headache and hands so shaky that you couldn't even hold a lighter to light your cigarette, well, that was torture.

  When Chad had proposed his plan to knock up everyone at the ranger station, she had gone right along with it, even convincing Tammy and a couple of other girls, who were dead now, to get on board. She would do anything to take her mind off of just how terrible she felt.

  She had only slept with Chad a couple of times, but he had been such a gentleman about it. He had made her feel wanted, desired, though she was covered in her own sweat and shaking from alcohol withdrawal. She was sad when the sessions stopped, when she had discovered she was pregnant, but she would share a smile every now and then with Chad. He was a good person, in her opinion, and he shouldn't have been taken out the way he was.

  But he had left her a gift, the child in her belly, a child who would never know alcohol, who would never know its father.

  Theresa smiled, thinking of who the child would become. Then she placed her hand on her belly, waiting to feel the baby move. The fire crackled in the pit as the sun turned orange and the shadows grew.

  She could overlook what those women had done to Chad and the other men… for a while. But sooner or later, someone was going to have to pay for the fact that her baby would grow up without a dad. The thought cheered her up, and it flooded through her chest like the warmth from a shot of vodka.

  "What are you smiling about?" Tammy asked.

  "Nothing… just smiling," she said.

  Chapter 6: I'm Too Old for This Shit

  They walked down the middle of the snow-blanketed street. They couldn't afford to twist an ankle by stepping off the road around the edges. There were no more snow-plows, no more de-icer, no salt. The roads were thick with snow, and it still fell from the sky.

  The snow came up to Epps' shin now. Bill Epps hated cold weather with a passion. He hated being so cold that he could never warm up. He hated how stiff his fingers got when the cold seeped in through his gloves. He hated the feeling of not being able to feel his toes in the tips of his boots. He hated having to snort snot in through his nose every thirty seconds as the cold stiffened up his nose hairs. He hated the blasting wind, his chapped lips, and the sense that he would never be warm again.

  He had to admit it was pretty, though. If an army of the dead wasn't hot on their trail, he would have been more than happy to walk through the numbing cold… for a little while, at least. They had twisted and turned several times, cutting through backyards and side roads to try and lose the tail, but everywhere they went, there seemed to be more of the dead. The concentration wasn't as dense as Portland, or else they would have had no chance in the snow.

  They passed abandoned buildings, restaurants, gyms, storage facilities. Grime covered their windows, their interiors shrouded in darkness. Epps imagined hundreds of Annies behind every window, and it was all he could do to keep himself from sprinting down the street in pure panic.

  Ahead of them, the dead were staggered, loosely bunched, but ever-present. It wasn't the dead ahead of them that presented a problem. It was how the dead moved. While the soldiers could move between and around the dead, occasionally shooting any that presented a problem, doing so alerted any random Annies to their presence. Meanwhile, in going around, the dead behind them made up ground, and the ones alerted to their presence by a muffled gunshot began their pursuit, shuffling through the snow in their direction. Even the ones they moved past turned to follow them up the street.

  The end result? They constantly had a tail of a hundred slow-moving Terminators chasing after them. They didn't tire. They didn't quit, and they wouldn't stop until Epps and his friends were dead.

  "Let's loop around again," Tejada said, "drop some of this tail."

  Epps and Allen took a left onto what they assumed was a driveway that led to a large industrial building. They stuck to the middle of the driveway, just to be safe. Even so, Epps cursed to himself as he sunk deeper than he had expected in a pothole. He pitched forward to avoid damaging his leg. He pushed himself up out of the snow, gasping as he brushed the cold, wetness of the snow from his face. "Watch out for that pothole," he said to the others, thankful that he hadn't sprained or broken his ankle. If he wasn't cold before, he certainly was now.

  They rounded the corner of the industrial building, its dark windows revealing nothing of the interiors.

  "Alright, let's pick it up," Tejada said.

&nb
sp; They double-timed it, rushing through the parking lot and staying away from where the curbs and sidewalks were. They moved down the entire length of the building as fast as they could. When they reached the far corner of the rectangular structure, they turned the corner and caught their breath. Damn this snow. It took more energy than it should to run through snow. If they weren't careful, they would find themselves exhausted on the other end of the journey.

  They walked carefully across the buried landscape around the building, and when Epps reached the corner of the building that faced the road, he paused, then slowly peeked around the corner. He waited until the last of their tail disappeared and then gave the signal. As a group, they fled out into the snow, hopefully losing their pursuers in the process.

  Epps tried not to look at the others. He tried not to look at their faces, at the fear he saw there. He knew their faces mirrored his own. All it took was a slip at the wrong moment, a twisted ankle, or a torn muscle like Sergeant Tejada had. Disaster was there, underneath the snow, waiting for the right opportunity to strike.

  Up the street they went, heading west. Gregg's trusty compass let them know the right direction underneath the sunless sky.

  The wind picked up, and they moved cleanly, efficiently, lost in their own thoughts. To talk was to make noise. To make noise was to attract the dead. To attract the dead was to invite their own demise.

  The muscles in his legs burned with exhaustion. He was fatigued, and he knew it, but he pushed himself because no one else complained. Complaining could get a unit killed faster than an actual enemy. Still, he knew he was at his limit. His body, filled with adrenaline for hours on end, was shutting down. He stumbled and knew the crash was coming.

  "We gotta find a place to hole up," Tejada said as if he had just read Epps' mind. "Keep your eyes peeled." Epps could have kissed the man. At the very least, holing up would allow him to organize his pack a little better, get the straps just right with the new weight his backpack held. And he could get a little food in his belly. His breakfast seemed long ago and far away.