by Chris Lowry
And restless because of it.
I didn’t know what was between us and the Gulf.
Or if there was a marina with a boat I’d been dreaming about and planning for us.
I wasn’t even sure if we could make it by dark.
The smart move would be to hunker down and wait it out. The dark was too dangerous, and the insect hum in the woods around us reminded me of the last time we were making our way through them.
Ambushed by a militia. Taken prisoner. People died.
I shook off the memory.
A lot of people had died on this trip. A lot of good people.
But my kids were safe.
Anna was safe.
I was alive and planned to stay that way.
A Z shuffled out of the woods and began to lumber toward us, as if drawn by my thoughts.
“Let’s keep moving,” I told him. “Get the others.”
He saw the Z, saw my hand shift on the grip of the long pike over my shoulder and grunted. One busy eyebrow arched higher than the other over his bright eyes.
“I don’t need your help,” I snickered.
He grunted again.
“I’ve got it.”
I thought he might say something else, but he didn’t. Just shrugged and began marching up the road back in the direction we had just traversed.
Tyler moved to the shadows on the side of the road, alert. Aware.
I approved.
The Z made a groaning sound as it drew closer.
I shifted the pike, aimed and made it all quiet again, except for the insects and the sounds of the cicadas buzzing in the trees.
CHAPTER
CHAPTER
5. “What's that?”
They listened as the high pitched whine of a high performance engine vibrated across the landscape.
They watched as a xxxxxxx approached.
“That is an exotic car,” Turner explained.
Sharp rolled his eyes and thought about explaining that yes, in fact, he knew what kind of car it was and that he meant who was driving it like a maniac toward the front gate.
But he kept his mouth shut as the engine revved and the car slid into a long sliding sideways stop in front of the gate.
Georgie grinned through the window.
“Holy Hell, Cap!” he screamed. “I’ve always wanted one of these.”
Sharp motioned to the two men manning the gate to push them out and waited as the sleek machine coasted through and purred to a stop beside him.
“Looks like you got it.”
“It ain’t all I got,” said the man in the passenger seat. “We got bad news too.”
Sharp glared at the two of them.
“Report,” he ordered.
“The town’s blocked in.”
“What do you mean blocked in?”
“That horde we blew up with the plane crash?” Georgie reminded him of the accident that destroyed their ride home. “We dropped it on the only road leading out of town that isn’t blocked.”
Sharp nodded again and turned away from the two men in the car.
“Damn it,” he muttered and started marching toward the back of the encampment.
He needed a moment to think of a way to get them out of there.
CHAPTER
We had found a house in Mt. Dora, an older structure that we used for the night and it hadn’t ended well for our group.
I looked around at the others scattered in piles around the long narrow living room and into the dining room combination next to a marble topped island that separated us from the useless kitchen.
There were different faces now, not the same as the first time. So many from the first group gone and me too stupid, too focused to know they needed saving.
Too many memories, so I closed my eyes and listened.
Brian and Peg shared a padded comforter just a few feet from me, stolen from a stuffed linen closet and like every other article inside of it, repurposed for our needs.
They leaned against the wall, her head rested on his shoulder, his eyes locked on a shallow metal fire pit carried in from the patio, and the flames that flickered in the center of the room.
Smoke curled toward the ceiling and moved in a cross breeze from one open window to another.
The kids were lined up along one wall, grouped off in pairs or quartets. Bem and Tyler, the Boy and Hannah, still silent since the loss of Byron, Bis and the new group, people she had known before.
Raymer and his family further on still, and the others squatted against the island or next to it.
There were murmurs and whispers, the kind that come from so many people in a room, but muted, quiet.
They weren’t here last time, but silence was a hallmark of our existence, as if conversation and laughter might draw the wrong ears.
It was true. It might. It would.
If not Z, then worse things that stalked in the dark.
The five million people in Central Florida had their share of criminals and ner’ do well’s who preyed on the weak. We ran into them last time, a fate I hoped to avoid again.
I glanced at the rifle next to my leg as Anna beside me. We were low on ammunition, but our bellies were full. No thanks to this house, but to the one next to it.
The only occupant there was a dead body and a revolver with one spent bullet in it. The body was missing the top of its skull, the brown stain on the wall testament to what happened.
It was surrounded by thirty six cans of food, veggies, chili and beans, even four cans of meat, a treasure trove of calories and nutrition.
There was no note, no indication of why, no good bye cruel world scrawled on the wall. Just a choice the man made, and we assumed it was a man only by the clothes on the skeletal remains.
Full bellies meant we were full of hope, and a night of rest next to the fire would see us through to a better tomorrow.
Anna snuggled up next to me and closed her eyes. There was still light in the sky, fading gray and purple twilight as the sun set outside. We were keeping farmer’s hours, early to bed, early to rise.
“Never trust a man who doesn’t carry a book,” I told Brian.
“You have one?” he smarted off.
I nodded.
“No way.”
“The only way,” I tapped a finger to the side of my nose.
“Is that supposed to make you look wise?”
“Like Santa.”
“You don’t look like Santa,” he said. “No jelly belly. No white beard. Though you’re starting to show some gray streaks.”
“Can you hear this?” I flipped him a lazy middle finger and a grin.
“It would be the best thirty seconds of your life,” he shot back.
“I think you’re giving yourself too much credit.”
He snorted and built a tee pee of the dried branches we gathered over the small embers still glowing in a small depression in the ground.
The fire licked up, crackling against the wet wood, sending up plumes of thick blue gray smoke. It drifted up against a leaden sky, lost in the low cloud cover that would turn into fog if it came any lower.
“I’m getting good at this,” he grinned up at me.
“You want a Scout badge?” I asked.
“If you run across one while we scavenge,” he squatted back on his haunches. “Is that where you pick up your books?”
“Around,” I nodded.
A lot of the houses we broke into had books on shelves, and it was harder to find authors I liked than it was to find food we could use.
That was probably a commentary on the readership levels of post zombie America than it was my taste.
Good books that I hadn’t read were just hard to find in the limited path we were on.
Combine that with limited space and weight restriction on just how much I felt like carrying in a pack, and it was a combination where the stars had to align just right to find what I wanted.
I might eat just about anything canned, but I co
uldn’t read just any thing.
“I didn’t read much for pleasure,” Brian sat back and rummaged a can of hash browns and two cans of potted meat from his pack.
He tapped a hole into each of the tops and set them on the edge of the coals.
“Does that say m-e-e-t or am I reading meat wrong?”
He snickered and used the tip of his knife to rotate the cans.
“I’m okay, you know,” he said as I sat across from him.
“Never said you weren’t.”
“But you’re worried.”
I could have nodded, could have shrugged. But grief is a weird creature and it elicits a different reaction in people in various ways.
Take me, for example. I take my grief and funnel it down into rage. Some people want to sob and wail, some want to keep their upper lip stiff and their emotions in check.
Some people just want to talk it out.
Brian was one of them. So I let him.
“I’m going to miss her,” he handed me a can of the warmed meat.
Potted meat is what’s left after they can’t make the sausage. It’s flavored with salt and nitrate, and tastes like swept floor would taste.
But we shared a can of hash and it cut into the taste. Somewhat.
“Me too.”
“You pissed her off so much, sometimes.”
“I bet.”
“She was so glad when we ran into you on the hwy. Do you remember that?”
I chuckled.
“That’s where you learned to make fire.”
We burned up a mile long traffic jam trying to escape two herds of Z, one chasing them, the other on mine, when they converged on us and trapped us in rows cars left where their owners abandoned them.
“She thought you could get us out of Florida,” he said as he scraped the last of the meat from the can and licked it off his knife.
“You did,” he continued. “And now we’re back.”
Brian glanced around.
“We never thought we’d see it again. I never thought-” his voice hitched in his throat.
I pretended to ignore the fat drops of salty tears that coursed down his cheeks and into the rough stubble of his beard.
He pretended to let me.
“I had a vision,” he said after a few moments. “I thought we could build a fortress, a safe haven where people lived like they did on the frontier of the wild west.”
“Trade zombies for Indians,” I said.
“First people,” he corrected. “Or native Americans.”
“First people.”
“Now that’s us. We’re the first people.”
I glanced up at the sky. It had rolled from gray blue to black, with sparkling diamonds of stars washed across the tiny portion we could see from the trees around us.
“I don’t know,” I told him. “We’re pretty myopic now. We think in terms of survival, and that’s what we’re supposed to do. That tunnel vision has kept us alive-”
“Most of us,” he groused.
“Most of us. But this could be isolated to the US. There could be a whole world out there unaffected by the plague.”
“Now you sound like Raymer.”
I shrugged.
“A couple of years ago, I would have told you zombies weren’t real,” I waved at the walls. “Now, I’d be hard pressed to argue against vampires and werewolves. In a world where the dead walk again, anything is possible. Including a possibility that we’re isolated in some badlands and there is a safe haven out there.”
He glanced up and pawed the tears off his face, sniffled.
“That’s a nice thought.”
“It is,” I said. “We keep searching for a place to settle here, in the South. There are reasons for it. We know it, the growing season is long, the weather is mild. But there are zombies and gangs, and militias and whatever hell else has attacked, fought or tried to kill us.”
“And blood sucking vampires,” Brian snorted.
“I haven’t seen any yet and we were close to DC. I bet that’s where all the blood suckers ended up.”
“Before or after the end of the world.”
“Both.”
“Both,” Brian agreed. “So you think we should look somewhere else?”
I looked around the house again. The fire in the metal pit burned low, but neither of us bothered to load more fire in it.
We kept farmer’s hours now. Go to sleep just after dark, up before the sun. The absence of civilization made us revert to a more natural circadian rhythm.
“My brother lived in California,” I said. “I don’t know what happened out there.”
“You know what happened to pioneers, right? They got shot the hell up by First People.”
“Zombies don’t shoot back.”
He shook his head and studied me under a tilted brow.
“You went half way across the country to get your two oldest,” he said. “Guess we’re going back.”
“Unless you want to stay here?”
“I want to get out of here,” he sighed. “Too many bad memories. My wife. My son.”
His voice cracked again, and this time when he stopped talking, he rolled over on his side and pulled the worn blanket over his shoulder.
I watched the lump of him, dark on the other side of red embers. The house would have been safer for us, put doors between us and any interlopers of the zombie or bandito variety.
But the structure still smelled of death, and there was no way either of us could stand it.
It was there if we needed it.
In the meantime, the fence surrounded us, an eight foot wall separating us from the rest of the world for the night.
West, I thought.
I’d been to California by car and plane and preferred flying. It was definitely shorter.
Maybe we could pile the group into an old Otter or some passenger plane and let the boy do his best to not get us killed.
I closed my eyes and let the possibilities play out. Another cross country run, hell bent for the Pacific Ocean with only a hint of what might wait for us there.
CHAPTER
The center can not hold, he thought as he stared at the woman talking to a group of townspeople. A gas lantern dangled from a hook on the porch, casting a yellow halo of light through her hair. He could see individual wisps that fluttered in the breeze and marveled for a moment at the wonder left in the world.
Ballentine was pretty.
He felt a tugging stir in his gut and locked it down. This was a mission. There was zero time for any one to be pretty, for him to find anyone attractive, least of all the HVA he had been tasked to retrieve.
Thinking that, he considered how FUBAR they were. Mr. Murphy, the patron saint of luck had fucked his team pretty good once they were out of the back of the C-130.
HALO jumps in the dark were never fun, but they lost a couple of guys on landing, and he had to kill a couple more that got bit since then.
And he did not like it.
Did. Not. Like. It. One freaking bit.
Captain Sharp took a breath through his nose and let it out slow.
“I’d say nice night,” she called to him. “But I don’t think you would agree.”
He shook his head and stepped into the circle of pale yellow light thrown off by the gas latern.
“We’ll have nice nights once we get you behind the wall,” he said.
“We will?” Pam smiled, her face bathed in shadows from the golden halo behind her head. He could barely make it out, but he heard it in her voice. “Are you asking me on a date, Captain?”
He cleared his throat and snorted.
“I think we should focus, ma’am.”
“Life is for the living,” said Pam wistfully. “We survived a zombie apocalypse and the world has changed.”
He watched her head move, but her looks were a mystery. Lost in darkness.
“There will be plenty of time for living once you’re safe,” he answered.
“See,” she said, the smile still lacing her words. “It sounds like flirting.”
“I tell you what,” Sharp said as he heard footsteps running toward them. “I’ll buy you a drink when we get back and we can discuss what happens after that.”