by Rich Baker
He hops in and hits the gas, driving down to the house where the group waits. He glances at Danielle as they move forward.
“I don’t know what the deal is here, but you’re coming with me, or I leave you for zombie food. Keep your mouth shut unless I speak to you directly, you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Good,” he says as they pull up to the driveway. “Load ‘em up!” he shouts as he gets out of the Ranger, gesturing to wounded and then to the bed of the APV.
Stephenie lunges at the Danielle, but the stranger stops her from attacking.
“Time for that later!” he yells. “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 three houses away from them. Another two dozen aren’t far behind those four.
“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 them.”
Ben pulls at Stephenie, and they run and grab Robert’s arms and carry him to the APV, helping him get in the cargo bed next to the body of the man that was shooting at them. Annie is dragging Amanda 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 hits Ben’s shoulder and points at an open garage door across the street and to their left, close to where Danielle and her murderous partner were parked moments before. The front end of a golf cart is just visible inside the opening. He nods yes to her, and she 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.
“Okay, follow us,” Ben says, 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 to the left, into the big, vacant field. D-Day follows in the APV, making the horde turn after them like a flock of decaying geese. Danielle was toying with the idea of jumping from the vehicle until she saw the mass of undead headed toward them. There’s no way she’s jumping out into that. She’ll have to take her chances with the Puckett’s.
She hears the rumble of a motorcycle to their left and sees a woman heading toward them at an angle on a big black chopper.
Now what? she wonders. She sees the stranger next to her wave at the woman on the bike, and then point at the golf cart. The woman gives a thumbs up and follows, hanging back a bit and to their left, dragging some of the undead toward her.
Ahead, Stephenie turns the cart into the alleyway, headed toward the Puckett’s lair. Marc is looking over the fence, sees them, and hurries inside the garage. A second later the door goes up. Stephenie flies into the garage, nearly slamming into the back wall. The stranger brakes hard at the end of the driveway and makes the turn into the garage in a controlled skid. Marc starts to pull the door down, but the stranger stops him.
“Wait!” he says. “There’s one more coming!”
Marc looks at the man, confused, but leaves the door up. Down the alley, the engine on the motorcycle revs hard, the bike easily outpacing the horde. The woman slows down well before she gets to the garage and coasts inside. Marc pulls the door down.
“What the fuck is going on?” he asks, looking around. “Where’s Keith?”
The stranger speaks before anyone else does.
“Whatever your team was doing went sideways, that’s what’s going on. Do you have some place more secure than this garage?”
“Who are you?”
“Name’s D-Day. We have several hundred zombies headed to this location. That door will not hold them back. Please tell me you have a more secure spot than this.”
“We do, but I don’t know you…”
D-Day cuts him off.
“That door closing was the sound of me joining your team, at least for the time being. We have wounded here, some maybe dead. We need to get to a safer place than this.”
The first of the horde starts hitting the door, underscoring his point.
“He saved us, Marc,” Annie says, then points at Danielle. “From HER and her new boyfriend.”
“Do you have someplace secure we can stash her? I expect you’ll have some questions for her,” D-Day says.
“Where is Keith?” Marc asks again.
Stephenie holds her hands out, one palm up, one down, and flips them over.
Marc shakes his head. “I don’t know what that means. Where is my son?”
“He’s dead, Marc,” Annie says.
No one moves for a long few seconds. Blood drips from the bed of the Ranger, as the undead horde descends on the house.
“Let’s go,” Marc says. “Everyone inside.”
Part Four: Collision Course
One
The Parrot drone moves another few feet and hovers, twelve feet off the ground and out of the reach of the dead. Andy controls it from Marc’s iPad while the others tend to the wounded. He moves the drone a little farther, pulling more of the dead around the corner of the house across the alley. He tried counting them but gave up after one hundred fifty.
When he’s moved the drone to the limits of its lateral distance, he takes it up in altitude, back over the houses and lands it in the window well of the Puckett’s old house. It’s safe there, and they can retrieve it later.
The undead, in their fashion, are moving like lemmings after the first few that followed the drone. Those ‘leaders’ are staring skyward, and if their reptilian brains are capable of registering anything, they’re confused. The noisy thing they were chasing just shot into the sky and disappeared. The masses forming up behind them don’t even know what they were following, so they look around, searching for prey, and start to wander off into the big empty field. The rain is falling harder now, and it is having an interesting effect on the undead too. The noise of the rainfall and the stimulus of the water hitting them has many of the undead spinning in circles, searching for an invisible enemy that they never find.
Soon the horde is scattered around the area, still within striking distance, and in much higher numbers than usual – more than Andy has seen since the Turn - but they’ve stopped trying to break through the garage door. Satisfied, Andy flips the cover over the tablet and heads down the stairs to the main floor, makes a right and goes to the internal garage door. He turns the deadbolt, twists the knob, and peeks inside. The door is badly beaten, the joints between the panels bent, letting in shafts of light. But the door held. He shuts and locks the inside door, then follows the trail of blood into the basement where chaos reigns.
Robert sits on the floor, leaning back against the cement wall of the unfinished basement, pressing a wad of gauze against his left shoulder. Annie has Danielle face down on the floor, a rifle at her back. Marc is cradling Keith’s head, tears leaving trails down his face. Stephenie weeps a few steps away.
The new guy and his woman are busy working on the guy who was with Danielle, shooting at the group. Bloody cloth is scattered all around the ping-pong table turned surgical theater. Kyle and Natalie are helping them.
“I got the herd moving out,” he says. “They didn’t get through the garage door, but they beat the hell out of it. I don’t know if we’ll be able to open it again.”
Natalie runs over to him from behind the basement door and hugs him.
“Andy, thank God!”
“Hey, fill me in. What’s going on?”
She takes his hand and pulls him to the other side of the stairs. She points at a body shrouded in a sheet and st
arts talking in a hushed tone.
“Ok, so they tried to help Amanda, but she was shot, like, seven times. She died right after they got her down here. Robert is wounded, but they said it’s not life threatening, so he’s waiting for them to finish with the other guy, the one who was shooting at them.”
“And it’s true about Keith? He’s really dead?”
“Yeah. I mean, you saw him over there. He was gone before they even put him in that cart.”
“And this guy they’re working on? Why are they trying to save him?”
“The other new guy, his name’s D-Day, he wants to see if they can keep him alive long enough to get information from him. He’s big on getting ‘intel,’ as he calls it.”
“Was Danielle really with this guy?”
“I guess so. She hasn’t said much since we brought her down here.”
“What are we going to do with her?”
“Ben’s over in the Compound working on the window well in the front bedroom. Since we haven’t finished the tunnel to the neighbor’s house yet, everyone figures it would be a good holding cell until we sort all of this out.”
Andy nods. “Okay. I’ll help Ben. Come get me if you guys need me.”
He walks over to the main room and climbs through the window into the tunnel that connects this house with the Harris house. He stops at the steel door and punches in the access code. The door hums as the steel bolts retract, and he pushes his way through, closing the door and pressing the ‘lock’ button on the keypad.
He finds Ben in the bedroom pulling bags of canned and dry food out of the window well where they’ve been storing their excess scavenged supplies. Ben’s girlfriend Toni sits on the bed, her arm in a sling. Her shoulder is still healing from her gunshot wounds received weeks before.
Andy nods at Toni. “Hey Toni,” he says. “Good to see you up!”
“Thanks. I’m trying to get moving again. It still hurts but not as bad as it was.”
He gives her a thumbs-up and turns to Ben.
“Hey man, can I help?”
Ben gestures at the bags he’s pulled out.
“You could run these to the other bedroom. Once we get this cleaned out, we can put Danielle in here. It’ll make a good prison cell.”
“She can’t get out? I mean, the door is on the same code as the others, right?”
Ben nods.
“Yeah, but since we never dug out the ground behind it to connect to the neighbor’s window well, she’s got no place to go. It’s the best I could think of on short notice.”
Andy picks up several of the bags and ferries them into the other bedroom, taking a couple of trips to get everything moved. When he finishes, they go and tell Annie that they’re ready. She marches Danielle at the end of the rifle barrel to the opened steel door and shoves her inside.
“I’m sorry for what happened,” Danielle says. “I had no idea that was going to go down like that! I thought he was just a survivor like us! I thought, maybe I can bring him back here, and he can help us, you know? And if I came back with help maybe you guys could forgive me for the way I left. I swear, I had no clue he was crazy!”
“Save it,” Annie says, and shuts the door. She enters the code to set the locks, hearing the inch and a half steel cylinders lock into place. She can just see Danielle through the window, but if the imprisoned girl were to step back to the dirt wall, she’d disappear into the darkness. She turns to the two boys.
“I’ll stay here with Toni and keep watch. I don’t trust this girl one iota. You guys go see if you can help the others.”
They nod and leave the room. As they approach the other door, Andy whispers to Ben.
“What do you think is going to happen to her? I mean, what if we have to execute her for…murder, or whatever this is?”
Ben stops walking and gives Andy a stiff smile.
“If it comes to that, between Marc, Stephenie, Robert and Annie I think there will be a line of people ready to do it. You didn’t see it, Andy. She led that guy back here. She sat next to him, doing nothing while he opened fire on us, and that was right after we had a shootout with those other two guys. I don’t know if they’re connected, but the timing is pretty odd for there to be no connection between them. This was deliberate. If it weren’t for that new guy, D-Day, more of us would probably be dead.”
“Dude, that is totally nuts. I can’t believe all this shit is happening. It’s crazy.”
“Crazier than the dead walking the earth? Crazier than the shit we saw in Fort Collins, or the gunfight on the way down here? Crazy is the new normal, man. It’s the new normal.”
He punches the code in the keypad and walks through the door into the tunnel, disappearing into the neighbor’s basement. Andy shakes his head and follows a moment later, shutting and locking the door behind him.
Two
Gilbert Olvera shuts the door and walks down the hallway. Gilbert was an emergency medical technician before the Turn. He knew Jesse Rios and Max Montero from Iraq, where he served as a medic. He’s seen more gunshot wounds than he thought possible when he first started his medical training, but in truth, they’re not too dissimilar from the wounds people receive in auto accidents. Bodies slam around inside vehicles, things break loose, and pieces of the car penetrate the human body and do damage, not unlike that of a bullet. People often find glass and plastic shards working their way to the surface months after an accident, just like bullet fragments from a wound. Sometimes it’s impossible to get everything, and often doing so would do more damage than just leaving it in the body.
He finds Jesse and Max in the family room of Max’s house on the Montero property, and he nods to them as he enters the room.
“So, how is he?” Max asks. “Did he say anything to you? Is he going to make it?”
“No, he didn’t say anything. He’s still out, probably will be for a while. Will he make it? I don’t know. He made it back to the pawn shop from where ever it was that he got shot, so he’s got a good amount of fight in him. He’s tough, and that will help him.”
“I never would have thought I’d hear someone talking about how tough Little Nicky Parker was,” Jesse says, shaking his head and chuckling.
“Hey, that fucking weirdo took a punch to the throat and still finished that fight,” Max says, coming to the wounded man’s defense. “His neck was all black and blue, looked like a fucking eggplant under his chin. He never bitched about it. He took his lumps, dished some out, and came out still standing, even if he does sound like a cartoon character now. No, you take it to the bank, that kid is tough.”
“Well, he’s stable for now,” Gilbert says. “The bleeding has stopped, and I don’t see any signs of internal bleeding, which would be a killer because we don’t have the equipment to deal with that. I think I got all the bullet fragments out, and it looks like it missed everything vital. We got his broken arm set and Addie’s in there watching him. She’ll get you if – when – he wakes up. Everything considered I think he’s very lucky.”
“Thanks, Doc. You did good,” Max says.
“No one’s called me Doc since Iraq,” he says. “It feels weird.”
“You’re the closest thing we got. Ain’t no one going to argue!” Max gives him a broad smile and hugs him. “Thanks again, man. I’m glad you’re here.”
“I am too.” Gilbert looks out the window, towards Longview, where tendrils of smoke from uncontrolled fires drift skyward. “The alternative was much, much worse.”
He takes his leave of the two men, pulling the front door shut behind him.
“Speaking of Lucky, where do you think he is?” Jesse asks.
“He has to be dead, right? I mean, Nicky’s all shot up, Laurie Walker is dead, Frankie Four Fingers is MIA. It don’t look good.”
“No, it doesn’t.”
“You think the Puckett’s got them?”
“Man, I have no idea. I haven’t gone any farther north in town than the Pawn King, and that was just to extract Nicky
. There’s ninety thousand people in that place. I would expect there to be more than a few of them armed and dangerous, protecting whatever they have left. Who knows who it was that did it.”
Jesse watches Max, trying to read his expression. He can’t tell if he’s satisfied with Jesse’s answer or if he has an issue with it.
“My gut says it was them. Mark my words, this was the same set of assholes that killed Hector and the Nelsons. Nicky can confirm it when he wakes up. He’ll tell us where they are, and we’ll go fuck their shit up.”
“We’re gonna need more ammo,” Jesse says. “We need to plan the raid on Murphy’s so we can gear up.”
Murphy’s sporting goods, one of the anchors of a strip mall on the south end of Longview, is one of what Max calls their ‘high value’ targets, but when they sent a small group to scavenge it for food and ammo, they came under fire from people on the roof. Of the five people he sent out, only three made it back.
“Ok, make that your priority. We need the supplies. Once we have what we need, and we know where the fuck they are, we take out the Puckett's.”
“If it was them,” Jesse says.
“Oh, it was,” Max says. “I know it was.”
“Okay, we’ll wait for Nicky to wake up and get what intel we can from him first, though. All right?”
“We need the supplies either way. Make plans for the sporting goods place. We’ll discuss the rest later.”
Jesse leaves the house, heading back to the big communal workshop that now serves as the barracks for Max’s small army.
Over the last few weeks, more of their associates have shown up. Many hid out in their houses in Boulder or Longview, others were moving from place to place, but in the end, about sixty people have made it to Montero’s Auto Complex.
The number of zombies this far out of the cities has been low, especially since Mani Ortega fashioned some improvised suppressors from empty water bottles and steel wool. They don’t last long, but they’re effective enough to keep the noise to a minimum when they engage with the dead, and that prevents more of them from being drawn to the sound of gunfire.
