Draconian Measures

by Chris Lowry

  A person can run fast or slow, and the knee may ache, but it’s designed for forward motion. It can go in that small limited range of motion for almost one hundred years with proper care and maintenance.

  But if you slam a boot heel into the side of someone’s knee and fold it sideways, that voids the warranty.

  Both emissaries fell.

  Both screamed.

  Warren added his scream to the mix.

  There was a lot of screaming in the press box.

  I bet it wasn’t the first time they heard it. There was championship banner on the fence below. I would put money on the announcer screaming when they won.

  Now it was a distraction.

  And a siren.

  It called in more guards.

  But I wasn’t too worried.

  I had a shotgun.

  The door burst open and I let the first one get inside before I blasted the second back down the steps.

  I couldn’t hear if he tumbled the men behind him.

  Guard number one, or emissary number one through the door wasn’t going for me. He wasn’t going for his gun. He put his body between me and Warren, shielding him.

  “This could have been different,” I screamed and went for the door.

  A slug opened a hole in the metal.

  I turned to the press box window and sent a bullet through it. Glass rained on the empty stands.

  The Guard with Warren decided he was allowed to shoot.

  Or maybe Warren whispered it in his ear.

  He ratcheted up his shotgun.

  I tossed my empty at his face. He flinched aside, ducked his head and took the blow across the helmet.

  When he looked back up, I sent the palm of my hand into his chin.

  A lot of guys learn to fight from movies.

  Truth be told I don’t like hand to hand combat, but if it has to happen, most people don’t know how to do it.

  A lot of guys learn to fight from movies. Or from watching MMA fights.

  They think a good solid punch is going to work. It’s a Rocky dream where they deliver a one hit knock out.

  Except the skull is hard.

  If you punch with a fist, you might break a finger, or knuckle. If your opponent ducks his head and you smash into the thick bone protecting the brain, you are going to be down one hand in a fight.

  That’s why I don’t like punching.

  I’d rather cheat and kick them in the tender parts wherever I can find them.

  Or a good poke in the eye works wonders.

  A heel strike to the chin snaps the head backwards in a direction it’s not meant to go. If their mouth is open, they could bite their tongue or snap teeth. It’s a move that sends a couple of signals to the brain, mostly pain signals and the brain sends back its standard emergency response.

  Run. Hide. Flight.

  Unless you’re trained for pain, it’s a real distraction.

  The emissary’s head snapped back. Blood spewed from his mouth and sprayed across Warren’s white suit.

  I yanked the shotgun from his grip and used the butt to whack him again. It was much stronger than my hand.

  Then I jumped through the shattered window.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The kids were smart. They didn’t move. There were two lumps of clothing in the middle of the field that smelled like dead Z, and it fooled them.

  I pounded down the stadium stairs and hopped the end of the fence and onto the field.

  The Z noticed me.

  I checked the shotgun. Eight rounds. No time.

  The emissaries would be right behind me.

  I hoped the kids were fast.

  The Z started hobbling toward me.

  If I had time, I would have led them around the track, tried to bunch them up, like the Boy did, and buy the kids space to run to the fence. Save my bullets for the run from the gate to the fence.

  I should have planned better.

  A soldier perched in the lowest corner of the far set of bleachers, aimed and fired. A bullet plowed into a Z that stepped beside me.

  I smacked its skull in with the grip of the shotgun.

  “Not him!” screamed the General.

  I could see him behind the fence by the bleachers on the other side. He was practically standing up in his wheelchair, using his arms to lift and shake and shout.

  He dropped and pointed to the kids.

  The soldier nodded and aimed.

  I screamed.

  He sent a bullet into the ground beside the lump closest to him. It didn’t move.

  “Bem! Boy!”

  I ran, shouldered down the Z that got in my way, using the shotgun like a club. Gore splashed across me, over me.

  A second bullet hit the lump and sent up a geyser of blood.

  I screamed again and stopped running, aimed with the gun and pulled the trigger.

  Nothing happened.

  The works were gummed up with Z goo.

  He shot into the kid again.

  My kid.

  I flipped the shotgun to grip it by the slippery barrel and let the rage bubble over.

  He shot the second mound of clothes on the ground.

  I bashed.

  I smashed.

  I lunged and swung. Gore drenched my arms, my hands, drenched my shirt, my pants.

  There was no way to tell where Z ended and I began.

  All I could see was red.

  I ran past the kids, bullied, bashed and crushed my way through the herd. They ignored me.

  The Z turned toward the gunfire, and cheering soldiers. The herd shifted toward them. The dead walked past me.

  I went with them.

  The soldiers couldn’t tell us apart.

  Neither could the emissaries lined up on the other side.

  Twenty yards away, they either didn’t see the shotgun, or couldn’t make it out.

  The soldiers started shooting Z.

  Fifteen shotgun’s blasting at the same time stopped them.

  “Don’t do that,” Warren called across the field.

  “We can get more,” the General yelled back.

  “I think you’ve proven your point,” Warren responded. “And broke one of my laws.”

  “They were dead anyway. I just helped them along.”

  I moved through the Z, closer to the fence. I didn’t know if the shotgun would work, would shoot, but I could climb. I could reach the one who killed my kids and rip him apart.

  “The law is the law,” screamed Warren.

  “No! I am the law. Do it.”

  The soldiers lifted their rifles and fired.

  Three holes opened in Warren’s face, crimson blood washing across his immaculate white suit. He fell backwards into the bleachers.

  His emissaries fired back.

  It was no contest. Shotguns fired across thirty yards by emotional men against four or five rifles held by calm trained hands.

  Five of the guards dropped before the rest stopped shooting. Two more fell before the smoke cleared and the rest held up their hands in surrender.

  I was close now.

  Under the soldier. The child killer.

  I was going to bite his throat out and feel his blood gush in my teeth. I let the rage wash up again, gripped the fence and stuck my toe in a hole to launch up.

  Two Z grabbed me by the arms and held me fast.

  They didn’t moan.

  They looked at me.

  Brown eyes and hazel. My eyes and their mother’s.

  Peering from a mask of goo and gore.

  I stepped down, lowered my head.

  “Round them up,” ordered the General.

  He pointed his soldiers toward the emissaries.

  “What about the corpses?” said one of the shooters.

  He aimed into the Z and fired. A body dropped. Then another.

  “I like what they were doing here,” the General grinned. “Go find out where they were keeping them and get them put back. Just leave them here for now.
”

  A soldier ran off to do his bidding.

  The General watched the Z, studied them. I know he was looking for me. He glared at the two bodies in the center of the field, searched for mine.

  But there were thirty to go through.

  I shuffled around with the Z, both kids close to me, playing the part.

  He couldn’t decide if I was one of the dead and he couldn’t find out until he cleared out the rest.

  I thought he was going to order them to shoot then.

  I would have.

  I think.

  But he didn’t.

  He rolled away with his men, planning to come back and search later. If he was going to take over Vicksburg, he had more important things to worry about than which body was mine.

  At least that’s what I think he was thinking.

  Either way, he left.

  It was just me and my kids.

  Still alive in a herd of Z.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  We couldn’t talk. Talking would attract the Z. The Boy tried talking with his eyes. While that worked great when telling jokes, it wasn’t an effective form of communication to get us out.

  The soldiers guarded the emissaries while they made them clean up the other set of bleachers.

  That involved throwing the dead bodies down onto the football field, which made the Z herd and feast.

  It moved us closer to the gate where the Z were let inside. The gate that was still open.

  I stutter stepped to it, shuffling and dragging a foot.

  I had a theory the Z responded to noise, to sight or a form of sight, and rhythm. The kids picked up on it and moved with me.

  Step. Drag. Shuffle. Shuffle. Step. Drag.

  Maybe I was being too cautious.

  The Z were preoccupied with fresh dead meat. They weren’t paying attention to us.

  The soldiers were watching the guards. They weren’t watching us.

  We disappeared into the shadows under the bleachers that led into a blockhouse locker room.

  In the dim interior, I stopped and pulled both kids close to me.

  They wrapped their arms around me and squeezed, and I wasn’t sure if we would ever let go.

  “Dad,” the Boy whispered. “You stink.”

  We giggled quietly.

  It was still too loud.

  A Z limped out of the darkness, moaning, reaching for us.

  I smashed it with the shotgun.

  A couple outside looked up from eating, gristle and blood dripping from their rotting teeth. They turned and began to lurch inside.

  Their movement attracted others.

  The herd was coming back.

  I grabbed each of their hands in mine and pulled them after me. We had to find a way out.

  I tried to picture it in my head. We had a locker room just like it at my high school. Under the bleachers, one for each team. Rows of metal lockers, wooden benches bolted to the floor. Cinderblock walls with holes knocked out every four feet to let in natural light through a simple grate window.

  We ran from one pool of light to the next as the sounds of moans increased around us.

  There would either be a door in the middle of the building leading out, or one at the end of the building leading to a long fenced in walkway.

  They were constructed this way in the south because of team rivalries. People take high school football seriously in small towns, and if a visiting team wins against the home team, it can cause skirmishes.

  We even had a riot break out at my high school after a game when the visiting team lost, and got in some cheap hits at the game buzzer.

  A couple of guys waited around and tossed rocks at the team as they left the locker room. Then beer bottles. Then words.

  The words were worse and led to the fights, which evolved into fights between the fans in the parking lot.

  The police were called.

  No one was arrested.

  No tear gas used, no nightstick beat downs.

  But after that, they installed a fence that covered the walkway for the opposing team to reach the parking lot.

  I figured it was that kind of locker room when we reached the middle of the wall and found more metal lockers instead of a door.

  We kept running.

  I felt sticky fingers brush against my arms and lashed out with the shotgun. It whacked something that moaned.

  Z.

  I jerked my arm to bring the kids in closer and we ran to the end of the building.

  There was the door.

  It wasn’t locked.

  I inched it open to peek out.

  “Run,” the Boy shouted.

  I glanced back over my shoulder at the light that spilled through the open doorway. We were surrounded by the dead in the room. A thick wall of zombies crashing in on us.

  I jerked Bem through, then the Boy, lashing out with the shotgun, smashing and crashing against outstretched arms, hands, skulls.

  Then I was through the door and yanked it closed. An arm shoved through, blocking the way.

  I slammed the door over and over, blood and meat leaking down the edge.

  But I couldn’t break the bone. The arm wedged it open, and Z fingers gripped it, trying to pry the knob from my hand.

  “Go!” I snuffed. “Go!”

  The sidewalk was five feet wide. It had fence on either side that ran to the parking lot.

  Riots weren’t limited to just my town, and football rivalry made tempers flare.

  For a game.

  It was stupid.

  Especially now, considering the Z.

  They ran to the end of the fence and the gate that sealed the entrance. It was locked with a zip tie through the latch.

  “Locked!”

  I glanced around.

  We were exposed in here. If any soldiers heard us, and came to investigate, we were fish in a barrel.

  Then I saw a gap at the top of the gate.

  I whistled.

  But Bem was already climbing. That girl. Scooping dead Zombie guts and hiding in the corpse.

  Changing places with zombies when the herd crowded around them.

  All after Zach tried to do whatever he tried to do.

  And now hopping the fence before I could tell her to.

  The Boy followed.

  The Z ripped the door out of my hands and I sprinted down the walkway. I hit the fence and scrambled up and over, landing hard on the other side.

  We didn’t have time to catch our breaths though. The Z were loud.

  It would draw attention to see what was agitating them.

  We needed to move and I needed to get our bearings and get us out of here.

  The Z hit the fence, shoved their arms through.

  I pushed the kids in front of me and we raced across the parking lot.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The streets all looked the same. Houses packed in with trailers, each of them home to someone. Maybe a family. Maybe like mine.

  There was confusion in the street. People milled around, drawn out by the gunfire, maybe by some of the emissaries as they escaped from the soldiers.

  I stopped the kids on the edge of a house and looked around.

  “Running is going to draw attention,” I said.

  “Where we going?”

  The Boy glared.

  I knew it wasn’t directed at me.

  “That was good thinking you two, back there in the field. How did you know the smell would stop them Bem?”

  She sniffed.

  “I didn’t. I was just trying something out.”

  I brushed a gore strained crusty strand of hair back from her beautiful tiny face.

  “Trying works. That’s what we do. We keep thinking, and we keep trying, and we make it work.”

  The Boy nodded.

  “I thought you were going to kill them all.”

  “I got a lot of the Z.”

  “Not the zombies.”

  He meant the soldiers.

  I wo
uld have gotten more than one. Maybe not all.

  Then I would have been shot.

  “You saved me too,” I told them. “If I’d gone after the soldiers, they would have shot me in the head. We look like Z, and we’d go down like them too.”

  Someone screamed.

  A woman walked around the edge of the building and just as I said we looked like Z, she saw us.

  Timing is a bitch sometimes.

  She screamed and ran.

  “Zombies!”

  “That decides it,” I said and led the kids in the other direction.

  We should have turned the Z loose from the football field. We could have used that distraction.

  We ran up the street, and turned a corner when I heard the growl of an engine approaching the opposite way. It sounded like a Bobcat tractor.

  I dragged the kids into a narrow space between a house and a trailer and we crouched down, waited.

  The General drove past leading a platoon of his men.

  I had to admit, he looked damn scary in that contraption.

  But he thought I was dead.

  I wasn’t about to change his mind. Let him find out when they searched the bodies in the football field.

  “I have an idea,” the Boy whispered in my ear. “Follow me.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  He led us under the trailer and out of the other side to the back yard. They were turned into what would soon be gardens too.

  Warren had a good plan. I wondered if the General would keep it.

  I could put some states between us, let the man chew on his obsession and hope we never ran into each other again.

  That was my plan.

  The Boy kept us moving over the fences, past three houses, three trailers and to a side street.

  “Do you know where this goes?”

  He pointed to a wooden sign next to the road. It was a brown parks sign, the kind with the name of the park carved into it in a throwback to historical significance. They didn’t last as long as the metal signs with white words stenciled on them, but the wear of the weather made a nice sheen to the wood.

  “It shouldn’t be far.”

  We jogged along the side of the road headed for the park. Jogging was an instant giveaway that we weren’t Z if anyone saw us. And all we had was a gory shotgun with a busted stock to stop them if they did.