The Undead Chronicles (Book 1): Home and Back Again

by O'Brian, Patrick J.

  He pushed the button on the dashboard to start the car and slowly backed out of the driveway, and over one of the zombies, in his attempt to leave. A speedbump and a crunch later the car was on the road, and Metzger instinctively drove in the direction of the sole friendly confines he’d found since becoming a weary traveler. He didn’t want to overstay his welcome, or give them the wrong impression about his intentions, but the nearby raid the night before concerned him. Finding them safe and sound would ease his conscience before he headed east, and their neighborhood wasn’t far.

  By the time he pulled onto their street, Metzger had pulled himself together, passing numerous zombies without stopping. He didn’t exactly feel at peace, just mentally and physically exhausted after so much effort failed to convey a payoff. Ignoring a few straggling undead, he pulled up in front of the house where Albert and Luke provided safe haven for a girl they never knew before the world fell apart.

  Immediately something felt wrong to him when he pulled up to the front gate, finding it wide open. A sense of panic shot through him because he felt certain his instincts were one-hundred percent correct, despite him wishing he were wrong. Throwing open the door and grabbing both the short sword and his .357, he headed for the gate, noticing the man he purposely threw into a zombie the night before continued to lie on the ground. He didn’t know why he gave the man a second glance, but he felt positive he saw a few fingers twitch. Much of the man’s abdomen area was eaten away, along with small chunks of his arms and one leg, but apparently enough of him remained for him to reanimate.

  “Fucker,” Metzger muttered, making a beeline for the newly undead man, stabbing him in the head with the short sword so he couldn’t surprise anyone from behind later.

  Returning his attention to the larger problem at hand, he walked toward the front gate, which made their house look a bit like a fort behind the tall wooden fence. He suddenly thought it unrealistic to believe any wooden fence, even one approximately eight feet in height, would deter many people from scaling it. Short of a guard posted continuously within the house, the fence couldn’t be defended, and it truly offered minimal defense. He walked past several sections of fencing until he reached the open front gate, finding it kicked in with enough force that the latch was broken on the door, and the wood splintered around it.

  His eyes slowly moved from the shattered pieces of wood up the concrete path to the front porch and the house’s front door. Exactly like he found where his parents once lived, the front door was open just a few inches, indicating something terrible happened to the three people living within the old walls. Clutching his sword in one hand and his gun in the other, Metzger began taking a step forward to investigate when the sound of a branch snapping behind him brought him to a complete stop.

  “They’re gone,” a raspy female voice said as Metzger turned to find a brunette holding a rifle of some sort with another woman and four men standing behind her. “And you can either wait to join them, or you can join us.”

  Six

  “And just who the hell are all of you?” Metzger asked, not liking the idea of being given an ultimatum after the day he’d endured.

  “We’re the ones with the numbers on our side,” the woman answered, though she still hadn’t aimed the rifle at Metzger.

  “I don’t have much in the way of supplies, if that’s what you want,” Metzger told a fib, considering four boxes of canned and dried goods sat in the trunk of the car he drove to his current location.

  Most groups wanted weapons, food, and occasionally clothing. Knowing he wasn’t going to win a battle against these people, or survive if they wanted him dead, he decided to negotiate rather than fight or flee.

  “We aren’t interested in anything you have,” the woman said. “The people who lived here, did you know them?”

  “Yes,” Metzger answered, seeing no point in denying the fact considering all three of them appeared to be gone.

  Now the entire group seemed to be put at ease, lowering all of their weapons during an odd few seconds of silence.

  “They were kind enough to put me up for a night after some assholes tried to kill me,” he added, hoping the group before him wasn’t the group in question.

  Something told him they weren’t.

  “Sounds like the same assholes we’re after,” one of the men spoke up. “They’ve kidnapped friends and family from each of our groups.”

  “Why would anyone do that?” Metzger questioned aloud.

  “Because they have a camp and they want cheap labor to fortify where they’re staying,” the woman answered. “My name is Molly by the way.”

  “Dan,” Metzger said, shaking her hand. “So why are you all here and not following these pricks?”

  “We’re not all here,” another of the men said. “Some of our people are following them back to their base so they can radio us with exact coordinates once they scout the place.”

  A number of questions ran through his mind, but Metzger believed he already knew the answer to the most important inquiry.

  “We followed them here last night and saw you,” Molly elaborated from her earlier statement. “Got here too late to save your friends from being taken, but we knew they only abducted three people, so we stayed to look for you.”

  “You found me,” Metzger said. “And I take it you want me to join your merry band and go after these punks?”

  “The more the merrier,” Molly said with a sly grin. “We plan on catching them off-guard and getting our people back. So what do you say?”

  “I have somewhere I need to be in a bad way,” Metzger replied, “but considering they tried to decapitate me, I can spare another day for some revenge.”

  Metzger knew the worst that might happen was their entire group getting wiped out by a more organized force and his brother would never see him again. At this point he wasn’t even certain his brother would make it back to port, or contact him with details. He wasn’t ready to throw in the towel, but Metzger thought the idea of sticking with other people made a lot more sense than striking out on his own again. Besides, he owed Luke and Albert because they risked their lives to save him from being kidnapped or killed a day earlier.

  Refusing to leave the car behind, even though he was told the drive was just a few miles away, Metzger followed the group in a few of their vehicles to a church parking lot. Everyone got out of their vehicles to form a circle around Molly, who accepted a large rolled up sheet of paper that Metzger thought might be a poster. She knelt down, unrolling the paper atop the blacktop, revealing a hand-drawn map of a large building and its surrounding grounds. Metzger recognized a few new faces in the group, which meant the people who conducted surveillance drew a detailed map by sight alone.

  Something about the layout and scale of the building drawn on the large sheet of paper felt familiar to Metzger.

  “Is that a school?” he asked.

  “It is,” one of the new men answered. “The entire area is fenced in, and they had some of their prisoners reinforcing their fences with wood and steel.”

  Not wasting any time, Metzger thought, wondering how on earth this group planned to break people free from such a large area. Schools were secure by nature, and when the fences were entirely closed, it made silent infiltration nearly impossible. He hoped these people knew more about the jerks within the school confines than they let on, because going against a large group on their own turf was almost guaranteed suicide.

  “What do we know?” Molly asked the two new faces.

  “We counted at least six with firearms who were supervising the outdoor work, and there’s probably more going on inside,” one of them answered. “They don’t have anything tall enough to serve as a tower, so they can’t see us coming from a high vantage point, or snipe us.”

  Metzger couldn’t believe they were seriously talking about invading the property in a straightforward manner.

  “We could wait until nightfall and cut a hole in the fence along the back where there
aren’t many windows,” the second scout suggested.

  “And how do we get into the locked school?” Molly questioned, pleasing Metzger who was thinking the same thing.

  “For all we know these guys killed a janitor and took his keys, or one of them is the janitor and knows this school top to bottom,” he added before anyone could disagree with Molly. “These guys go out to kidnap people and scavenge for supplies, don’t they? Why don’t we knock down a few of their numbers that way?”

  A few members of the group glared at Metzger for speaking as the ‘new guy’ but the others seemed to agree with his suggestion.

  “They sent a truck out about an hour ago,” the first of the two scouts noted. “It hadn’t returned last we saw.”

  “Covered truck?” Metzger asked.

  “It was full-size with a cab on the back.”

  Everyone looked to every other set of eyes in the group, all knowing they might have a way into the makeshift prison. Getting in wasn’t necessarily the difficult part of their plan, because they all knew the risks of getting into a firefight with the group inside an unknown floorplan. There was absolutely no way of knowing how many overseers existed, how many weapons they held, or how they managed to keep so many prisoners at bay. Personally, Metzger didn’t like the odds at all, though the element of surprise might benefit his new allies significantly.

  “I apologize that I’m new to all of this, but what else do we know about these douchebag kidnappers?” he asked.

  “We know a few are former military,” Molly answered. “All of us came together while trying to track them, so we know a few of their travelers by sight. What we have is fragmented, but we’ve been watching them without them knowing it for a while now. It wasn’t until they abducted your friends last night that we discovered their location.”

  “So my friends were bait?” Metzger inquired somewhat angrily.

  “Not exactly,” one of the other group members answered.

  “It sounds like they were,” he pressed. “You could’ve just as easily captured one of these assholes and made them talk.”

  “That was the plan,” Molly said, “but we lost track of them near the neighborhood. When we finally caught up we saw you out there with three or four of them, and we didn’t dare make a move. And then they scattered after you took out one of them with a zombie. We were a little too late again this morning when we went to speak with your friends, but Brian and Will were able to spot them and follow them to the school.”

  “How far is the school?” Metzger asked.

  “Less than a mile,” one of the scouts answered. “There’s only one good road in and out of there, so if we wanted to set up an ambush for their driver it wouldn’t be too hard.”

  While the group had been discussing their plan of action a few straggler zombies wandered into the church parking lot, now making their presence felt with growls and snarls. Before any of the others rose to deal with the problem, Metzger drew the survival knife from his side and walked over to stab each of them in the skull as silently as possible. He grew concerned, because if he was the warrior of this group with practically no survival or fighting experience, he didn’t like their chances inside the confines of the school grounds.

  “Can I have a word with you a minute?” he asked Molly.

  She eyed him momentarily and he worried she was going to give him the standard line about anything he wanted to say to her he could say in front of the group. But she stood from the map after a few seconds and followed him behind of the vehicles.

  “I want my friends back as much as all of you, but I’m a little concerned we’re rushing into this without much of a plan.”

  “Something tells me you’ve been swept into all of this without much warning, so maybe you’re a little overwhelmed at the thought of working with a group.”

  She appeared completely serious as she spoke, with an even tone that made her a strong leader. Metzger thought of her as determined, confident, and courageous, though not recklessly fearless. Something about her instilled confidence in her group, and to an extent within him, but he still felt unconvinced about her course of action.

  “Those two walkers back there,” she said, nodding in the direction of the two zombies with head wounds, “were a test for you to see if you could handle yourself. We may look ragtag, like we don’t have a plan, but when the shit hits the fan we handle our business. There will probably be casualties no matter how we try getting our people back, and we accept that, but we’re willing to risk our lives because we all have people we care about inside there. Do you care about your friends?”

  “Of course. They saved my life.”

  “Then you’re welcome to contribute as you have been, because Lord knows we can use some good ideas, but at the end of the day we are going to make the first move to get our loved ones back whether you’re with us or not.”

  I guess that’s settled, Metzger thought to himself, feeling a bit more confident about the group and their ability to handle a fight. As he followed Molly back to the group he noticed some smirks, understanding why they felt a need to test him. To them he was a complete stranger, and they needed to know what he brought to the table, and if he would be a liability who might endanger their lives.

  “I do think he’s right,” one of the men in the group stated, nodding towards Metzger, “we’re better off trying a Trojan horse and sneaking in, rather than some kind of frontal assault.”

  Metzger felt vindicated for bringing a good idea to the table, but he still didn’t love their chances. Battles by invading forces seldom ended well for such groups because they didn’t know the lay of the land, or where the weapons were located.

  “We have radios,” Molly stated. “Even if a few of us get inside perhaps they could get some extra recon done before finding a way to let everyone else in.”

  “Do you have any firepower beyond guns?” Metzger questioned.

  “Like what?” one of the group asked.

  “Like something that can blow a door off its hinges if we get compromised and stuck in a bad place.”

  One of the scouts looked at him with a sly grin.

  “You’d be surprised exactly what we have in our arsenal. And hopefully the assholes at the school won’t be expecting the kind of party we’re bringing them.”

  ***

  Refusing to leave his car behind once more, Metzger ended up following the convoy of vehicles a short distance down the road where they took them into a grove, ensuring they were out of sight from the nearby road. Dangerously close to the school, but not within viewing distance, the group broke into pairs and smaller clans to take up positions along a ditch where they were invisible to anyone driving their way until it was too late.

  Metzger ended up with Will, one of the scouts who appeared to be only a few years older than a high school senior. With a thin frame, shaggy brown hair that hung near his eyes from lack of a recent haircut, and remnants of acne, the young man was denied a normal adulthood already. They hunkered down in the ditch, which thankfully proved to be dry in the fall weather while tall, tan grass provided them with adequate cover.

  “This still seems insane,” Metzger admitted to the younger man.

  “I felt the same way when I first met some of these guys, but they are capable. We’ve taken down entire swarms of zombies together.”

  Metzger decided against starting an argument, but taking down a group of shuffling zombies wasn’t the same as dealing with live ammunition from people who knew how to efficiently fire it. Their best bet, and perhaps their only hope of minimal casualties, was a minimal number of people controlling the prison, using guns and intimidation to keep their workforce at bay.

  Personally, Metzger had left some of his larger firearms inside the vehicle, opting to travel somewhat lighter so he could move quickly and avoid making noise. He often tried choosing the best weapons for the immediate future, because too many guns and blades weighed him down, making travel cumbersome. Sometimes when he located
new guns, he took whichever suited him better and hid any others where they could be retrieved later. Available ammunition, or lack thereof, often made his choices easier.

  “How long have you guys been planning this?” he asked Will.

  “About two weeks.”

  Metzger gave him a quizzical stare.

  “Well, it was just a few of us in the beginning,” Will admitted. “A few of us banded together for survival and after we found a few more our stories started sounding similar about seeing loved ones killed or kidnapped. It wasn’t long after that we decided to find these dickheads and do something about them.”

  “And you just waited for the numbers to be on your side.”

  “That, and to find out where they were taking everyone. A school was one of my guesses, but I wasn’t sure why they wanted to kidnap people, so the whole slave labor thing came as a surprise to me.”

  “Why else would they want people?”

  “Intel, perhaps. Or maybe to eat them.”

  Metzger couldn’t fathom cannibalism, particularly since the food supply wasn’t completely drained. Scores of retail stores, factories, schools, food pantries, and individual homes still provided adequate food and supplies, even for large groups.

  “How exactly do you know it’s the same people kidnapping everyone?”

  “They drive the same two vehicles all the time. One is the truck with the cab on top, and the other is a van that has some kind of cage in it. We spotted them individually a number of times when they took people we knew, or tried to take us. Once we banded together and started talking, we knew these were the same ass wipes and we had to do something about them.”

  Shifting his position, considering they were basically lying diagonally within the ditch, Metzger looked to both sides, seeing the other small groups basically waiting in silence or making small talk to pass the time. No one appeared to be visible to oncoming traffic, and thus far the undead weren’t even a factor. He wondered if the group at the school cleared them out regularly, meaning they might have another major vulnerability if they left the safety of the mesh wire gates.