by David Smith
"Hell yeah. We've got the big guns." Osterik replied.
The run back to the construction site took less than five minutes. We climbed the fence, ten feet high and covered on the outside with plastic banners of advertisements, and immediately saw a Caterpillar D-9. It was sitting at the base of a pile of busted up concrete, twice its height. The blade was a few feet taller than myself and there was a ripper on the back, the teeth over a foot long. It had a closed in cab but was unlocked so Osterik climbed inside and got to work hot wiring it while I stood guard.
"How long you been in the guard?" I asked.
"Twenty-two years, give or take."
"How is it you're still a Specialist?"
"I made E-6 in active duty before switching to the guard. After that, everything went downhill. I've been 11B, a mechanic, armored cav. Been to Iraq, Afghanistan, Africa, Bosnia. Thought I had seen it all."
"I guess you never expected zombies?"
He laughed. "No one expects the Spanish Inquisition."
"Huh?" I said and was drowned out by the sound of the dozer roaring to life.
Osterik drove while I stood on the catwalk in front of the open door. There were already three of the dead gathered on the other side of the fence so we smashed through it, taking down a few sections of it, crushing the dead under the tracks, then turned to go up the street.
By the time we made it back to the pier, the sun was almost down and the Lieutenant and the Chief had built a litter out of canoe paddles and a tarp and laid Sergeant Watts on it. Between the four of us, we were able to lift him up and lay him across the hood.
We headed north, following 12th avenue all the way up the river. The wooded areas and parks next to it gave us a place to push the cars and with the river to our left, we only had to defend one side from the dead.
We had made it halfway to the George Washington Bridge some time after nightfall. We had used about half of the ammo, most of the fuel and almost all the water in our canteens. Watts was looking bad. We all knew he was infected but didn't want to admit it because we knew he hadn't been bitten. To admit it would be admitting that we didn't know how it was spread and that any one of us could be next.
When the fuel finally did run out we were still several blocks from the bridge and it's a good thing we were. We could see thousands of dead, up on what was left of the bridge, walking right off the end of it a falling into the river. They looked like burned out ashes raining down from the atmosphere after a volcanic eruption. If we had gotten close enough for them to hear the engine, they would have turned back for us and there was no way we could have fought them off.
Before Watts went into shock, he stuttered out, "I feel so cold. What happening to me?"
Osterik was the only one who would answer him. "You're infected Sarge. You're turning into one of them."
The Chief argued. "He can't be. He was never bit, we checked him. It's gotta be some other kind of infection."
"Look at him sir. You ever seen anything else burn somebody up that fast?"
"It was the water." The Lieutenant interjected. "It was so full of blood, I could feel it on him when I pulled him out."
"But you're not getting sick."
"I wasn't submerged in it. He got it in his eyes, his mouth, probably even in his lungs."
No sooner than the words left his mouth, Watts started convulsing then fell into a coma before we could even get to him to hold him down. He looked stone dead, no rise and fall in his chest. The only way we knew he was alive was the raspy sound of a few shallow breaths. We watched him for a few minutes, Chief holding his wrist and feeling a faint, fast pulse.
"Not to sound like an asshole," Osterik said. "but we need to put him out of his misery...If not for his then for our own safety." None of us looked up at him, just kept watching Watts. I knew the Chief and Lieutenant were watching for him to stabilize. I was just watching for him to turn.
Suddenly there was the loose sound of a Beretta cocking behind us. Before the Chief and Lieutenant could turn around, he put one shot through Watts' head. I just leaned out of the way when I heard it because I knew he was right. The Chief hadn't even noticed that Osterik had slipped it out of his holster.
"It's gonna be dark before we get back. We show up after dark, those idiot guards are gonna shoot first and ask no questions. We should be safe sleeping in that big magnolia up ahead if the first limb isn't too low."
Chapter 16: Captivity
I woke up a few times during the night to the rustling of dead leaves or the scratching of bony fingertips against the hard, smooth bark if the tree we were sleeping in. Once, when I awoke, my arm was dangling down off the branch as I lay on my chest against it. It was still four feet or more out of reach of the one beneath me who had noticed and was reaching up for it by still startled me enough that I lost my balance and would have slid off and been eaten alive if not for being strapped to the tree by my belt. It was tall and I could see most of skull and facial bones exposed in the moonlight. Thin, whispy hair stood on end out of what was left of the scalp in the back and one eye was gone leaving a dark pit where it had been. It looked as if he had taken a shotgun blast to the face at some point with a light load and at too great of a distance to breach his skull. He had no shirt and his pants hung loosely around his protruding hips bones, his stomach, an empty hole where it had burst forth then dried up and retreated back inside him. He reached up with bony arms, his shoulders hard and lean, the muscles almost wasted away to strings and the skin stretched tightly over them. Four others scratched at the tree weakly, just as emaciated as he.
I thought about Stephanie and wondered, with a sickness in the pit of my stomach, just how many of the men had used her and how she could not even care. I knew I should be worried about my sister falling into the same role or worse, being forced into it. But I somehow wasn't. I readjusted slightly to take the pressure off the ends of my ribs against the tree branch and put it into fresh ones then dozed back off as the sky began to lighten.
I awoke to the hollow sounds of bats and knives cracking through skulls. I looked down and four men dressed in denim and leather were standing around the tree. I recognized two of them from the compound the day before.
"Wakey, wakey." Called out one of them; a tall sinewy man with sunken eyes and hard, angular features, a two day beard and random, faded tattoos on his long, thin yet muscular forearms.
Mac reached slowly for his gun, hoping to do so without drawing attention to it.
"You don't want to do that." The man called out. "Even if you win that battle, you'll lose the war. They'll come running for miles around by the time you climb down out of that tree."
We both knew that we were almost out of ammo and that even if we had enough to kill the four of them, we wouldn't have enough to fight our way back through a herd. I looked at Mac and there was a look of burning hatred in his eyes, his lips pressed so tight that his mouth disappeared in the middle of the thick, red beard.
"Take your guns by the barrel and drop them down here then climb down, yourself."
We did and as soon as we got to the ground one of them hit Mac on the back of the head with his rifle, almost knocking him out. They didn't do the same to me, I guess because they didn't feel it was necessary. They did ziptie both our hands behind us though, before walking us almost a mile through the woods and out to the road. On the way there, Mac wouldn't shut up.
"Don't tell them anything kid." He said from behind me.
"Shut up." The one leading him at gunpoint said.
"You hear me?" He continued. "Their gonna torture us. It's going to be like no pain you've ever felt but don't tell them anything."
"Shut up, I said!" The man shouted again and hit him in the back. I heard Mac grunt.
"Prepare yourself now, kid. Make up your mind that you're not going to tell them anything. Even if you think they're going to kill you, don't say anything. If you tell him anything they're going to kill everybody; your sister, your little girlfriend, and it
's all going to be your fault if you talk."
After that, I heard the man hit them again and heard him hit the dead leaves. They kept beating him as they kept pushing me on toward the road until all I could hear were faint thuds in the distance. I felt like a coward for not trying to help him but I knew that resisting at this point would only result in the death of us both. I didn't know why they hadn't already killed us but I knew that if they hadn't already, they wouldn't until our purpose to them was served.
Finally, we came into the back yard of a small wood sided house, abandoned and covered in years of mold and moss. The bushes and trees around the house had grown so tall and thick that there was only a small opening in the canopy, letting one wide beam of sunlight push its way to the ground like a spotlight on a stage. The front yard was even darker, the entrance into the driveway almost completely concealed with overgrown azaleas.
There, in the steam of this suburban jungle sat five motorcycles and two riders guarding them. One was a man not much older than myself, covered in tattoos from his neck to the ends of his fingers and the other, a girl, slightly younger. He held a shotgun and she, a revolver, not what I'd call a safe distribution of firepower for her sake. She had her back to me but I could tell she was younger by the way she carried herself, compensating for her lack of experience with her athletic, beauty-pageant-perfect, posture. She wore every strand of her dark hair pulled tightly back into a pony tail high on the back of her head and it still hung down to the middle if her back. She wore a black tank top that was too tight to stay down at the bottom to cover her overdeveloped-for-her-age hips. The skin of her shoulders and waist also showed her youth as it didn't have the weathered appearance of everyone else's in this post-apocalyptic world. But I couldn't see her face. I really wanted to see her face.
The man noticed us coming through the yard and said something to the girl. She turned her head and I could see her profile silhouetted darkly against the green of the overgrown azaleas. The only words that came to mind were 'geometrically perfect beauty'. He put his hand on the perfect, naked curve of her hip and she kissed him on the cheek before noticing me staring at her. Her eyes met mine and she quickly turned them down, shyly as he swung his leg over his bike, took it off the kickstand and waited for her to mount up.
They put Mac, beaten to a pulp and barely conscious, on the back of one of the bikes and ziptied his hands to the backrest and put me on one without a backrest and told me to hold on. We shot out through the azaleas, limbs slapping around us and engines roaring, onto the road. I recognized it as being less than a mile from Magnolia Ridge. A few small crowds had gathered loosely in the road at various points on the way back to their compound and although the tension sat like a rock in my gut, waiting to be pulled off and helplessly eaten alive, the motorcycles weaved through them with ease.
A few times on the way back, we rode alongside the man with the girl with the black hair, her ponytail flapping behind her in the wind like a flag. The way she had looked at me before, I thought that maybe if I could catch her eye a few more times, perhaps I could gain her trust or at least, enough sympathy that she would somehow help us if she was able. Each time we got close enough that I could see her face, I stared hard, hoping she would feel my glare and turn her head. I hoped she would give something away in her eyes that would tell me something about her I could use.
When she finally did look my way, it was just with her eyes, light blue behind long, black eye-lashes, squinting against the wind, keeping her head forward. Her eyes were so piercing, set in the midst of all that black hair and dark olive skin, that I felt she could kill a man with a glance or rule the entire world with a hard stare, if she took the notion to do so. If she was against us, she would've told them to bash my face in like they did Mac. But no, she was afraid of them. That's why she wouldn't turn her head, maybe. So the next time I caught her eye I thought out to her, 'You don't have to live like this. You're better than this. Help us and we can protect you.' and hoped somehow the message would get through in my expression and that it was the right message. I could have been misjudging her. Maybe she didn't turn her head because her ponytail would slap her in her face.
We made it back to the compound within minutes and pulled straight into the roll up door we had entered the day before and they closed it behind us as we rode through the warehouse, the idle of the engines echoing and intensifying in the sheet metal walls and steel shelving. We stopped outside the office door and were brought inside. Mac had come to his senses and was struggling against then defiantly.
"Remember what I told you." He whispered as they walked him past me and opened the door with his face. They shoved me and I followed.
It was dark in the hallway, as before, and all I could tell was that we went ten or twelve steps and turned left. I could hear a door swing open and could feel the floor turn from linoleum to hard tiles and there was suddenly a strong smell of raw sewerage. They walked me in and pushed me to the floor then ziptied me to the plumbing under a sink. I heard another one zipping closed across the room as they secured Mac to something else then they all left.
The smell of sewerage combined with the stifling heat and the anxiety of the beating that I knew was imminent was getting to me and my stomach started to turn over and over like gears in a machine with rocks stuck in between them. I dry heaved a couple of times as there was nothing to vomit up.
"Try to sleep if you can." Mac said. "You're gonna need your strength."
"How's your face?" I asked.
"I've had worse."
"Really?" I laughed nervously.
"Not that I can remember, no." He said slowly.
I stretched my legs out in the floor then scooted down till I was laying flat with my arms suspended from the plumbing. I interlaced my fingers around the pipe to keep the zipties from cutting into my wrists and closed my eyes. I dozed off for what might have been seconds or minutes or hours before the fluorescent lights fluttered on, I was too tired to tell which. it was long enough though for me to wake up drenched in a fresh layer of sweat.
After a few minutes, the boss walked in, his boots crunching heavily on the dirty, broken tile. The black haired girl and her boyfriend followed him in. He walked over to Mac first, who was sitting on the floor in front of a dirty toilet, his arms pulled far behind him and his hands ziptied around the base of it, his head hanging down in front of him. Flies buzzed in and out of the brown strained toilet and landed on his face then flew off again. The boss squatted down in front of him, his jeans pulling down in the back to reveal the upper cleft of his butt, covered with hair and red pimples.
He reached out with one meaty hand and dug his sausage like thumb into Macs eye, lifting his head up to see if he was awake.
"They sure messed you up, didn't they?" The fat man declared. "It can stop right here if you just answer me a few questions." He said as he looked into Mac's, almost swollen shut, left eye.
Mac just looked at him out of his one, half open eyelid and spit a mouthful of bloody saliva down the front of his red beard and onto the floor. The boss drew back at first, disgusted, then looked down at the blood on the floor and back up at him, his mouth open in disbelief. He held Mac's head up with the left hand and drew the other meaty fist back then drove it straight into the middle of his face with all his weight. He hit him so hard he almost lost his balance and had to catch himself on the stall wall which shook and rattled. The girl flinched and covered her mouth with a delicate hand either to keep from puking or to hold back a disapproving gasp. Her eyes almost seemed to glow in the dim fluorescent light like they were full of whatever was in lightning bugs.
Mac's head snapped back and dropped down then hung loosely. I wondered if he was even still alive but alive or not, the boss stood up and began lecturing.
"You ungrateful, ginger-head sum-bitch!" He said loudly and deliberately, spit flying out in the last word. "I bring you into my house. I give you shelter and a place to rest your ugly head and this is how you repay
me? You bleed and spit all over my floor?"
He kicked him in the stomach one time, hard, bracing himself on the shaky stall and the door fell halfway off, the screws of the top hinge rattling loose and pulling out of the plastic. "Shit." He cursed then turned around. "Kara," he snapped at the girl. "Get this mess cleaned up. And you," he pointed to her boyfriend. "Make yourself useful and fix that door again. I don't want you perverts looking at me when I'm tryin' a take a shit."
"Okay, Choppa."
Choppa, they called him.
He then turned to me and walked till he stood at me feet, blocking out the light. I had sat up and slid back to the wall under the sink, putting the plumbing between us. Slowly bending over, he looked down at me around the side of the sink. "Now, you ain't gone bleed all over my floor are ya?"
I just stared up at him from behind the pipes and waited for what was to come. He stepped back then reached down and grabbed my ankles and pulled me out straight. I struggled against him, pulling myself back under the sink, the zipties cutting into my wrists. He kicked at me as he pulled but not to much avail as he couldn't keep his balance with me struggling. Finally, he dropped me. "I got you, you smart ass sumbitch." He said then slammed his hands down on top of the sink and it moved. He grabbed it and yanked left and right, loosening it from the wall then pulled it loose. I drew my leg up and kicked him as hard as I could in the knee and he almost fell, dropping the sink on me, it hanging by the plumbing. This only made him angrier and he came back and leaned on it with his chest, crushing me underneath, the u-shaped trap digging into my chest.
"You done, you smart ass little shit?" He yelled then bounced his weight up and down on it. "You want to fight? Huh? You think you can whoop my ass? Huh, you little turd?" He was reaching over the back of the sink now, around the bent led pipes and slapping me in the face.
Finally, he stood up and pulled out a folding pocket knife. I thought he was about to stab me but he reached over and cut the zipties. He dragged me out from under the sink after that, the pipes scraping my chin and forehead, and put one foot, heavily, in the middle of my stomach. I tried to push him off, tried to kick him, but couldn't draw enough air to do anything worth the effort with his foot in my gut.
