by Chris Lowry
And now, he was asking the group to saddle up and head west again, just to get one woman to safety. That was the mission.
"The mission," he voice was loud from practice, like rallying the troops. "The mission is to get you to safety."
"We're safe enough here," one of the men called out. He didn't see which one.
"Safe enough," Sharp answered. "That's how I want to live my life. Is that what you want?"
"It's what we have," the man answered again.
Gray beard, gray hair in a fringe around his bald head. He looked like he might have been a professor before, and now he was lost outside the walls of academia. All he was missing was round spectacles perched on the end of his nose.
Sharp turned to Ballentine's daughter.
"Just you then," he said in a low voice pitched just above a whisper.
"We're not leaving them," she argued back. Her eyes flashed in anger at the thought of it.
Sharp faced the crowd again.
"The mission is to get you all to safety. We have started to rebuild behind a wall. It keeps the Z out. The dead can't get in. The streets are safe. We're taking you with us."
4. Sharp gets the buses back at the same time as Javi.
“We have food. We have wheels. We’re ready.”
“We are not ready,” said Jacob. “But we are going.”
The towns people start to show up with suitcases and boxes.
It's too much junk.
You're asking them to leave their lives behind.
No, I'm saving their lives.
The people almost riot.
Pam gives them one back each.
This isn't a military operation, she reminded him.
It absolutely is, he argued.
You can't treat it like one, she advised. You can't treat them like that.
CHAPTER
SHARP
“Look at that.”
Captain sharp followed the direction he was pointing and grunted. Black and gray thunderheads stacked up from the horizon to the top of the sky, a menacing wall of an approaching storm.
“Looks like trouble,” he said.
“We should get back to camp,” said Bear, his eyes glazing with worry.
Sharp glance around at his Squad and the civilians with them. He shook his head.
“No,” he said. “We stay sharp. We keep moving. Eyes up and open.”
He didn't wait for them to agree. They had worked together too long, he knew they would follow.
The smart move would have been to send a rookie forward as Scout, but so far, the Z had been thin. They had encountered three 3, easy to dispatch with K-Bar knives which kept their forward momentum quiet.
Z were attracted to noise. Movement sometime caught their eyes, so sharp to the Shadows of the tree where they covered the Black Road. One of the civilians with them at point of the way, a former bus driver who ferried school children back and forth. He was leading them to a Depot, where sharp and his Squad could gather up a caravan of school buses to carry the survivors trapped in a Township in the middle of the zombie Wasteland to the safety of the West.
“Hold up.”
Sharp froze and lifted his rifle to his shoulder. The others were doing the same thing behind him.
There was movement up ahead under the shadows they were walking in. The trees spread across the asphalt casting the roadway in a dappled twilight, splashes of yellow sunshine leaking through the canopy.
The movement shifted into the walking dead, shuffling at a strong steady pace straight for their position.
“Light ‘em up?” Javi asked from behind him.
Sharp did a quick head county. Six zombies moving in on them. He shook his head and slung his rifle.
“Too much noise,” he said out of the side of his mouth.
He drew his K-bar knife and started walking forward.
“That’s a little closer than I like to get, Cap,” Javi said.
But Sharp noted his second was right behind him. Bear joined them and they waded through the six bodies in a quick methodical fashion. Javi had a little trouble with one when his blade got lodged in a skull bone, but Bear swiped out of his second zombie and reversed his knife to catch the other intended target.
“Thanks brother,” Javi said as he yanked his knife free and wiped it on the soiled shirt the dead man wore.
“Anytime,” Bear smiled. He cleaned his blade and slid it back into the sheath.
“Round ‘em up,” Sharp said as he traded his blade for his rifle and began moving up the street again. He didn’t wait for them to catch up, taking point all on his own.
CHAPTER
DAD
I worried about hurricanes.
It was season, I think, or close enough to it. The way Florida worked, we wouldn’t know until it was on top of us.
The gray clouds would stack up all the way to heaven, black clouds behind with cracks of lightening and wind that howled.
It would tear through the pine trees, scour the landscape and worse, toss of tornadoes that were the bigger danger to us.
I grew up in Arkansas and the terrifying howl of warning sirens would cut the atmosphere once or twice per year. There would be no warning now.
Nothing but the dead sailing through the air, along with branches and debris and a million forgotten things abandoned across the landscape.
Each of them would be a bullet, a bludgeon and increase our danger seven fold.
There were a hundred other irrational fears made more powerful by not knowing.
Z.
Bandits.
Militia.
Others.
Sickness.
Listing them off was like listing the contents of Pandora’s box or those horrible things released when the seven seals were broken and unleashed on the world.
“You’re getting gray,” Anna said in her soft voice, a finger trailing through the too long hair on the side of my head.
“Beats the alternative,” I grinned, which wasn’t the whole truth.
My hair was thinning on top, climbing higher on my forehead. It happened to a lot of men my age, and I thought about it often before.
Now, the vanity of it didn’t seem to matter so much.
Hair was there.
Hers was pulled back into a tight ponytail, wrapped with leather shoestrings that could be repurposed.
“I can grow mine out like yours,” I told her.
“A skullet,” she teased back.
“Not yet,” I snorted back. “Not quite, but give me a few years.”
She tugged the hair behind my ear in a playful grasp and went back to watching the woods beside the road.
I knew her plan then.
Not to keep me guessing or not to tease me into wanting her more, because there was no one I wanted more than her. Except for the safety of my children and my extended family.
No, her purpose was craftier.
It made me respect her more, and love her more.
“The finger in the hair trick,” I muttered to myself and sniffled a laugh.
“What?” Brian asked as he trudged behind me off my right shoulder.
“I’m not going to fall for the banana in the tailpipe shit,” I told him.
“What the hell are you talking about?” he shook his head grinning.
“Nothing,” I said. “I’m talking about nothing.”
Anna used her touch to calm my worry.
She tricked me into thinking about her, thinking about something besides the hundreds of horrors that could befall us.
Worry is wasted, I told myself. There is only now.
And now, even with a few new mouths to feed and miles to go before we reached the gulf, there were no hurricanes, no tornados, none of the hundred other things that could harm us.
No Z.
At this moment, we were safe.
Tired, hungry, sore and beaten, sure.
But alive.
If I didn’t worry about all of those things, I could plan.
Shelter.
Safety for eight to twelve hours if we did it right.
“Let’s find a place to stay,” I said over my shoulder to Brian. “Rest for the night.”
“You’ve got my vote,” he said back.
I looked over my other shoulder and caught Anna grinning, and I winked back.
“Sneaky,” I said in a low voice.
She shrugged and made a face, pretending innocence as we kept walking.
MICKEY
He didn’t know if zombies could see in the dark, but he sure as hell couldn’t. The road in front of him was awash in darkness, the thin scatter of stars casting a feeble glow just bright enough that he could make out the separation between dirt and blacktop.
He was doing it with one eye, though, so that might be a contributing factor.
He could see darker spaces on the edge of his vision, black blots that blocked something up ahead. Buildings maybe, but until he got closer, he couldn’t tell.
Mickey tried to listen. Z’s made noise, a low moaning sound that would serve as early warning for their approach.
At first, he was worried about zombies. Then coyotes entered his head, some random memory of the roadrunner cartoons that evolved into a waking nightmare about roving packs of carnivorous coyotes.
So he listened for the yips, and barks and wondered if any scratch in the bush was one ready to pounce and take him down.
The skittering in the roadside scrub made him wonder about snakes. Weren’t there rattlesnakes in Arizona? He tried to remember, but it was so hard to focus.
He seemed to be the only thing alive in the night, the only thing moving, in the vast dry desert sea.
The shadows ahead of him rose up like bulwarks and he smiled with half his face, the half that wasn’t busted and broken. He had been right.
“Buildings,” he said out loud to break the silence. Then wondered if that was wise.
The silence thus far had been his friend. It had kept him hidden in the darkness, and now his voice sounded too loud and unnatural in against the quiet desert.
If there was something close, Z, coyote or giant serpent, he had just glazed a target on where he was.
Mickey shuffled closer. The first building was brick up to his waist, then splintered wood siding above. He could tell that much with his finger.
But if it was a house or a store or just a random set of four walls, he couldn’t tell. It was too dark.
Too dark to explore, too dark to do anything but try and find a place to hide and pray for daylight.
He ran his hand along the brick so he wouldn’t get a splinter in his finger, arm across his chest to keep his injured left fingers out of the way.
At the corner, he peered around and snorted at the waste of time. It was just as dark back here, just as hard to see. Difficult to make out details of the structure or anyplace to hide.
Maybe if he had full use of both eyes, he could pick out something. A ladder to the roof to hide, or some screened in storage box he could lock himself into and drift away to sleep.
He kept moving, finger trailing against the textured brick, and felt the door jamb. It was open. He could hear the echo of emptiness thrown back toward him as he stood in front of the opening.
Mickey took two steps across, and backed his shin on a wooden step unseen in the dark.
Nothing responded. Not inside, not out there where he was either.
He leaned against the brick and breathed for a moment.
“This I stupid, Mick,” he whispered to himself. “Keep looking. Keep going.”
But searching would take longer and he was so tired. His feet hurt, his legs were screaming in agony. All he wanted was to curl up somewhere and wake up later with the pain gone.
He knew that wasn’t going to happen if he didn’t find a safe place to curl, and maybe this was it.
“Go,” he ordered himself and banged against the open wooden door three times.
The rapping cracked through the silent night.
He strained to listen, but there was no response. No coyotes yipped as they hightailed it through the door, nothing rattled or hissed.
Best of all, there was no moaning. Just the hollow sound of emptiness, a void and vacuum in the desert night.
He used his toe to find the step again, and took two up into the building. The inside was pitch black, a complete and utter darkness that the starlight failed to penetrate two feet past the open door.
He could see the lighter shades of windows up front, a patchwork of patterns on the far wall, but the space between was the black of a cave.
No way to tell what was in it, what was waiting to trip him, snare him up, or hurt him more.
He reached for the edge of the open door and shifted it closed, then ran his fingers along the surface to search for a latch or lock. He twisted the deadbolt shut with a click and let out a cross between a sigh and a sob.
If the front was secure, he was safe. For the moment least. As far as his ears could tell him, he was alone and the building was closed off.
Mickey felt along the wall to the closest corner and sank down where the two walls met. The floor was gritty vinyl, but it felt like a featherbed after being up and moving since morning.
His legs shivered and twitched as the muscles contracted in spasms. He didn’t think he would be able to sleep through it, but he was wrong. All he had to do was close his eyes, take a breath and exhaustion claimed him for oblivion.
CHAPTER
DAD
It wasn’t too long past the end of the world and every town was starting to look the same. Same stores, same buildings, same acts of destruction from looting and scavengers.
It wasn’t much different than before the zombies showed up.
The thing about living in the good old USA is folks would move from one state to the next. As they got settled into their new homes, they began to miss the comforts and amenities of the places they had left behind.
Take Dallas for instance.
When the metroplex had a surge in crime, a lot of people absconded for Arkansas’ capital city of Little Rock. They found a quaint small town perched on the tranquil muddy river and loved it.
Crime was low and property was cheap.
Then the migrant Texans began to miss Dallas, so they built a version of it in the western part of the city.
They populated it with chain restaurants and wide roads so that anyone visiting between the two cities couldn’t tell which one they were in.
Homogenized.
The same.
Folks would bitch about a big box retailer moving in to snuff out all the Mom and Pop stores, but they would do it at a chain restaurant and ignore the hypocrisy.
Nothing changed in the new Z world.
Each city was the same desolate wasteland of abandoned buildings, crashed cars and ransacked shelves.
Florida was maybe worse than some of the other places due to sheer population. There were five million people in Central Florida, all prime to become the walking dead due to nothing more than proximity.
“Nothing?”
Tyler shook his head.
“Me either,” I said.
He cradled a hunting rifle in his hands, empty backpack slack across his shoulders.
I glanced around again.
This was a tiny little berg huddled on either side of a two lane highway, somewhere North of Tampa.
Nine buildings on both sides of the road and a couple of trailers parked at the end of dirt roads cut through the pines.
Two of the mobile homes were burned out shells.
I didn’t think the other two would be in much better condition.
“We could hole up here,” he said.
I nodded, eyes still moving across the landscape. It was true. We could hole up and wait for more daylight tomorrow.
One of the buildings was solid enough. We could move empty shelves in front of broken windows and take turns keeping watch wh
ile others slept around a small fire.
But we would be hungry.