This Rotten World | Book 4 | Winter of Blood

by Morris, Jacy

  Its feet crunched in the snow, and it emitted a groan, a low, guttural bellow. That bellow drifted across the mostly unbroken surface of the snow until it found another set of ears, not alive, but not dead either. This being, this once-man, emitted its own groan, even as it rocked towards the sound it had heard, following the sound of food. Noise meant food.

  That creature's groan was picked up by another, and another, until it reached the ears of dozens of the dead. The dead moved among the cars, constantly bumping into each other and veering this way and that. But one of them heard a faint groan coming from the woods. It turned, drawn by the groan.

  Two of the dead saw another walking into the forest in the direction of a barely audible moan, and they followed. The two became three, and four more of the dead noticed the three, and they became seven, and soon they were all coming. Struggling through the snow, a trail of the dead leaving cars behind, leaving behind the place where they had died trapped on a mountain road.

  Outside the compound, another of the dead pounded on the trailers, compacting the snow beneath, walking over dead bodies that were already encased in snow, the dead that the survivors had already killed but been unable to burn.

  The snow fell harder now, like a thick white blanket, like the world was covered by a layer of static. The snowpack outside the trailers thickened, and with each passing hour, the dead rose.

  Chapter 15: Audrey Hopburn Belgian IPA

  Rudy knew the kids in the room. They were him. They were orphans like he had been. His pain, the pain at having been unwanted, was not something they shared. Not yet, at least. But they would grow up in this world knowing that their parents weren't alive anymore. At least they had known their parents. Rudy had never had that luxury, and while he had always been curious, never knowing anything about his parents had protected him from ever really missing them. Oh, sure, he had spent a good portion of his childhood cursing them as he was moved from foster home to foster home, but he had never actually missed them. You couldn't miss something you didn't even know.

  But these kids, D.J. and Hope, they knew that their parents weren't coming back. No one had told them specifically, but Rudy could see it in their eyes. They had waited for the kids' parents for a day to keep up the illusion, knowing that their mother and their father would never appear. They were dead, both of them. How cruel the world was. To have survived this long and then fallen on the same day, what a tragedy.

  When asked how old he was, the little boy had held up three fingers and said, "Three," though it sounded more like "free." Hope was five, but she seemed much older than that to Rudy. She was intelligent, smarter than the average five-year-old. He made sure to talk to them both—to smile. They had so many questions.

  That first night, they had bawled their eyes out, and he had struggled to calm them down. They didn't want consoling; they wanted their parents. Rudy had distracted them with food, pulled from his own pack. He had been saving a can of peaches, syrupy and sweet. What he had been saving them for he didn't know, but that moment seemed like a fine time to break them out. The kids were skinny, their arms bony in a way that a child's arms shouldn't be.

  They saw him pull the can out and open it with the can opener. The lid popped free, and he held the can out to them so they could peer down inside and look at the thick, orange slivers floating within.

  "What is it?" D.J. had asked.

  "Peaches, dumb-dumb," the girl had said.

  "Don't call me that," the boy said. "Mom said you can't call me names because family doesn't call names."

  The girl looked embarrassed, her mother's words ringing in her ears.

  Rudy held out a fork to them and encouraged them to eat. The girl went first, fishing out a sliver with the fork and taking a bite. Rudy smiled as Hope smiled for the first time. She liked it. Then it was the boy's turn. He fumbled with the fork, but finally speared a slice of peach with the prongs. He held it to his mouth and took a bite, a little uncertain of the fruit. He bit into it, and he smiled as well, chewing with his mouth open.

  No one corrected the boy. No one told him about manners and the proper way to eat. Rudy supposed that type of thinking was archaic now. There were no more people in ivory towers, poo-pooing social faux pas. There was no more social media to reinforce the antiquated social norms of America. Hell, there wasn't even an America. The boy chewed loudly and sloppily, and the soldiers around the room didn't say anything. They sat in silence, snoozing or looking on quietly with half-lidded eyes.

  Tejada had held a meeting with the soldiers one by one, filling them in on how to handle the kids and their situation. Rudy and Amanda had been called in during the kids' bawling.

  "Don't say anything about their parents. They don't need to know. For all they know, their mom is still alive and on her way here. Their dad too."

  "Don't you think we should tell them?" Rudy had asked.

  "It's not like we're never going to tell them, Rudy," Tejada said. "When we get somewhere safe, and they can mourn properly, then we can tell them. But if we have to take them out on the road, I can't have them sobbing and alerting every damn Annie in a mile radius. Christ, you hear that in there?" he said, referring to the kids' crying in the other room. "We'll be lucky if the Annies aren't stacked three-deep around the fence when we wake up in the morning."

  What Tejada said made sense, but Rudy felt terrible for the poor kids. Eventually, tuckered out by their own crying, they had settled into a fitful sleep on Rudy's sleeping bag. He didn't mind. He had taken the opportunity to sleep, as well.

  They had waited a day, mostly in silence, the soldiers sharing glances every now and then as if to say, "Shouldn't we get a move on?" But the kids needed this if they were going to be quiet on the road.

  No one left the office building, and everyone stayed away from the windows. At night, everyone spared a little bit of their food for the kids, even the usually surly Whiteside gave them some lima beans, saying, "Here. I don't care for these much anyway, but they're good for you."

  The boy had made a face as he had eaten the lima beans, but he ate them anyway. His sister did the same without complaint.

  In the morning, Tejada stood and made a big show of looking out the window. "We can't stay here anymore. There's too many of them out there. The fence could go at any moment." It was all a show for the kids' sake.

  "But what about Mommy and Daddy?" D.J. asked. Hope simply stood there, her eyes big, chewing on the inside of her lip.

  "We'll leave them a note. Your momma knows where we're staying. She'll stop by and see the note and follow us to the next spot."

  Rudy grabbed some sheets of paper and sat down to write out a note with the children.

  "What should we say?" Hope asked Tejada.

  "We'll just tell them that you're safe, and we're heading west, up the highway to the beach," Tejada said gently.

  Rudy wrote out the words, and then Hope signed her name. Rudy showed D.J. how to make the letters of his name, and then, with the awkward unpracticed motor skills of a young child, he scrawled the letters "D" and "J" on the paper. When it was done, they stuck the paper next to the broken window and weighted it down with a can of food so the children's parents would find it.

  When that was done, they packed their gear, climbed out the window, and ran.

  ****

  Amanda hopped over the fence. She had never been a climber. She had never joined her friends when they had climbed trees as a child. She hadn't climbed the poles at school and refused to climb the rope in gym class, but she was getting pretty good at it.

  She stood on the other side of the wrought-iron fence, a clock ticking in her head. They had run for the west side of the fence, the least populated by the dead. Now the dead were coming for them.

  Amanda reached up and put her hands around the little girl. She was lighter than she should be for her age, malnourished perhaps. That would explain why her stupid ass mother and father had been out finding food. They must have run out at some point. S
he placed the little girl on the ground, and Hope stood looking around her, her eyes big and afraid.

  Amanda wondered if the girl had ever been out in the world since it had changed. The soldiers said they had found them at their home. She didn't think it was likely that Hope's parents had taken her out into the real world. They would be insane if they had.

  "It's ok, Hope. They can't get you. Not while we're here," Amanda said.

  The little girl nodded, and Amanda set D.J. on the ground next to her. The clock in her head was ticking again. The dead moved like a wave, crunching through the snow. Rudy landed with a thump, and then the rest of the soldiers hopped the fence. Amanda and Hope ran west, following in the broken trail of the soldiers. They were babysitters now, her and Rudy. He had volunteered them for the duty, despite the fact that she knew nothing about children. When they had first shown up, everyone had looked to her as if she could do something about their crying. The fact was she had never dreamed of having children, never wanted them, and didn't actually want to look after D.J. and Hope. So when the soldiers had looked to her to stop their crying, she had simply shrugged her shoulders, and they had dropped the issue.

  She wasn't going to be their mom; she didn't even know how to play at such a thing. She could have killed Rudy when he volunteered them to watch the kids. It had been bad enough being on Tejada duty, dragging the old man along through the snow. Now, they had to worry about kids, kids that would be too scared to even say anything if something was wrong. She had some sympathy for them, but it only extended so far. She would much rather be walking through the snow with her baseball bat in her hands and no extra responsibilities to weigh her down.

  On the bright side of things, the weather had shifted. The snow was slowly being melted by a drizzle that was a shade above freezing. On the downside of things, everyone was soaked. Those without rainproof jackets wished they had them. Amanda wished she had rainproof boots. The ones she wore, scavenged off a dead woman from inside the Nike compound and treated liberally with disinfectant spray, were not as warm as she would like. Socks, thick, fluffy socks, that's what she wanted right then.

  They plowed through the snow, picking up the children when they could no longer move. The survivors didn't move as fast now, and the tail behind them grew in numbers as it gained ground.

  Even though it was still barely above freezing, Amanda found herself wishing she could take off her jacket. Her body burned from dragging D.J. along. The little boy did what he was told without complaint. He didn't whine. He didn't say he couldn't do things, which she had fully expected. He was silent as a mouse and dutifully moved his feet forward. When he slowed, Amanda picked him up and carried him for as long as she could until he regained his strength.

  Still, carrying the child drained her of her own minimal energy reserves. Her lower back ached, and her legs felt rubbery an hour into their journey as they rushed through the wet snow, plugging along, each step taking them closer and closer to the beach. They paralleled the highway now, looking to their right, waiting for the stalled cars to thin and disappear so they could use the big road to get to the beach. That was the plan; keep it in sight until it was clear, and then it would all be smooth sailing.

  They passed by another Fred Meyer on their left, but they didn't consider it with the children in tow. They had barely made it through the last one unharmed. They rose and dipped, moving over rougher terrain, taking their time to cross drainage ditches and dips in the ground. This was when their tail came closer, and for a while, the survivors found their bodies renewed by fear, the fear of being overrun and eaten by the dead.

  They ran more, until they came to an empty stadium. The layout of the stadium told her that it had been built for baseball, but she didn't know that Portland even had a baseball team. In the winter snow, it looked cold and desolate, uninviting. They skirted around the stadium. It was a tombstone, a monument to a time when humans had been able to sit out in the open and swill beer while people played games for entertainment. She wondered what D.J. and Hope would make of the place. As the thought crossed her mind, D.J. spoke his first words.

  "What is that place?" he whispered, pointing to the empty risers and the tall banks of lights suspended in the air on poles that jutted up into the sky.

  "That's a baseball stadium."

  "Baseball?" the child asked, looking confused.

  She knew nothing about child development, had never bothered to pay attention to the mile-markers that marked the progression of a baby to a toddler to a curious young child. When this had all started, he had been two. His memories of that time were probably locked away, lost in the fog of a developing brain.

  "Yeah, it's a game that people play."

  "Like the silent game?" he asked.

  "The silent game?"

  "Yeah. We played it all the time. Whenever one of the monsters was outside, Mommy would have us all play the silent game. I was real good at it. Daddy said so."

  Amanda just shook her head. "Yeah, it's like the silent game, only there's more people, and they have a ball and a bat."

  "A bat?"

  "Like this one," Amanda said. She pulled the baseball bat from her backpack and held it out for D.J. to look at. "One person throws a ball as hard as they can, and the other person tries to hit it with this. If they hit it, they run around the bases and score points that way."

  "That sounds fun," D.J. said.

  "It was never really my sport, but yeah, lots of people liked it."

  D.J. fell silent, and they all looked at the field as they passed it, replacing the empty stands with visions of people in short sleeves and shorts, stuffing their faces with hot dogs and washing them down with cool beers in plastic cups. They could hear the crack of the bat as it connected with the ball, though the only sound in the real world was the crunch of snow turned to slush by the rain, their own tired breathing, and the groans of the dead on their trail.

  "I think we can get to the highway now," Tejada said.

  They all looked over at the highway. The line of stalled cars had thinned out considerably, and they could see a clear stretch of white snow for a mile or so. They rushed through a snowy field, passing under power transformers with dead lines that carried no electricity. It felt good to be back on a road.

  ****

  Civilization was thinning out, or at least, its ruins were. It was hard for Tejada to realize that everything he looked at was decaying, slowly but surely. Even now, the road underneath was going through a process of daily freezing and unfreezing, moisture filling in the empty spaces in the asphalt, no matter how small they were. The water froze and expanded, pushing and cracking the pavement. Slowly, the road would fade away, the bits of broken asphalt washed into the drainage ditches on the sides of the highway until a working car, if you could find one and make it run again, wouldn't even be able to navigate the damn thing. How long until weeds grew up out of the asphalt? How long until a tree planted itself in the cracks in the road and pushed upwards?

  Yes, thinking of everything as ruins helped him deal with the fact that the world was dead and gone, that the only thing that mattered was the people around him right now. The dead had dotted the highway ahead of them. They could really move now. His only real concern was the kids that they carried along with them.

  He should have said "no" to helping the woman. He should have stuck to his vow not to get involved, not to help anyone else. After the death of Day, he had been sure that the part of him that wanted to help people was dead, but it was still there, glowing softly. Now they had two kids to tow along with them into the end of the world. My God, how terrible this must be for them.

  He glanced over at the children to see them chugging along slowly, the boy holding Amanda's hand and the girl Rudy's. If he hadn't sent help after the lady, those kids would be dead. Every time he thought he was through helping others, something bubbled up inside him and overrode his brain. He was sure that it was this part of him that was going to get them all killed. No more
helping. No more.

  They were hard words to think, even harder to feel. Deep down inside, he knew that he couldn't stop the feeling. He knew that his soldiers wouldn't let him either. They were all trained that way now, trained to help life whatever the cost and to take it when necessary.

  Now he had to worry about the kids. They couldn't be out in the cold as long as the adults could. They were small, their core temperatures not as capable of withstanding this chilly weather as long as an adult. He himself was freezing his ass off.

  He stumbled on something in the road, catching himself by grasping onto the shoulders of Gregg and Epps. They carried him, and he realized with his hip the way it was, he was more worthless than the children. His hip felt better today, but only incrementally. Two, three more miles, that was as far as they were going to be able to go today. Maybe the weather would be better tomorrow. Hell, maybe it would be worse, but they didn't have the luxury of The Weather Channel anymore. There was no more news, no more sports, no more weather reports. There was only what one wanted to do. And he wanted to survive. Every day was a risk, and he tried to mitigate that risk as best he could. That meant not pushing yourself to the limit.

  The sky was wide open, swirling, and gray. The drizzle that fell on his face was cold, but he was glad that he could feel it and that his boys could feel it. Though he had lost soldiers, he had saved lives as well. Those kids were the future, as much as any of them, and they deserved a chance at least.

  But God, if they should die… he didn't want to think about it. He didn't want to think about what it would mean for him or his men. That would tear them apart worse than anything the Annies could do, he suspected. He wished the kids were ugly, but even with their shaved heads, they were cute as a couple of buttons.

  Ahead, Allen chopped the side of an Annie's skull open. It tumbled to the ground, and the blood flowed a little quicker than it had in the preceding days. It was getting warmer out. With any luck, the snow would melt. They could really move then, and they wouldn't have to worry about any crawlers hidden under the snow. That would be nice.