A Good Distance From Dying (Book 2): Samantha's Song

by Carroll David

  He was released the next day without any paperwork being done. He said this was another example of how much the cops didn’t like seeing those “long hairs” moving into their state. Texas was a far cry from San Francisco and the locals were no fans of the hippy movement. The families of the four protesters would never know the name of the man who had done all the damage to their loved ones. No law suits would follow. All Jane had to do was sleep in a Texas jail cell one night and he was off the hook. He told me that he owed a great deal to the police because, had he gone to trial over those beatings, he would have gone to military prison. And that was something he wasn’t sure if he would have been able to survive.

  He had told me stories about his life after the war. For all of his efforts, he had a hard time adjusting to life with the locals. Everything was different. He said he believed that he just didn’t think like they did anymore. Something had changed while he was away. He described it to me once as a light switch had been flipped on the entire country and what he had come home to was something more akin to waking up into an episode of the Twilight Zone. Had he not run into one of his friends from the service, he would have most likely been killed in a bar fight, or be in jail now.

  The friend he had run into was named Curt Shelf and he had just joined a biker gang that was stationed out of San Antonio. His friend had told him that it was the life. They made their own rules and the cops were so scared of the club that they didn’t do anything but look the other way when they drove by. Also, with Jane’s knowledge of hand to hand combat as well as the combat training he had from sniper school the club would jump at the chance to have him. Jane figured why not go check it out; he didn’t have anything else to do. A year later he was no longer a prospect but was a full fledged member and was running missions for a new military, trying to win a new war. This was a war for turf and product. The payoff was drugs, beer and women.

  Curt had known him as Jane in Viet Nam, so the name once again followed him into his life as a biker. He said that he had lived that life for over twenty years. One morning he woke up and just couldn’t do it anymore. He wanted out. “It was more than that,” he had told me. “I felt I had to get out or I was going to die. Too many years of excess was beginning to take its toll. It didn’t matter how much I drank, I never really got drunk anymore, and no matter what drugs I did the high just wasn’t satisfying anymore.” And even though he had gotten married, he still had sex with any women he wanted, and he said that he had been with so many women that looking at a “hot little number” didn’t even, as he put it, “Get his motor running anymore.” He knew he had reached a crossroads. He knew it was either party till it killed him, or get out. Jane chose to get out.

  This news was not what Mrs. Jane Bradshaw wanted to hear and a divorce was soon to follow. From what he told me, and he wouldn’t say much, the divorce was a bitter, angry affair, and in the end, she got everything. It seems the club had sided with his soon to be ex-wife and the local courts did as they were told. This led to Jane getting out of town in the dead of night. He had told me that he heard a song on the radio that first night away from home where the singer said, “All my ex’s live in Texas that’s why I hang my hat in Tennessee.”

  That was as good a sign as any, so he drove up to Tennessee and decided to see what jobs he could find here. As it would happen there were about as many jobs here as anywhere else in the country. That is to say, he couldn’t find anything. He was talking to the local police in Knoxville about getting on as a patrolman when another old army buddy gave him a call. It seems that Curt from down in Texas was still trying to be a friend and had made a call to a man they knew as Chief back in the day. Curt wanted Chief to try and get into contact with Jane and see if there was anything he could do to help his old friend out. As fate would have it, help was something that Chief was in need of. He was hiring a liaison for the ROTC program at ETSU, a college in Northeast Tennessee in a place called Johnson City. Jane was in town for that interview when the world turned upside down and the dead decided staying dead was boring and they still had some things to do.

  Jane had been staying in a hotel at exit seventeen, when it all went to pieces. He did what he had been taught to do. He didn’t panic. He took care of his priorities. First priority was his own personal safety. He was in a corner room with no adjoining door so the only way into his room was the door from the hall. The door opened inward which helped him greatly in the job of securing it. He braced the furniture in the room against the door making a solid line from the door to the opposite wall ensuring that there would be no way for the door to be pushed open. Secondly, he knew that water would be a priority as well. He filled the bathtub, the sink, a trashcan, and the ice bucket. He cut the incoming water off to the toilet and made the decision that he would have to live with the smell of his own waste for the few days he would be hiding away in his room. He had told me that as the positive note, he hoped that the smell would throw some of the dead off his scent. The room he was staying in had a kitchen unit which was another thing in his favor because he had some food stocked away. He didn’t have much, but a little bit is a whole lot better than nothing. He took inventory and made a schedule for rationing the food to allow him to keep eating for the three to four days he figured he would have to remain in isolation.

  As it happens he made it four days because it was during the morning hours of our fourth day on top of Wal-Mart that I met Mister James “Jane” Austin Bradshaw.

  I woke up at what my watch told me was four thirty in the morning by Big Lou barking his head off. I rolled over and looked at my crazy dog as he stood there staring out of the tent and growling his “they are coming to eat you” growl. That was enough for me. I grabbed my shoes and made my way to the edge of the roof. Jack was already there and I could see Shawn and Amanda making their way towards us.

  I was going to ask Jack what was going on, but then I heard it, that chorus of moans which can only mean one thing; the zombies, they are here. Jack had a big flash light that illuminated something like ten foot chunks of the parking lot and what I saw wasn’t good news. On the first morning after our arrival here at Wal-Mart we had about forty zombies surrounding the store. No sweat, easy to deal with in truth, especially with Amanda living here. What I saw that night was two to three hundred zombies crowding the front entrance of the store.

  “What brought them to us?” I asked Jack, but he just swept the light again and looked at the whole mess with his mouth hanging open.

  “What’s going on?” Shawn asked and now I could see Sass making his way to us as well.

  “You don’t want to see.” I said as Amanda looked over the edge and said a few choice expletives.

  “That bad?” Shawn asked. I just nodded my head in agreement. As I was nodding my head I heard something, a voice, rose up over the moaning. I took the spot light from Jack and shown it straight down against the side of the store. There, standing on top of our buffer wall of vehicles, safely away from the outstretched dead hands, was a tall thin man. He was older, most likely in his sixties, and he had a smile on his face as he saw me looking at him. He waved and said, “Howdy. If’n ya’ll don’t mind, I sure would be obliged if you could toss down a rope.”

  FIVE

  "About time.” I heard Amanda say. Looking up I could see Jane and two other men making their way towards us. Marky Mark and Fred Baker were trailing just a few steps behind. Seeing Fred made me feel sick to my stomach. I’m not a very confrontational person, at least under normal circumstances. I was not looking forward to what I was about to do. However, I had asked for this, even though I knew it was going to be unpleasant. May as well go ahead and get it over with.

  “Fred. We need to talk.”

  Fred’s face told me he knew what was up. He must have known the guy that Jane had shot. Once he saw him he had to have known what was really going on. He also knew that we were going to want answers.

  “I guess we do Charlie.” Fred said, “Where do you want me
to start?”

  “I would imagine that the beginning is as good a place as any.” I said.

  He never looked up. Maybe he found it easier to say these things without acknowledging our presence. Maybe he just felt guilty. Either way he addressed the pavement as he spoke.

  “We were at the hospital when it all started. We were there to see a friend of hers, Tabitha I mean. One of her friends had gotten drunk the night before and had tried to drive her Escalade through a light pole. As these things often go, this one did as well. The pole didn’t move out of the way and the Escalade didn’t find a way through it. The truck went from sixty to zero in about half a second. This led to her friend having some rather serious injuries. The vehicle had an airbag, and it did deploy, this was the only thing that saved her life we were later told. Even so, the damage was impressive. She wasn’t going to be released from the hospital any time soon. That was okay with her because as soon as she was released she was going straight to jail.”

  “A few years ago, the state had that big three strikes and you’re out campaign. Do you remember what I’m talking about?” He looked up to me and I nodded my head that I did know what he was talking about. In truth I had no clue. I don’t watch the news. That would cut into my X-box time and like some unknown philosopher once said, “Time is fleeting…game on.”

  “This had to be like her sixth or seventh strike. Her dad was a judge, but I think he was running out of favors to call in. Either that or he was just getting tired of jumping through hoops for a disrespectful daughter who never seemed to learn her lesson. Maybe he thought, “This time I will let her see the consequences of her actions.” Tough love and all of that I guess. Either way the cops were circling like vultures and daddy wasn’t coming to drag her carcass to safety this time.” Fred paused, but continued to stare at the ground. The look of concentration on his face made it seem like he had spotted something out of place on the ground and was trying to figure out what it was. After a moment he began again.

  “We were sitting in her friend’s room on the seventh floor listening to her blather on and on about what an uncaring bastard her dad was and I was wishing that I could have been anywhere but there, in that room. Samantha was just as bored and fed up as I was. Eventually we excused ourselves and went to find something to do that wasn’t narrated by the whiniest, most clueless woman in the universe. We went out into the hallway and looked out the window to the main road. All the cars were stopped. At first we thought that there must have been an accident. Then we noticed that there were people attacking each other down there. It looked like a big game of tag, but instead of tagging the other people the ones that were “it” were tackling and throwing people to the ground then falling on them. It was weird, we watched for a few minutes till the whole scene became to unnerving. I walked back down the hall and told Tabitha to look outside. She did, and when she looked back to me she was as white as a sheet.”

  What followed was another, shorter, pause as Fred worked through the memories that he was watching play out in his head.

  “Her eyes were widening, and her posture told me that she was on the edge of full on freak out. ‘Oh my god.’ Tabitha said to me. ‘I know what’s going on down there’. I was amazed because I had no clue what was going on. She looked at me with her eyes as wide as I had ever seen them. ‘Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god’, she just kept saying over and over. I grabbed her by both arms and shook her. I screamed at her ‘What is going on?! What do you know?!’ She looked back out the window saying, ‘Oh my god, we’re on the seventh floor, we’ll never make to the bottom. We’ll never make it to the car. Oh no. Oh no.’ Then she just started repeating oh no over and over again.”

  Fred looked up at me again and his face had a guilty look to it as he said, “I wanted to slap her. She was scaring me, and she wouldn’t tell me what was going on, so I thought that maybe if I smacked her it would snap her out of it like in those old black and white movies. Instead I shook her again and screamed even louder ‘WHAT IS GOING ON?!’ A nurse stepped into the room and asked if everything was okay and Tabitha shook loose from me and looked the nurse right in the eyes and said, ‘Hell no, everything is not okay. There are zombies outside eating everybody within reach.’ The nurse didn’t believe her. Even after Tabitha had gotten her to look outside the nurse said that she was crazy. Tabitha said that crazy or not we had this one chance to secure the floor before we were overrun. She also reminded the nurse that we were on the seventh floor, and if she was right, there would be no possible way for any of us to get to safety after the rest of the hospital fell.”

  “The nurse still wouldn’t believe it. Tabitha left her friends room and ran to the bank of elevators. She called every one of them to the seventh floor and then wedged the doors open so they wouldn’t be able to go back down. She found a floor map and then told the few of us that were helping her that we were lucky because there was only one stairwell that led up to the seventh floor. Securing it wouldn’t be that hard at all. We broke into an office and started dumping all of the furniture down the stairwell. It took maybe two offices worth of furniture before the stairwell was impassable. By this time the nurses were aware of what was going on. They attempted to free the elevators from the jamming methods we had employed on them. Apparently after a few minutes of being held open like that the elevators start alarming. Tabitha beat this one nurse to the ground. The others seemed to be in some form of shock watching their friend get the hair knocked off her head by some skinny black haired chick in a pair of daisy dukes. After a minute or two of complete silence the nurses squared off against us. There were seven of them and four of us. We stood our ground and I have no clue how long we would have stood there waiting for the others to make a move if it wasn’t for the old man.”

  “What old man?” Sass asked, clearly getting into the story.

  “From down the hall we heard him yell out. ‘Turn on your TV’s. They’re a eat’n peoples! They’re everywhere, and they’sa eat’n people!’ This was enough to break the standoff and get us all moving towards the nearest television. What we saw chilled us. The people down on the ground were zombies. The TV report was showing someplace up north, I can’t really remember where. These zombies were biting hunks out of people. Without even turning away from the TV Tabitha asked if any of the nurses knew how to shut the elevators down and from the doorway we heard a man’s voice say, ‘I do.’ It was one of the maintenance guys. He had been on the seventh floor replacing a doorknob, of all things. He locked all of the elevators down and then Tabitha took charge. Everyone was looking to her because she was the one that had already done so much to keep us safe. Even the maintenance guy didn’t try to take over as the leader, and in my opinion, he should have been in charge, not Tabitha. I can honestly say that Tabitha should have never been made to be responsible for that group of people.”

  “So, what happened? What led to you and Samantha escaping the Hospital and running away from her?” Sass asked.

  Fred looked up at him with an uneasy expression across his face. “You just don’t understand. How could you? You weren’t there.”

  “You are going to have to make us understand Fred. You are, in essence, asking us to go invade Johnson City Medical Center and attempt to re-kidnap your daughter from a group that is most likely going to shoot first and ask questions later. We have to know who and what we are dealing with. You have to tell us why we should endanger ourselves.” I said, and I meant it. At that point I was still pissed over what amounted to a home invasion, but, in my mind, I hadn’t yet committed us to going after her. I know that sounds really bad, but I had a few problems with this whole affair already. The biggest nagging problem I had was how did they get up onto our roof and take her without anyone hearing or seeing them? Jane was on watch. Jane doesn’t make mistakes. The top was locked down. There was no way up and it would have taken two men minimum to find and take the child. I saw no possible way for this to happen. That question just wouldn’t leave me alone. How
did they get up there? How?

  “There are a few things you have to understand.” Fred was saying. “Tabitha is a recovering addict.” There was a pause then Fred shook his head and balled up his fists as they hung at his side.

  “No. That’s not the truth. Tabitha is an addict. She pretended to reform but she is never really going to. I guess I may as well admit that to myself now. She likes alcohol, pills, cocaine, acid, anything that would get her six steps from Pluto. That’s what she used to call it. ‘Watch the kid Fred I’m going to get six steps from Pluto’. The drugs were better than when she drank. She liked to punch and kick and bite when she drank. I had gotten good at getting her to attack me instead of Sam, but every now and then she would go after her anyway.”

  “You’re telling me that there is a drug consuming, abusive, alcoholic running the show on the seventh floor of the Med Center?” Amanda asked.

  “Yes.” Fred said.

  “There’s nurses up der right?” Marky Mark said. “Whys don’t dey jus take ‘er down? Take control.”

  Fred looked at him like he couldn’t quite make out what had been said.

  “He does make a good point.” I said. “There is only one of her. The nurses could easily overpower her and take control.”

  “I’m sure they could. Tell me Charlie, how many people are knocking down the door to take your job from you? Other than that idiot Jericho.” Fred asked.