Zed's World (Book 3): No Way Out

by Rich Baker

  The group raises their weapons, pointing them at the corner of the house where the gate is. A voice calls out to them.

  “Hey, look, we’re not looking for trouble, you know? We’re just trying to find food and stuff, to survive.”

  Robert looks over at Amanda, and she’s gone pale and is shaking.

  “We have no food here. Nothing to offer you,” he says. “You should just move on.”

  “How do you know? Maybe we could trade, you know? There ain’t many of us humans left. Don’t you think we should stick together?”

  Amanda’s voice cracks, barely above a whisper.

  “It’s them,” she says, her voice shaking, her lips curling in anger.

  Annie nods her head toward the three fresh graves. “As in the ones who did this?”

  Amanda nods.

  Robert whispers to the group. “If they show themselves, shoot them.”

  “Hey, guy? We can hear you whispering. Look, let’s just talk, okay? My name’s Lucky. What’s yours?”

  “You should just leave. We know who you are and we know what you did here. Just go. While you can.”

  When he speaks again, Lucky’s voice has a hard edge to it.

  “So that’s how it is, huh? You talk pretty tough. Have YOU killed anyone? Anyone LIVING? It’s not as easy as you think, you know?”

  “You didn’t seem to have any problems murdering my friends. Is there a reason you’re still here?”

  “I’m interested in who you are. You seem to know a lot about me and my friend. Do you know who we work for?”

  “Don’t know, don’t care. Just go away.”

  Rocks crunch behind them. They all turn and look just as Little Nicky steps around the opposite corner of the house with a rifle raised. He puts his sights on Robert, but his eyes catch Amanda, and he stops.

  “You!” he says. “How…”

  He’s interrupted by gunfire and screams. Lucky is pulling the trigger on his AK-47, at first just firing blind as he comes around the corner, only aiming away from the opposite corner, which is where he told Nicky to stop. Once he gets his bearings he takes aim on the closest person to him.

  Amanda spins and sees Lucky. Her blood runs cold at the sight of him. His face was the last thing she saw when he and Nicky drugged her family. The sound of bullets hitting flesh and blood spraying in the air move her to action.

  Lucky watches the young man fall down, several new holes in his body spurting blood. He focuses on another target, wondering why Nicky isn’t shooting, when he sees her. Amanda.

  How the fuck is she still alive? I should have just killed her that night. Fucking soft-hearted Nicky!!

  These thoughts flash through his head in an instant, but it’s an instant too long. He sees the flash from her pistol and feels the heat of the bullet in his chest. And another. And another. He hears more gunfire as he loses his balance and sees only the sky.

  Nicky fires blindly, not aiming, just spraying bullets. Though he doesn’t hear any shots, he sees Lucky get hit several times, bloody stains spreading across his shirt. He sees Amanda aiming a pistol at Lucky, so he directs the barrel of his rifle at her and pulls the trigger twice before someone is shooting at him. Bullets hit the house next to him, and one grazes his ear. He backs away, around the corner of the house, still pulling the trigger. He backs into the fence and climbs it as fast as he can. As he drops off to the street side of the fence, a bullet hits him in the lower back. He lands on the ground hard, feeling his forearm snap underneath the weight of his body. He screams, rolls over and uses his left leg to push his battered body toward the house. He knows he needs to get to his feet and get moving or he’s going to die.

  In the back yard, Stephenie is sobbing over Keith’s body. Lucky shot him several times when he was firing his AK, but the round to the head was the fatal shot. Annie is tying off a strip of fabric over a wound on Robert’s leg, and Ben is using a white bandana to put pressure on a hole in Amanda’s right shoulder. He’s trying to figure out how to tie another bandana around her armpit to keep pressure on it when Amanda notices Lucky is gone.

  “No!” she cries out, shaking Ben off. “No, goddammit! You’re not getting away!”

  She gets up and walks over to the corner of the house. She peeks around the corner and sees Lucky walking away from her, his legs unsteady and his gait uncertain. She raises the pistol and pulls the trigger.

  Lucky wobbles on his feet, almost going down but somehow staying upright. He’s through the gate now and can see the rear end of the white electric car. He’s going to make it.

  Another shot, this one to the back of his head, has his vision swimming. He thinks it’s odd how the ground is rushing up to him.

  In the car, Little Nicky is agonizing about what to do. He’s pretty sure Lucky is dead, but he knows that Max Montero will question him about it if he doesn’t see the body. Movement catches his eye as he sees Lucky step past the corner of the garage. He’s alive! He presses ‘start’ and gets ready to take off. Coming back here was a really bad idea. I should have moved on like Lucky said.

  He sees Lucky’s head pitch forward. Blood spatter cascades through the air. Lucky’s body goes stiff and falls forward, his face making hard contact with the sidewalk. Then that woman, Amanda, steps into view.

  Amanda walks up to Lucky’s body and kicks him, rolling him onto his back. His eyes are still open, and she can hear him gasping for breath. She aims the pistol at his face.

  “This…won’t…bring your…kids back,” he says in a hoarse voice, almost a whisper.

  “It will make me feel better, you son-of-a-bitch!”

  She pulls the trigger until the slide locks back.

  Nicky’s mouth hangs open as he watches Amanda put four – or was it five? – more bullets into Lucky, into his face. She is cold, like a hit man. She looks up and makes eye contact with Nicky. He sees her drop the empty magazine, but her right arm hangs limp, so she’s having a hard time getting a fresh one loaded. She turns and shouts something he can’t hear, but rather than wait to find out what she said, he decides it’s time to go.

  He stomps on the gas pedal, spinning the wheel to the left and pointing the car out of the neighborhood. The rear window shatters and bullets hit the dashboard, the passenger seat, and the windshield, but somehow miss him.

  At the end of the street, he turns left, going the wrong way in the roundabout, but it’s not like anyone is going to give him a ticket. He sees a startled woman on a motorcycle stopped short of the roundabout and a man with a rifle running into the yard of the house at the end of the street. There are a lot of zombies coming through the field and up the main road. He makes it another block, turns left and disappears around the corner.

  Back at Amanda’s, the group gathers in the front of her house. Ben and Annie have brought Keith’s body out to the front yard.

  “I think we may want to go inside and wait this out. There’s going to be a ton of zeds coming. We’ll never get Keith home with a horde around us. Plus, Robert’s leg is hurt, and Amanda’s arm is injured,” Ben says.

  “I don’t know if I can go back in that house,” Amanda says.

  “Well, we need to figure something out. We’re not going to have much time. The guns those guys had were hellaciously loud.”

  Robert bends down and rifles through Lucky’s pockets, finding some papers, a key fob for the electric car, and his wallet. He puts it all in his bag and stands up, wincing as he tries to put weight on his leg. He opens his mouth to talk when blood sprays all over his face. He hears a muffled ‘whump’ and Amanda falls against him, knocking him into the garage door. Bullets ping through the aluminum door, and two more hit Amanda, one of them passing through the band of muscle above her collar bone and lodging in Robert’s chest.

  The rest of the group scrambles for cover, looking around for the shooter.

  “There!” Annie says, pointing up the street to a mean looking all-purpose-vehicle. “Two people, a man and a woman.”

&
nbsp; “Is that…Danielle?” Ben asks.

  “No, couldn’t be, could it?” Annie says.

  Stephenie gets her gun ready to fire when they hear muffled shots from their right, and in the APV, the shooter has collapsed against the blonde in the passenger seat. A man with an AR-15 and a vest full of tactical gear yells at them as he runs past.

  “Gather up your wounded; we need to go! There’s an army of the dead coming this way!”

  Ben starts to raise a gun to him, but Stephenie stops him and points at the APV.

  He can see clearly now that it IS Danielle in the APV.

  “That giant fucking bitch!” he shouts as the stranger runs past them.

  They watch the stranger run to the APV and hear him barking instructions at Danielle. He grabs the wounded driver and moves him the bed of the APV, then hops in and hits the gas, driving down to the house where the group waits.

  “Load ‘em up!” he says, gesturing to wounded and then to the bed of the APV.

  Stephenie lunges at the blonde in the passenger seat, but the man stops her from attacking.

  “Time for that later! Let’s go! Time is a factor here!”

  They all hesitate, looking at each other, not sure if they should listen to this guy or not.

  He raises his rifle, and fires six shots, dropping four zombies that were within one hundred fifty feet. Another two dozen aren’t far behind them.

  “Look, I’m trying to help you guys here, but if you don’t want it, I’ll take this APV, and you all can hoof it through this horde that’s coming. There’s only another couple hundred behind those four.”

  Ben pulls at Stephenie, and they run and grab Robert’s arms and carry him to the APV, helping him get in the bed of the vehicle. Annie is dragging Amanda’s body toward them, and Ben rushes to help her, while Stephenie goes and starts moving Keith’s body. A few seconds later Annie and Ben show up to help her, and they put him in the bed with the others.

  Stephenie points at an open garage door across the street and to their left, close to where Danielle and this unknown man stopped to shoot at them. The front end of a golf cart is just visible inside the opening. He nods at Stephenie, who sprints towards it.

  “Folks, we need to go,” the stranger says. “Where are you staying?”

  “One minute and we’ll show you,” Ben says.

  Stephenie reaches the cart and gets behind the wheel. A second later it rolls out of the garage and turns their way.

  Annie and Ben hop in the cart, and they head down the street, weaving through the undead and knocking a few of them aside. Stephenie sees the mass of zombies coming from the right, and jumps the curb, steering the golf cart into the big, vacant field. D-Day follows in the APV, making the horde turn like a flock of decaying, grounded geese.

  Part Three: The Others

  One

  Friday, May 24, 2013: Z-Day Plus 7

  Frank Walker, aka Fierce Frankie, aka Frankie Four Fingers, aka Frankie the Gimp sees the red light flashing, indicating something has tripped the motion sensor at the back door of Pawn King. That’s the name of his used goods emporium. Not ‘the Pawn King’ as in “Let’s go to the Pawn King.” It frustrates him. No one says, “Let’s go to the McDonald’s” or “Let’s go to the Wendy’s” so why do they say, “the Pawn King?” He could understand if he had more than one location: “Let’s go to the Pawn King on Fourth Avenue.” But he doesn’t have more than one. It’s just ‘Pawn King.’

  It’s a goddamn chess metaphor, he often says to people. He takes pride in his work, and others should too. He also owns ‘Check Mate’ – the check cashing place next door. And Castle Mini-Storage – that one works on many levels. And Bishop’s Coffee Shop.

  Frank has never played a game of chess in his life. He associates the game with high society, something with which his businesses are not known to be associated, but he thinks it looks better on paper and makes him look smarter in social circles above the strata where he resides. He doesn’t care so much about that for himself – he has no use for ‘social circles’ – but he does for his daughter’s sake. She cares what people think, and she’ll hopefully get married someday. He would like it to be to someone a step or two above his strata.

  He started Pawn King with a settlement he got from the city when he was passed out drunk in an alley under a pile of garbage, and one of the city trucks drove over his leg. Three surgeries and months of rehab later, he could walk again. He would forever have a limp, however, hence one of his many nicknames, Frankie The Gimp.

  It was worth it to him. He was uneducated and doing day labor, mostly construction, and even breaking his back sixty or seventy hours per week he was barely making ends meet. When that truck ran him over, he got a high six figure settlement out of the deal and, with the help of his daughter, he parlayed that into a working-class empire.

  He changes the monitor feed to the peephole camera on the rear entrance and sees Lucky Maestas and Little Nicky. He smiles for a minute, marveling at how the scumbags, the lowlifes in town, always have the best nicknames. You’ll never hear of a Fortune 500 CEO called by the number of fingers on his hand, or named for an infirmity. The upper crust always hides their imperfections, he thinks. We embrace ours. That’s what makes us better equipped for the real world. THIS world. He presses the button under the counter that unlocks the rear door, waits for Lucky to open it, and releases the button.

  The two men make their way from the back with two full backpacks and two full duffel bags.

  “We got a ton of stuff, Frankie,” Lucky says. “We didn’t even get too far and had the bags full.” He sets the duffel bag on the counter and unzips it. It’s filled with fruit, vegetables, raw meats – hamburger, chicken breasts, steaks – and lunch meat. Each of the bags has a similar trove of food inside, some of it fresh, some canned.

  Frankie smiles at them. “You did good, boys. I believe you went out with more bags though. Did you run into trouble?”

  “There’s zombies everywhere, Frankie, and they’re fucking fast. We almost got overrun a couple of times,” Little Nicky says. His real name isn’t even any variation of Nick or Nicolas. He earned the moniker after he got punched in the throat in a bar fight. The damage to his voice box left him sounding like the Adam Sandler character from the movie of the same name. “They got too thick, and we were worried we wouldn’t make it back.”

  “Did the car work out?” Frankie asks. It was his idea to send the boys out in a Nissan Leaf because the electric engine is so quiet compared to the gas combustion engine in a normal car.

  “Yeah, mostly,” Lucky says. “It doesn’t matter once they see it. They come running, and any others that see them running follow them like they’re tied together. Soon there’s a whole mob of them.”

  “But the engine noise didn’t draw them out?” Frankie asks.

  “Nah, I don’t think so,” Lucky says.

  “Did it or didn’t it? It’s a simple fucking question, Lucky!” Frankie shouts. He tends to lose his temper over small matters, hence, ‘Fierce’ Frankie.

  The outburst startles Lucky. “I don’t know if they heard us or saw us first, Frankie! All I can tell you is that I didn’t see them coming out of the woodwork before we drove through a neighborhood, which I would expect them to do if they heard us coming. They sure as shit came out after we passed a group though.”

  “It’s not like we could ask them, you know?” Little Nicky adds.

  “No, I suppose you couldn’t, you little smart ass. Please try to remember you’re in this happy, safe little outpost by the whim of my good graces! Run your mouth, and I’ll put you out on your ass, and you can see how reasonable they are!” Frankie points a fist toward the front window, indicating the undead on the street out in front, unseen through the steel shutters. It’s only when one looks closely at that fist that his stump of an index finger is visible. Cut off before the first knuckle; it’s pointing, just barely poking out past his folded knuckles. Frankie Four Fingers.

 
; “Sorry, Frankie. It’s just, things happen fast out there. I wasn’t taking notes - I was just trying to, like, survive, you know?” Little Nicky says.

  Frankie looks at Little Nicky with a withering stare. After a minute, he turns to Lucky. “It’s a good thing you’re the brains of the operation, Lucky. Get this stuff to the fridge. There’s some stew on the stove, get a bowl and get some rest. You guys are going back out tomorrow.”

  He watches them take the bags to the kitchen. He’s hard on the boys; he must be. He knows that with his lame leg he couldn’t go out and gather supplies as they can. No, he needs them to fear him, needs them to think that they need him more than he needs them. To some extent that’s true. But, take away his buildings, the generators he has in the basement, the weapons and ammo he’s collected from desperate people for pennies on the dollar - take it all away, and he would have nothing to offer them. He has no real skills of any kind other than a quick mind. He may lack a formal education, but Frankie has street smarts in spades. It’s a good thing these kids are conditioned to follow an alpha, he thinks. Whether it’s the leader of their gang or me, they need someone giving them orders.

  The pair of young hoods unload the food and eat some of the stew Frankie has on the stove. They eat in silence while Frankie’s daughter organizes the canned food they brought back. It’s no secret that she doesn’t like them. She doesn’t like any of the gang element in town. They’re always bringing stolen merchandise to pawn, which puts her father’s business under the eye of law enforcement too often. Several times they’ve had to turn over property that turned out to have been stolen, and they never get reimbursed the money they paid for it, not that the police care about that. She finishes her work, turns and glares at the two men and leaves the room.

  “Why are the hot ones always so bitchy?” Nicky says in a hushed voice.

  “Aren’t they all bitchy to you?” Lucky says.

  “Yeah, pretty much.”

  “Then maybe it’s you, not them. Ever think of that?”