“Maybe she shouldn’t watch,” Jimmy said. “You know, in case something bad happens.”
Sadie glared over the top of Jillybean’s head. “Nothing bad is going to happen. We’ve all hunted before so it’s no big deal, right Jillybean? I remember you used to make the prettiest little snares. She’d use vines and flowers and long grasses to camouflage them. It was like art. Mine were always…”
There was a sudden snort and a long bellow from one of the buffalo that seemed to have fallen over. It was a big male with a head the size of a dishwasher. It was blowing loudly, making a commotion as it struggled to get to its feet near one of the irrigation canals. Around him, the herd didn’t know what to make of it. Those closest circled and pawed the ground. One came near and swung it’s horned head back and forth, perhaps trying to see what the problem was with its beady little eyes.
“What the fuck?” Jimmy had his rifle up again and was squinting through the scope. “It looks like it might have broken its leg. Wait, no, it’s got something on its leg. Huh, it’s a bear trap. It stepped on a bear trap.”
Sadie had never heard of this hunting tactic before. She raised her rifle and saw the wounded buffalo laying on its side, its chest heaving. Every once in a while it would pointlessly give the trapped leg a little shake. The bear trap was affixed to a nearby boulder with a chain that was as thick as Sadie’s arm.
“The hunters are moving,” Jimmy said. In short spurts, the hunters began to draw closer. At first the remaining buffalo tried to circle their wounded friend, however the hunters used the ditches to divide the group. The buffalo did not like to cross them. They would go to the edge and turn skittish and it was easy for the hunters to scare them off.
Soon it was just a stalwart group of maybe twenty buffalo left defending the injured one. They formed a ring that didn’t look as though it could be broken by the tiny humans unless they used their guns, which they hadn’t tried yet. It was then that Sadie noticed that half the hunters weren’t armed with guns—amazingly, they carried crossbows.
She would see why a few moments after some of the men began lighting handfuls of grass on fire. They waved them in the air, creating a hazy cloud. The total amount of smoke couldn’t have been much more than what came from an average cooking fire, and yet the buffalo began to move away. They turned little circles in their retreat, confused over the smoke and their innate duty to protect the herd.
As they retreated, the men moved up. Those with the crossbows quickly turned the trapped buffalo into a pincushion. It was dead in seconds and in minutes its hide was peeled away and its bones stripped of meat. They were so fast that the zombies lurking in the woods didn’t have time to make it halfway across the wide fields before the men pulled their wolf fur about them and slunk off, heading north into the hills.
“That was something,” Sadie said.
“Do you think they left anything for us?” Jimmy asked, getting to his feet. “I’m sick of this canned shit we’ve been eating. I’m gonna go check.”
Before he got three steps, Sadie said, “Hold up. One of us has to follow those guys and the other has to watch Jilly.” He didn’t seem to like either choice; both would be dangerous if he wasn’t careful.
After a deep breath—his way of agreeing with Sadie—he gestured with his good hand towards the north. “I’ll follow them, but listen, I want some buffalo when I get back. They left the ribs. Can I trust you to cook some of that up?”
“Yes, yes but get going.” Forgetting his injured arm, she gave him a shove, almost toppling him. She whispered an apology and watched him make his way along the edge of the forest in the dimming light as the sun went behind the mountains.
“How you doing?” she asked Jillybean when he was lost among the shadows. “You gave me quite a scare there for a few minutes.” Jillybean shrugged without looking up. “Do you want to talk about it?”
The little girl shook her head.
“That’s okay. I’m not a therapist or anything. Let’s go see what they left us, what do you say?”
“Sure, I guess.” They trudged down to the fields, climbed a wire fence and jumped a ditch before they came to the scattered remains of the buffalo. Jillybean had seen enough death in her time that the mess of bones and blood shouldn’t have affected her, but for some reason she didn’t want to get too close. “I’m sorry about what I almost did. I let it get away from me.”
Sadie put an arm around her. “It’s okay. It’s been a long few days. Do me a favor? Watch for stiffs while I get us some rib meat.” There was plenty to be had, which made Sadie wonder how good it would be. She collected it in her shirt, having decided the moment she had seen the farm houses that she’d be getting a new one.
She smelled pretty ripe and would have loved to collect some water for a bath, but her labors weren’t over for the day. There was wood to collect, a fire to start, a meal to cook and perhaps a late evening mission to check out what sort of people they had stumbled across.
“What did you think of them?” she asked Jillybean as they trudged up to the closest of the farm houses. “It would be cool if we could end our journey right here, you know? We really weren’t under orders to go all the way to the ocean. We just have to find the right community.”
Jillybean pushed her way through a screen of bushes and trees that surrounded the house. She paused, staring up at the weathered building with its peeling paint and tired shingles. “They’re well led, so that’s good,” she said. “It’s too bad that there’s just not that many of them.”
“I’m sure that wasn’t all of them.”
“No, of course not. There’s probably a hundred and fifty there abouts. Judging by the decayed nature of the different carcasses and bones in that field, I’d say they come out every couple of days to get one. Sometimes they get a little one, which is sad but what’s worse is when they get a mommy.”
Sadie turned back towards the screen of vegetation. “There’s no way you could tell the sex of a buffalo from the bits that were left over, at least from that far away.”
“Huh? No that would be impossible, but I know there were six different mommies killed because there were six real skinny calves that weren’t getting their milk. Calves is what means they are babies. They’re gonna starve.”
Were there six skinny calves? Sadie wondered, trying to think back. She couldn’t remember. She had been too focused on the men to pay attention to the makeup of the herd. “Anything more you can tell me, about the men that is?”
“I don’t know if they’re good guys or bad guys, if that’s what you mean. I think they’re getting low on ammo, which is not so good, but they are efficient and that’s something, I guess. Are you gonna go check them out tonight? And if so can I come? I won’t be bad, I promise.”
A somewhat sane Jillybean would be an asset on a reconnaissance run; a Jillybean on the edge of a breakdown would be a disaster. Sadie gave her a close look, and saw that her eyes were clear and the twitches were gone. Still it was better to be safe than sorry. “No, I better go alone. Someone has to keep Jimmy company, right?”
“Sure, I guess, though he does curse a lot. Hey, what if he goes to sleep, then can I come?”
“We’ll see,” Sadie said, using a tried and true expression every mom who had ever walked the face of the earth had used. “Let’s see what’s in this house before we make any decisions.”
It turned out there wasn’t much in the house. It hadn’t just been searched, it had been stripped down to the floorboards. The beds were taken, and dressers, and the cooking gear, all the tools and most of the clothes. Sadie only found a replacement shirt down in the basement in the dryer.
Even the couches had been taken. The closest thing to a bed was a reclining chair that sat alone in the family room pointing at a useless TV. What was left didn’t add up to much. “Well, this sucks,” Sadie said as she touched a fake tree four inches in height. It sat on a homemade table that took up most of the basement. On it was a train set with fifty f
eet of track.
“I think it would be cool if we could get the ‘lectricity going,” Jillybean said. “And look under here.” Beneath the table was a heavy duty kite with four hundred feet of line on a spool the size of rolling pin, a stack of photo albums, and some boxes of decorations: Halloween, Christmas, and Easter.
Jillybean eyed the kite the longest and had to be dragged out of the gloomy basement. “You saw the trees, didn’t you? This must be a great kite flying area. We could…”
“We can get a fire going and cook some of this meat, that’s what we can do.” Sadie directed her back to the main floor and went in search of firewood. Normally Jillybean would have helped, but she pouted on the recliner instead. By the time Sadie got back with the first armful of wood, the little girl was fast asleep.
“Lucky girl,” Sadie mumbled, wishing she could join her. She was bone tired, but there would be no rest for her. This new group they had discovered would have to be evaluated and not just by Jimmy. The soldier had yet to show any spark of intelligence beyond the ordinary and unless he came back saying that there were just thirty guys sitting around a campfire, Sadie would have to check things out.
“And I’m so tired,” she said, setting her Zippo to a crumple of paper in the fireplace. She yawned her way through cooking the rib meat. Her only utensils for this process was a stick which she had tapered to a point. She gave each piece a fair dusting of salt, pepper, and oregano, but without barbecue sauce and the chance to slow roast, the meat was more than disappointing, it was an annoying exercise in chewing.
When Jimmy got back, he was polite enough to lie about how awesome it was, and yet it took him ages to down each bite. It didn’t help that he talked while he chewed: “It’s very promising,” he said around a smiling mouthful. “I followed them up into the hills and came to this big-ass wall. I gotta say it was damned impressive. It was like ninety feet tall and, I don’t know, maybe two hundred feet wide. They set it up across the face of this valley. It’s not as big a valley as Estes, but it’s still good sized.”
“You got past the wall?” Sadie asked excitedly. “How many people were there?” Jillybean’s estimate had been depressing and she didn’t want to believe it. Her hope was that there were a thousand very nice people sitting in a pristine valley that was an exact mirror of Estes.
“I don’t know,” he said, one second after taking another bite. He chewed for a bit before saying, “They had guys up on the wall, so I climbed this other hill that was close and could see into the valley a bit. It looks safe. Ain’t no zombie gonna get in, that’s for certain. The hills are way too steep.”
Sadie sat back, disappointed at the vague description and the lack of effort on Jimmy’s part. Had this been Captain Grey or Neil, or even Dianna, they would have braved the hills surrounding the valley and come back with a full report. She sat there with her feet thrumming, watching Jillybean sleep. Eventually, she said, “I’ll go check things out here in a little while. When I’m gone watch over her.”
It was already well past sundown, but it was still too early for her to head out. There’d be too many people awake, perhaps too many enjoying the fine weather, maybe too many taking evening strolls. She had already conjured a vision of the valley as practically a utopia and yet that didn’t stop her from donning her black gear and daubing ash on her face.
When she set out an hour later, she went light and fast, carrying only her M4 with its Starlight scope. In the dark, she blended so well that when she looked down even she could hardly tell where her feet stopped and the shadows began.
Finding the valley was easy. The stream that fed the fields cut through the hills on a straight course for two miles and then, rather unexpectedly, took a sharp left. A quarter of a mile further on, it came bubbling out from beneath the wall. Sadie scoped it with her rifle, seeing the green shapes of men high up on the wall.
The wall’s edge closest to her smacked right up against a looming and very steep hill that ran in a gently undulating ridge for a half mile before it wedged up against more hills, cooling Sadie’s hope that this group had set themselves up in a valley after all.
“More like a box canyon,” she mumbled, fearing that Jillybean’s guess concerning their numbers might not be far off. There was only one way to tell and that was to see for herself. With little enthusiasm, she slunk along the base of the ridge line heading for the further hills, thinking she would come at the valley via the back door, which would be the least likely guarded.
There was plenty of forest and brush to conceal her movements as she made her way to the hills. Once there, she slung her weapon and mounted the slope. Because of the sharp angle, she went from tree to tree like a monkey. Jimmy had been right about the zombies, she thought. Tired as she was, even she was having trouble getting up the hill and twice she slipped.
Then she found a deer trail running at a diagonal towards the summit. As a bonus, it headed in the direction of the valley, but whether or not it actually got there, Sadie never found out. She was fifty yards from the top when she hit a snag and tripped, going down hard on her hands.
It wasn’t just a simple branch that tripped her, however. A sudden blast of light and heat just to her right shocked and blinded her. It was a military grade flare that consumed her retinas and turned everything utterly black, the black of deepest space. She tried to stand and struck her head on something sending her back down to her knees.
She tried again, flailing her hands about, hitting branches and trunks, not knowing where anything was save for the damn flare and the hill that wanted to suck her down. She tried to turn around to get down the hill in one piece, however the branch she had hold of snapped and she pitched sideways, rolling like a log until she whammed into another trunk.
Now, she was a good ten feet from the flare and desperate to get away. A whistle had been blowing and with it were the raised voices of men. Once more she tried to stand, only now it felt as though she were being pinned down. Her jacket was pierced and snagged in places by the jutting spears of broken branches. She tugged backwards, catching what felt like the edge of a saw across the face, cutting her cheek.
“Mother!” she hissed, grimacing and throwing an arm across her eyes which made moving on the slope impossible. Around her, the night was filled with orange blobs and dancing shadows. Her only chance to get away was to take a moment to get used to the light from the flare.
She turned away from the intensity of it, shielding her face and blinking until she could see the forest as it really was. Finally, she could see properly—or at least well enough to see the men hurrying down the trail to get at her. She tugged away from the tree and crawled back up onto the deer trail, thinking that on this ground she had the advantage. She was too fast and they were too slow.
A heartbeat before she showed them her heels and fled with the speed of a leopard, the flare made a strange fizzing sound and abruptly died. For the second time in the space of half a minute, Sadie was blind and yet the same orange blobs were there to torment her.
The men weren’t blind, however. Behind her, flashlights came on, catching her standing there on the path like a simpleton. With a curse, she tried to run, but now the race was unequal. They could see and she could barely make out what was a shadow and what was a stick in the eye…or a branch creeping up out of the earth.
It felt like a hand reached up and grabbed her Converse. With a curse, she went down again and before she knew it there was a knee in her back and a gun to her head.
Chapter 7
Jillybean
Jimmy’s chewing woke the little girl, or rather, it was the leading cause. Sadie’s disgust over the sloppy mastication caused her to speak louder than she wished, obviously trying to drown the sound out.
Five feet away, Jillybean lay in a little ball of pink curled up on the lone chair in front of a fireplace looking just like a house cat. Her fly-away hair was more of a mess than usual and it hid the eye she cracked as she listened to their conversation. Sadie
’s idea was to go for a late evening reconnaissance and so it was only natural that Jillybean was already forming a plan to slip away to go exploring with her sister. In her mind, they belonged together when facing danger.
What’s wrong with just staying here? Ipes asked. He came waddling from around the back of the chair and stood on his tiptoes to peer into the slit of Jillybean’s eye. His shadow was a wavering thing, that looked to be doing a belly dance in tune with the flames. She’s awful smart. She should be fine.
“Hmm,” Jillybean murmured under her breath thinking that, as much as she love her sister, Sadie wasn’t all that smart. She had above average intelligence, that was true, but she was nobody’s genius.
Okay, she’s fast as lightening, Ipes said. She’ll be untouchable. Really, have you ever known anyone who could catch her? Here, shove over. You look comfy as a cat and I want in on some of that. He hopped up and wormed his way into her arms and somehow managed to get in under her chin, where he was warm and comfy.
You know, if we’re going to be cats, we might as well purr. Ipes began to rumble contentedly. It was a soft, hypnotic sound and when it was combined with the heat from the fire and Jillybean’s exhaustion, it was no wonder that she was soon fast asleep again.
How long she was out this time, she didn’t know but there was a quite a puddle of drool in the crook of her arm when the back door banged open waking her. Bleary and disheveled, she sat up on the cracked leather recliner as Jimmy came in, his eyes wild and his hands shaking. “You gotta see this.”
He practically dragged her from the family room and out onto the porch and then through the backyard. “Wh-where are we going?” she asked, her hand slipping into her pocket where she had her .38 ready.
“Through here,” he said, pushing through the screen of trees. “Look. What the hell is that?”
Away to the north was a glow of yellow light that was partially hidden by an intervening hill. It lasted about ten seconds and then went out. In the dark that followed they could hear the carrying notes of a whistle blowing from the same direction. “That was a flare, wasn’t it?” Jimmy hissed, gripping his short hair with one hand. “Son of a bitch it was. That means they got her, right? They got her. Fuck me. First Steinman, and now this. I knew this was going to happen. Why didn’t I stop her?”
The Apocalypse Sacrifice: The Undead World (The Undead World Series Book 10) Page 7
