by Chris Lowry
She stood off the porch and brushed her hands on her jeans.
“I’ll hold you to it,” she said and stood next to him as Javi double timed to the edge of the light.
“Cap,” he huffed. “You need to come see this.”
CHAPTER
This was the beginning of a riot. Sharp could feel the tension in the air. The buses were in a line in front of the gate, facing forward, ready to move out.
MICKEY
He woke up in darkness with no way to know if he had been asleep a few hours or perhaps longer.
The room was black and he wondered what made him wake? Was that a scuffle on the asphalt out? Side of the door?
Was it the year of the coyote? One of us zombie
No, he thought as his blood turn slowly eased. His waking had been gradual, a smooth transition that moved him from sleep to a snoozing form of wakefulness.
He tried to shift up and his leg, muscles seized and pulled, contorting him into the fetal position on the floor. He tried to stretch it out, but the muscles in his rib cage grabbed and squeezed, knotted the breath from his lungs. He couldn't even scream.
Mickey didn't know how long they lasted. The twitching spasm ended after what felt like hours.
But it couldn't be more than a few the room was still dark.
H tried something different this time, slow and steady movements to get his uninjured hand and knees the floor. There was a thick layer of dust under his fingers and gritty sand along the vinyl that had probably drifted in open door.
He stayed on all fours for a few moments to make sure pain wouldn't seize him again and then slowly pushed himself up. He used the wall as a guide and froze every time his muscles twitched again.
He finally made it upright, as close to standing tall as the soreness and the ache would let him. He needed more rest, he knew, but he also needed water. Food if he could find it, but his tongue was swollen so thick it pushed against his swollen lips, and rasped around against his teeth with a sandpaper texture that he knew meant trouble.
He wasn’t sure if he could make it until morning, wasn’t even sure if he wanted to try. Something itched against the base of his skull, some survival instinct that screamed at him to get moving, just start and don’t stop.
He took a step forward, hand on the wall for support and guidance, and followed it with another. The agony receded to something manageable. Ever present, yes and threatening to be permanent but something he could handle. For now.
If he could find something to drink. And food. Water would push the pain back, and let him figure it out. Decide what to do and how to do it. Water would wash away the ache, thin out the blood that had to be pooling in yellow, purple and blue tie die patterns on his skin.
He couldn’t find it in the dark.
There were too many obstacles and pitfalls, too many dangers that could make his injuries worse. Make the pain worse.
He had to wait for daylight.
He glanced around the room where he found himself. It was pitch, but there was a lighter patch of black outlined in a rectangular pattern opposite of him.
A door, he hoped.
He scratched one foot forward across the gritty vinyl floor, one hand on the wall, the other held in front of him as he searched for anything that might block his way.
A step could trip him. Lifting his feet off the ground could put something underneath them, and send him off balance and careening into who knew what in the darkness of the room.
The slide though, was safe. He wanted to hum an electric boog-a-loo, but all that came to mind was a single line from a long ago song.
“Just slide to the left,” he sighed on an exhale, not even a whisper.
But he didn’t slide left. He slid his other foot forward, and was only partly amazed he kept his balance.
Mickey tried watching his feet, but he couldn’t see that far down in the dark. So he locked his eyes on the brighter space of black, and slid forward inch by inch.
He felt the sill at the bottom of the doorframe that separated the front of what he thought was a store from the back room where he had slept.
There were windows along one wall, the glass smudged and dirty, but still lighter than the blocked off space he was coming from. He could see vague shapes and outlines, more images than anything. Starlight bathed the street beyond, but only in the most faint fashion. The world was shades of black, too dark of a night to even offer gray.
He continued the slide across the floor, pausing to finally slide left to avoid some black thing that blocked his forward progress.
He wanted to reach out and touch it, put his fingers on it, but didn’t think that was safe to do without knowing what it was. For all he knew, some sick bastard lined it with shards of glass, and he would slice off the tips of his fingers for testing it blind.
So he skipped it and moved toward the windows.
When he made it, he put one hand on the glass to steady his balance and let his racing heart slow down.
His head hurt, his whole body hurt, and the movement reminded him how hungry and thirsty he was. But with that one goal under his belt, one blind stumble across a strange room, he felt reassured. Confident even.
He was going to find the men who left him for dead. Find them and feed them to the zombies.
But first, he’d pray for morning and water. Or just water, he thought. Morning would come no matter what.
CHAPTER
Sharp glanced at the group assembled in front of him. It was made up of his men, the soldiers who had followed him out of the back of a C-130 and into the interior of the zombie wasteland that once was the United States. There were also several townspeople with them, each tasked with driving a bus back to the walled fortress that was once a small town.
That’s where they found Pam, the daughter of the Chairman of the Council and the reason they were beyond the Wall.
She was at the edge of the crowd standing next to Jacob, the leader of the city as they watched the group form up in front of the gate. The rest of the townspeople formed a semi-circle around them
He caught her eye across the heads of the group,
DAD
CHEN
BALLENTINE
DEL
DEL
DEL
SHARP
SHARP
“What do you think will be out there?” Jacob stared at the gate.
The buses were in a line behind them, stretched along the road in front of the courthouse and waiting for morning. The last two were full of fuel and food, more transport trucks than people movers, but Sharp liked it that way.
He felt pleased with himself for stockpiling the extra because he had the same question on his mind.
What was out there, between where they were and where they needed to be.
“Weather,” he said. “Tough road. People. Maybe some who want to come with us. Maybe some who don’t want us to make it.”
“Because of what we have?”
Sharp nodded.
“And zombies,” said Pam. Her voice quivered as she shuddered.
“Yes,” said Sharp. “Lots of zombies.”
America had four hundred million people when the Z virus hit. There were maybe fifty million survivors on each coast, and who knew how many in the middle.
He would be surprised if that number was close to fifty million too.
But that left three out of four Americans walking dead. A metric shitton of Z and a lot of space to meet them in.
“Weather,” Pam glanced at the star lit sky.
“This time of year,” Sharp shrugged. “Who knows what we’ll get. We’re going to swing south and hope for the best.”
“Plan for the worst?” Pam sniffed.
“Always.”
“Is this a good plan?” Jacob asked yet again.
It was rhetorical, and they knew it. And no matter the answer, the plan was in motion. Daylight would find the gates open and sixteen hundred people on the move.
Too many mouths to feed, to many bodies to keep safe, Sharp argued in his mind. He thought once more about kidnapping Ballentine’s daughter, just one bus for his men and her. It would be a tough ride, but easier than worrying about so many.
He shot her a look and she shook her head, as if she could read his thoughts.
Sharp smirked. Maybe not so easy as he thought. Besides, his mission was keeping her safe. She could spend time worrying about the civilian population.
If they became a hinderance, then he could abscond with the Chairman’s daughter. Until then, he would just have to be extra vigilent.
“I don’t think I can sleep,” she said. “I’m too nervous.”
Sharp kept quiet. But he knew how she felt. He would have trouble sleeping too. There were too many details to overlook which meant too many chances to second guess himself, to reconsider his choices.
“Try,” he said. “Or sleep when we’re underway.”
“I don’t think I can do that either,” she shrugged.
She didn’t say goodnight as she drifted back toward the courthouse and a cot she had made her own the last few days she was there.
“You?” Sharp asked Jacob.
The leader of the community turned and stared at the houses that surrounded them. His eyes lingered on the ones where people had elected to remain behind, and he pursed his lips in painful concentration.
“I don’t think I’ll sleep well ever again.”
Sharp had no answer for that either. If this mission didn’t go off right, he wouldn’t sleep either.
MICKEY
The wait wasn’t as long as he expected, but long enough that he suffered three bouts of cramps that crippled his legs, Fighting through them was rough, tough enough that they spread across his ribs and nearly bent him backwards in an effort to keep the spasm contained.
It didn’t work. His traps and shoulder muscles followed and he knew he was in trouble. The lack of moisture was animalistic, a dry beast writhing in his empty stomach and howling displeasure across the nerve endings in his body.
The light, when it came, filtered in purple at first, turning the dark details of the street into pale imitations of real life. There was no darkest hour before the dawn, not that he noticed.
There was at first an absence of starlight as the stronger light of the sun blocked it out. It started at the stratosphere and so went unnoticed, the blinking white sparkles on a velvet sky winking out to disappear until darkness returned again.
The purple landscape faded to gray, and then gradually brightened.
Mickey could make out smudges on the window, smears of goo and gore from where he supposed the Z had peered inside, chasing something or maybe just window shopping.
That thought made him smile, and then he realized that a Z scraping against the window meant something might be inside with him.
“Shit,” he murmured and turned.
The room was full of shelves, all empty. In a former life, it had been a hardware store or perhaps a general store, the kind found in the center of dying towns as people fled to big box retailers for lower prices and the same selection.
Whatever it had been, it was an empty shell now, the fixtures and shelves covered with a fine coating of thick brown dust, and gritty sand.
Abandoned before the apocalypse, he thought.
He looked at the window. There were remnants of masking tape in the corners and a scrap or two of faded yellow newsprint where someone had ripped it down.
His eyes trailed across the floor and saw footprints in the dirt, scuff marks from multiple trips to clear the windows of the paper used to block it off.
Mickey took a breath, let it out and breathed again before he followed the scrapes across the sandy vinyl toward the far end of the small store.
In the far back corner, he saw ashes from a small fire, and a lumpy polyester sleeping back, two packs against the bare wall. One of the packs was open and he could see the top of a small plastic water bottle.
He grabbed it, twisted off the top and tried not to sob as he swallowed four great gulps of tepid stale water.
His stomach lurched and threatened to send it back up, but he swallowed that down too and waited for the gurgling pain to pass.
There was a second bottle in the pack, unopened and he grabbed it too, screwed the top off and raised it to his lips.
But the pain wracked him again and he struggled to keep from spilling the precious liquid. Squatting was no good for his legs, his back.
He was barely able to set the bottle upright, before the tremors and twitches carried him over sideways onto the floor.
Mickey tried to stretch out, tried to keep everything from clenching, and burning. But each movement elicited more pain, in new places, and all he could do was freeze, try to hold still until it passed.
It did, and faster than last time.
He twisted his head to one side, and this time couldn’t keep the sob inside. In his spasms, he spilled the water.
One hand clawed for the plastic and dribbled the last drops into his mouth, just an ounce or so. He kept it on his tongue and tried to sit up.
The lumps in the sleeping bag caught his eye.
He reached the other hand over and flipped back the corner to be greeted by two skeletons. A grown up and a child was all he could tell, both with shattered bone in the desiccated skulls, round holes just above the brow ridge.
He sighed and fished through the packs.
There was no food, no more water, no weapons.
He shook his head. It was a sad story, he bet, and one that would have someone somewhere weeping. The new cruel world too much for these two, so someone decided to end their suffering and took off without a bottle and half of water.
Mickey dumped the clothes and book from the pack and stuffed the two empty bottles in it.
He cast around for anything else that might be of use, found a lighter half full of lighter fluid and stuck it in his pocket.
Then he forced his way back to his feet and shambled to the back door room to see what he could find.
Nothing. The empty shelves might have been turned to firewood if he had the time and notion. But there was no water, no food, nothing he could use to solve his immediate problems.
It took extra effort to step out of the open door and at least he had enough of his mind to check for Z before he did. He shuffled to the front of the building and peered inside the smeared window for a moment before moving on.
The street stretched in front of him in morning sunlight, the slanted rays keeping his side of the road in shadow.
Mickey took a step forward, then another, the movement making his stiff muscles scream. Tight skin across the bruises shifted and moved with him, sawed at the tender areas.
He took deep breaths and let them out, hoping the motion would loosen things up, and to huff out little exasperations of pains as he stepped.
The next building was just as empty as the first one where he made an accidental camp the first night, but all the windows were gone as was everything inside. It left nothing but a shell and a hollow echo of his footsteps on the sidewalk.
The light kept growing as he walked, the way day seemed to brighten into existence as nighttime faded. The shadows shifted and moved as the bland vagueness of the dark disappeared into surprising detail.
The buildings were brick, the signs faded. The street was new blacktop, divided by a solid yellow line that indicated no passing in this section of what could be downtown.
There were eight buildings grouped together and when he reached the end of the raised sidewalk, he could see an old fashioned gas station further on, divided by two empty lots and a burned out mobile home.
There was a lump in the road, hard to make out with his one eye until he was closer. Then he saw it was a dirt bike, a 250 he thought. It was scratched and dented on the side, the end of a long slide on the pavement that scuffed up the gas tank and left a gouge in the asphalt.
Mickey could see stains on t
he blacktop, dark smears of gore and guts. Whoever had ridden the bike turned it over on the side, and didn’t get away clean.