by Brown, TW
It was obviously a bite.
“Where’s Reggie?” one of the bikers asked, moving forward and trying to see a familiar face on the three other figures limping through the cloud of dust that almost seemed to be thickening.
Joel glanced over at Will, but he was wearing sunglasses that made it impossible to see the man’s eyes. Had Will taken the man out, or had he simply been a casualty—
“Right here,” a voice rasped from the haze as one of the obscured figures came close enough that Joel could make him out. It was indeed the leader of the group of bikers. “And, yeah, it was those religious freaks that blew the fucking building. If I’d been allowed to shoot the—”
“She had a suicide switch, you idiot,” Will snapped cutting the man off. “We would’ve all been blown to hell. As it is, we’re lucky we got out of there alive.”
“I think there’re a few individuals that would beg to differ,” Reggie muttered just barely loud enough to be heard.
“Enough!” Joel snapped. He glared in Will’s direction and then the biker. He was about to suggest that they get moving when more shapes started to stumble forth in the haze. One of them was coming up directly behind Will and Conrad He was about to draw his pistol when the figure coughed. As far as he knew…zombies didn’t cough.
“Only about half of my people made it, Joel,” Conrad said as he freed his arm from where it had been draped over Will’s shoulder. “I’m pretty sure we lost the rest in the stairwell when the building came down.”
“How many?” Joel asked.
Part of him wanted to just grab the man and hug him. But his relief was false. Conrad had been bitten. He might not even survive the trip back to the compound.
The man pulled back from Joel, gripping his arms and looking into his eyes with what initially looked like concern. His own gaze flicked down to the wound and then back up to Joel.
“This?” he said in a voice almost a whisper. Joel nodded. “Well I don’t know what to tell you. It got aggravated during the fight to get out of the building, but that bite is five days old.”
Surely Joel hadn’t heard him correctly. Nobody lived past three days after being bitten. Apparently Conrad saw the doubt.
“We actually have a few people with bites older than mine,” Conrad leaned in and whispered into Joel’s ears.
A million questions swirled through Joel’s head, but here and now was neither the time nor the place. There were a growing chorus of moans and cries closing in on them. It would have to wait.
“Let’s get out of here,” Joel announced to the group.
14
Company
The return to the bikes and transport rigs proved to be much easier than getting to the location. For one, all the noise had brought the undead from every direction, but most groups and clusters were easy to avoid. Once they reached the monorail, the journey was actually uneventful.
Joel wrote a lot of that off to the fact that they were no longer concerned with the living. With just the undead to contend with, it was a simple matter of evasion. As they walked above one particular stretch where the undead below were so thick that he couldn’t make out the road, Joel’s mind drifted back to one of Wanda’s favorite movies. In truth, he hadn’t minded this one as much since it was obviously a bit of a parody. Joel kept hearing a voice informing him that zombies, much like dogs, don’t look up. Whether that was true or not did not seem to matter. The zombies continued to pay them no mind since everybody in his group moved as quietly as possible.
Malik had to drive the Humvee since Debra had been clipped in the shoulder. The wound wasn’t terrible, but now that the adrenaline had subsided, she admitted to being sore enough to worry about her ability to handle the big vehicle if serious defensive driving were called for.
By the time they all got loaded up and started back towards the highway, Joel felt that he could almost catch his breath. He realized his own adrenaline had long since ebbed from his system and now he was tired as well as sore in a few places. That had been another thing he’d scoffed at with the zombie movies. People ran and jumped and climbed like they were doing little more than playing on the school playground. That sort of activity took its toll. And, as a few of the members of the group had proved earlier in the day, it wasn’t quite as easy as it looked.
With the convoy stretched out now, the bikers in a sort of ring around the vehicles Joel had brought from the community, Joel’s mind could finally cycle down a bit along with his body. A shake jolted him back to the present when Debra woke him to let him know that they were approaching the compound’s gates.
“Did I doze off?” Joel asked groggily.
“Judging by the snores?” Debra quipped. “I’d say you did more than just doze.”
Sitting up straight, Joel glanced back to see her sitting beside Conrad and two of his people in the rear of the Humvee. The rest of the survivors had been divvied up between the other transport vehicles.
“How’s the shoulder?” He nodded to the dressed wound that made it look like she was wearing shoulder pads on one side.
“Honestly, it just aches a little. The bullet chipped off a bit of meat…nothing serious.”
“Unless it gets infected,” Malik quipped.
“Thanks for that, Mister Sunshine,” Debra snarled.
“Those zombie kids?” Joel asked, changing the subject and recalling the encounter on the trip out.
“No sign of them.” Malik brought the Humvee to a stop as they rolled up to the gate.
A pair of armed sentries came out, one going to each side. The dark silhouette of a large machine gun behind a wall of sand bags could be seen on the roof of the first house inside the actual compound perimeter.
“Glad to see you made it back,” one of the sentries said, sticking his head inside the Humvee. “Saw a lot of smoke on the horizon. We started getting worried.”
“Yeah, also, the crew in the radio shack asked to see you as soon as you return.” The second man stepped up to the other side and leaned his head inside. “Is the rest of the team bringing up the rear? And what’s with all the motorcycles?”
“Nope.” Joel met the man’s eyes with his own and saw the younger man flinch. “We took some losses. There are still some people out there that need to be dealt with as we expand and claim the area. As for the bikers, we ran into them along the way and they helped with the mission objective.”
“Umm…” the first sentry piped up, “we do still need everybody to report to the intake area for inspection.”
Joel nodded. Now was not the time nor the place to reveal they would be bringing in a few people that may or may not be immune to the zombie infection.
“Send somebody from the radio center to see me,” Joel said. “Whatever it is that is so important, they can tell me in quarantine.”
“Quarantine?” Conrad said from the back of the Humvee.
“Standard protocol for anybody coming in from outside the wire,” Debra said, then shut her mouth with a click of her teeth. The vehicle started forward before she continued. “Umm, boss?”
“Yeah, I know.” Joel stared out the window. Perhaps their medical types would understand the situation better.
Twenty minutes later, everybody had filed into the house which had been converted into an entry exam area. It hadn’t been set up to accommodate so many. That was all the more reason they needed to expand. And, while it would be a risky mission, they needed to claim one of the area hospitals. They did receive one pleasant surprise when it was revealed that one of the bikers was actually a veterinarian. While it would certainly be good to have the services of a human doctor, a vet was almost better.
Many people believed that vets were failed doctors and had no idea that the situation was actually often the exact opposite. When the EMT that was currently the senior member of the medical staff came into Joel’s room, the look on his face was grim despite the initial good news that he would soon have somebody to share the workload with once the biker/vet
cleared quarantine.
“Did you know we have three people that suffered injuries by the zulus?” the man asked after he shut the door.
“Wait…three?” Joel knew about Conrad. The young man had mentioned that at least one other of his people had been bitten and not turned. But three?
“Yes, one of the bikers.” The EMT paused, a look of concern on his face. “I can’t be certain, but it would seem that your friend and the person from his group might either be immune, or else they are exhibiting the signs at the slowest rate I’ve ever heard of…but the other young man…one of the bikers, already has the tracers.”
“Put him down,” Joel said.
“So, I will hold the others to the seventy-two-hour quarantine, but you and Miss Allen are both cleared to leave.”
“I want Will and Malik released as well.” Joel got up and pulled on his coat. Sitting had made the aches and pains even worse. He needed about half a bottle of ibuprofen, but he couldn’t let on right now.
He wasn’t two steps out the door when a woman with a clipboard fell in beside him. “I have the new totals for you, sir.” Joel gave a grunt and a nod. “As of now, if everybody marked as clear survives and comes out of quarantine, we now have seven hundred and forty-three citizens here and another fifty-six back at the dam.”
Joel let that sink in. He’d seen groups of survivors numbering in the tens, and here he was with almost a thousand. Perhaps it was time to get aggressive. Despite the recent losses, and he knew there would be more to come in the future, he had the numbers to own the area.
They arrived at the radio center and Joel gave the woman a nod before going inside. The room was a steady buzz of activity.
“…inbound with an ETA of less than an hour,” a voice crackled from one of the radios.
“Be advised, you will need to clear quarantine before you are admitted,” a man said into his headset.
“Commander in the room!” one of the radio operators barked.
Joel paused and looked around before realizing that they were referring to him. That was new, he thought.
“Commander Landon, sir,” a petite, middle-aged woman with Asian features addressed him. “We are currently in contact with five groups of survivors making their way to us. The repeating message is yielding excellent results, sir. Each group has been briefed on the conditions of admission. The largest group numbers over twenty.”
Joel nodded. “Is this what I was asked to come here for? It seems that a standard report would suffice.”
“No, sir.” The woman gestured for him to follow her to another room also filled with radio equipment. She picked up a log book and handed it to him. “We have been in contact with a large group numbering over a hundred.”
“Excuse me?” Joel took the log book and began to scan the entries. “I want copies of this sent to my house.” He handed the log book back.
“Already done, sir.” The woman nodded and handed him a duplicate copy.
“I want to be notified immediately the next time contact is made.”
Joel turned and left the room. His mind swirled with the possibilities. This group would be a huge addition to his community. It was also obvious that these people were not fools. They had made it clear they would not be able to make the journey until after this winter. They didn’t want to get stranded someplace in a snow storm.
Time had certainly flown. He’d ridden out much of the early days of the apocalypse in his suite. Then there had been the taking of the Hoover Dam, and now they were reclaiming Boulder City. They had power in the form of electricity as well as in sheer numbers.
The cornerstones were in place for a community that would be unmatched. No raider would dare confront them. Just as he’d told himself early on, Joel would not simply survive…he would live. Certainly the flow of survivors would begin to lessen. Fewer people would have the ability to hear his signal.
“I hope I made you proud, Wanda,” Joel whispered as he reached his front door, opened it and stepped inside.
After a hot shower and a handful of much-needed ibuprofen, Joel turned on the MP3 player docked in the home’s entertainment system. Easing down into his recliner with a double dose of scotch on the rocks, and some Mozart drifting throughout, he sat back and began reading the logbooks.
He drifted off with less than half the scotch gone. In a rare instance Joel’s dreams were not the haunted nightmares that were the norm…instead, he was walking on a beach with Wanda. Neither of them spoke. They just walked hand-in-hand. The only thing odd was the deep crimson of the sunset. It reminded Joel of blood.
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TW Brown is the author of the Zomblog series, his horror comedy romp, That Ghoul Ava, and, of course, the DEAD series. Safely tucked away in the beautiful Pacific Northwest, he moves away from his desk only at the urging of his Border Collie, Aoife. (Pronounced Eye-fa)
He plays a little guitar on the side...just for fun...and makes up any excuse to either go trail hiking or strolling along his favorite place...Cannon Beach. He answers all his emails sent to twbrown.maydecpub @gmail.com and tries to thank everybody personally when they take the time to leave a review of one of his works.
His blog can be found at:http://twbrown.blogspot.com
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