Shirley stood up and boldly spoke, because she’d never speak any other way, “The name doesn’t truly matter. You matter. You have kept us safe for a long time. Everything you do has always been for us. I wouldn’t care if you were called dog food but you’re right, a good name is important.”
She got a few laughs and someone actually yelled out Alpo before she called in a loud clear voice, “All in favor of Sabaton say ‘aye’!”
“Aye!” was chorused throughout the room.
“Any ‘nays’?” The room was silent.
She looked back at Chuck and winked, “Sabaton you shall be!” She sat down and then jumped back up, “You should also come up with a name for our home. The Compound has always sounded so meh to me.”
Several people laughed as she sat back down and Carmen held up her hand. Chuck waved his hand for silence and pointed to her.
“When we were coming here from the cannibal camp, I cried. Not just because we were saved, but also when I saw this place. It just looked like a home. It was our salvation. What about Salvation or Sanctuary?”
There were claps and cheers and a few people began talking to each other with ideas.
“I like both of those,” Chuck said, raising his voice. “Everyone come up with some ideas, and we’ll meet back here tomorrow and pick a name. And now, Shirley will let everyone know how the garden is going and when we can start harvesting.”
Chapter Nineteen
Sabaton took all the supplies collected during the rescue and distributed what was useful, they put all the weapons together and began cleaning and repairing them. The ghouls didn’t take very good care of the weapons they took victims with; they just used them until they were worn out and tossed them aside. The handles on three axes and a dozen knives had to be repaired. They were all caked with dried blood and who knew what else. They sat at some tables outside with a small metal tub that was filled with water and alcohol to soak them first. It wasn’t rubbing alcohol though, it was a bottle of whiskey they’d found, but it did the trick just fine. One of the members of Salvation had asked for it, since it’d been so long, but Antonio reminded him that the cannibals were the last ones to have this bottle. He blanched at the thought and walked away.
Antonio looked around at everyone doing their tasks. Since the last meeting, their spirits seem higher and they seem to be more hopeful about their survival. They agreed on Salvation for the new name of their home. That’s what it really was to everyone here and it really did seem so much better than just calling it The Compound. They had left all the food and water at the ghouls’ camp; no one trusted anything edible from them. Everything else useable was taken but the thought of using a blanket that a ghoul slept under was an unnerving thought. Shirley swore she and the girls could get them so clean you would never know. Everything that was collected was taken to Shirley first. It took a couple days to get everything cleaned and sanitized then given to those who needed them the most.
Chuck got up to talk after he finished eating and discussed his idea of every single person at Salvation being armed and skilled with some weapons. Some had never really learned how to defend themselves but Chuck wanted to change that. They now had enough blades that every single person here could have at least one blade on them. He brought up the idea of training everyone to use them defensively but wasn’t sure how it would be accepted.
“I want that long curved knife,” Shirley spoke up, “and I want to learn to use it! If any of those ghouls come here, I’m not going without a fight. I’ll gut that damn cannibal’s throat!”
Everyone laughed and Chuck said, “Yes, you’ll be first Shirley. But everyone needs to remember that the threat may not be just from cannibals. Zombies are always a threat but they can be taken out with a knife. Yes, just a knife. Also, the Z.E.D.s are still out there and we don’t know where they all are. I gave Trader Joe some trade goods so he can put together a map with locations of as many as he can find as he goes. The Z.E.D.s will be trained to fight, not like the cannibals. So, your training will consist of different types of training, Z.E.D, Ghoul, and Zombie. Everyone okay with that?”
“What about the kids?” Tamra asked, holding hands with her two kids, Becky and Brian. Sitting close to them was Tamra’s sister, Judy. Judy and the kids were looking better every day since they’d been rescued.
“Do you want them to have the weapons?” Chuck asked without being condescending. He knew this would have conflicting opinions.
“Hell yes,” Tamra replied vehemently. “We’ve been discussing this since they got back. I want them to know how to protect themselves. I may not always be here and we don’t want them vulnerable.”
Many others nodded and whispered in agreement. Chuck would encourage as many as he could to allow the children to train but he wouldn’t force them. Luckily, it turned out not to be a problem. It seemed everyone was willing to let their children carry weapons, but only after they had been trained with them.
“We still need to hit the Z.E.D.s camps one at a time,” Chuck said, glancing at Antonio and Tamar, who nodded.
“Why risk that?” Margi, who was holding her six-year old son, asked. “We’re safe here. We can see them coming from a long ways. Why should our protection, our Sabaton, ever leave us?”
Antonio stood up and confessed, “I used to be one of them until I realized what was really happening. I rebelled too many times and was publically whipped for it; made an example of. I’ll carry those scars the rest of my life. But the scars that hurt the most are the memories of what we did to the innocents. I fled, went AWOL. I couldn’t do it anymore, hadn’t been able to for a long time. I wasn’t the first to go AWOL and I’m sure I wasn’t the last.”
They glanced at several members of Salvation who also had come from the Z.E.D.s. Those former soldiers nodded and grew somber at their own memories of the atrocities they’d seen and had been forced to do.
“If they aren’t stopped, they will keep doing it. Stealing kids, killing entire villages, brainwashing the younger generation to join, they have to be stopped. There are other resistance groups in other parts of the wasteland, who are also attacking small camps of Z.E.D.s as we speak.
“How do you know this?” Alice asked him.
“When we were out on mission I told the team about Captain Goodard,” he replied, nodding to where Sabaton sat together. “What I didn’t get to tell you was that he told me a secret the last night he was there. He had just been transferred to his position in the Neo-US forces. He was in charge of the Scouting Company and visited many Z.E.D. camps. He used this to gauge the loyalties of Z.E.D.s and see if any could be turned. He looked for people like me; there were always others like me. He encouraged men and women all over the wastelands to abandon the Z.E.D.s and build new troops to help in the resistance, to overthrow the Neo-US and the Z.E.D.s. Right now, the Z.E.D.s are the most powerful group in this regime so they need to be taken out slowly, one camp at a time. Finding people willing to fight them was hard. Many deserters chose to embrace this life, like I did, instead. I abandoned Captain Goodard’s ideas to start a new life. He would never blame me. He told me that as long as you make a choice, no matter what you chose, at least you are thinking for yourself and not conforming to the Z.E.D. hive mind. That’s why I traded my wedding ring to Trader Joe to create me a map of Z.E.D. camps and information.”
“Again, tell me why we need to attack?” another woman asked. “You made a choice. Why can’t we continue with that choice? We can just stay here and live the way we’ve been living.”
Chuck stepped forward and held his hand up to Antonio. “Because if we wait for them to just find us, to come marching in after us, we’ll all die,” Chuck said. “Some of the camps have tanks and real guns. Maybe only one tank but a single tank would take us out, no matter how much notice we have seeing them coming.”
“How do you know what they have?” Em asked him. “I thought your arm was taken by cannibals?”
“I was also in the Z.E.D.s around the same time a
s Antonio but in a different camp. I fled to keep my daughter from becoming one of their breeders.”
Chapter Twenty - Fall 2031
When Chuck stormed back into his family tent, the fury on his face was evident.
“What’s wrong Daddy?” his fourteen-year-old daughter, Jeri, asked him.
He generally wasn’t an angry person but for the past couple days he’d come home from his shift angry, angrier than she’d ever seen him. He’d stand outside and yell incoherently with someone before coming inside. His wife, Samantha, put her arm around Jeri and probed Chuck with questioning eyes. She knew why he was so upset. He looked Sam in the eye and shook his head imperceptivity. Her heart sank and she realized they were down to only two choices, neither of them appealing.
“Mom, I’m cramping again,” Jeri groaned, holding her hands over her stomach.
Samantha was about to tell her to hush, to keep it down so no one would hear her. She shook her head as she realized it didn’t matter anymore.
“I hate this. You have to do this every month? I wish I could make it go away and never come back.”
You and me both baby, you and me both. Chuck looked at his little girl, pardon, his daughter who was now a young woman. She started her first menses only two days ago and, while they tried to hide it, it was found out. Two days after she finished bleeding, she was to pack her belongings and move to the breeders’ tent. There she would be prepared for her new life as a Z.E.D. wife. An appropriate soldier would be chosen for her and she would marry him. She would be expected to give them many babies, lots of future soldiers.
“It’s for the good of the Neo-US,” his Captain had told him after he called him to his tent. “You do want what’s best for us, don’t you?”
It was a dangerous question and Chuck knew how to answer it.
“Of course, Sir,” he replied. “She’s just so young. She’s only fourteen.”
The captain looked back down at his paperwork, “If she’s bleeding, she can be breeding. Dismissed!”
Samantha made Jeri a cup of willow bark tea for the cramps and told her to lie down and get some sleep. She and Chuck sat together, watching as Jeri slowly fell asleep, absently clutching her stomach as random cramps wracked her.
“When do we go?” Samantha whispered to him.
“The shift change is at midnight,” he answered quietly. “We’ll leave five minutes later. They’ll still be shooting the shit and goofing off before settling in and taking it serious. But even if they aren’t, even if they are at attention, I’ll take them out. They aren’t raping my baby girl.”
He kissed Samantha and wiped her tears. Suddenly, he had doubts, “Maybe we should ask Jeri. Maybe she wouldn’t want to live out there.”
“We already discussed it while you were gone,” Samantha said to him, putting her hand on his cheek. “She’s your daughter. What did you think she would choose? We’ve even packed bags already.”
“You know this will be hard living and we could die out there.”
“I don’t care,” she answered. “I’ll be with you and Jeri, and that’s all that matters.”
At ten minutes after midnight, they vanished like the wind. They weren’t reported missing until six-fifteen when Chuck missed the start of his shift. The six-hour head start was enough for them to get far away.
Chapter Twenty-One – Winter 2032
Chuck and his family had been living in a small earthen hut he built many miles from his former Z.E.D. camp. He knew there was now a bounty on his head, as well as his family’s. They’d been there for over six months now and Chuck felt safe enough to start making their location permanent.
It happened when he least expected it. He’d seen and killed two human zombies who were stumbling after a lame deer. It had a broken leg and if he hadn’t intervened, they would have easily overtaken it. He snuck up behind them while they were focused on the meat ahead and took them both out with a single axe swing to each. Then he pulled out his arrow from the hunter quiver and set it in the bow. With a single shot, he put down the doe mercifully.
“I’m sorry,” he said to the beautiful animal as he checked it everywhere inside and out for bites or pustules, “but you’ll feed my family for months.”
He gutted it and slung it over his shoulder. He was feeling so good, his mouth watering at the thought of venison that he was trotting home. Once he got within sight of home, he heard screaming.
Samantha!
He dropped the deer and pulled out his axe as he ran forward without a sound. Every inch of him wanted to scream her name but he knew that stealth was the only way to save them. He ran up and put his back against the wall, inching toward the partially open door. He peered in and saw one man holding his wife, her arms already tied behind her back, her feet still free, and she was kicking out at anything she could reach. He struggled to put a gag on her; she was a fighter and he couldn’t hold the gag in place without letting her go and getting kicked worse. Chuck surmised that if only one man was holding Samantha, there was probably only one more tying up Jeri. If there were more than those two, he’d be helping hold Samantha to gag her. He hoped.
Samantha caught his eye and continued her struggles as though she never saw him. She darted her eyes towards the part of the room he couldn’t see. She blinked rapidly and rolled her eyes. He mouthed Jeri and she rolled her eyes up and down. He pointed to himself then in the direction of Jeri. Sam increased her struggles, getting another kick very close to the soldier’s crotch.
Chuck burst in the room and ran to the right immediately. There was only one other Z.E.D., he had tied Jeri’s arms to the bed and was starting to pull his pants down. Insane anger burst through Chuck and he saw red. He swung his axe, decapitating the would-be rapist. He heard a scream cut off from Samantha, and Jeri cried out, struggling at her bonds, “Mom!”
Chuck spun around to see Samantha slowly dropping to the floor, her throat cut, blood flooding the front of her shirt. The remaining Z.E.D. ran out the door and around to the back of the hut.
If he gets back to his unit, they’ll have more Z.E.D.s here by nightfall!
Chuck followed him, murder in his eyes. As he rounded the hut, he saw the jeep. The soldier was patting all his pockets, looking for the keys. He pulled them out just as Chuck buried the axe into his face.
Screaming, he ran back inside, slipped in his wife’s blood, and slid on his back into Jeri’s bed. Still sobbing his wife’s name over and over, he cut the ropes from Jeri’s wrists and together they crawled to Samantha’s body, lifting her atop both their laps. They held her as she took her last bubbling breath and her eyelids fluttered one last time. They cried in each other’s arms until they were drained. After she was buried, they packed everything in the Z.E.D. jeep and drove off in search of a new home.
Chapter Twenty-Two – Present Day
There were more than a few tears shed at his story. He continued on to tell them how Jeri died and how he lost his arm. A few already knew about his arm but not about his daughter. Chuck himself had finally opened up to his new family and cried openly in front of them all. Shirley came forward, crying herself, and pulled him into a hug. His massive size engulfed her but he clung to her tighter and set his cheek on top of her head, letting his tears pour down her head.
A few minutes later, he stood up and whispered, “Thank you.”
Shirley only smiled and walked back to her seat. He stood up straight and wiped his eyes.
“All right!” he said with new confidence in his voice, “I’ve obviously needed to get that out for a long time. Rest assured you won’t see me do that again!”
Laughter was heard amid the sniffling.
“So now you all know why I hate the Z.E.D.s just as much as the ghouls. The ghouls may have taken my arm, but the Z.E.D.s took everything else. I want revenge. And I know some of you do as well.”
“We are the Resistance!” Rick spoke up, his fist raised in the air, “We can sit here and wait for them to come here and wipe us
out, or we take them out!”
“Are we Raiders or Resistance Fighters?” Judy asked hesitantly. She was still a nervous wreck from being held by the cannibals.
Antonio stood up and answered, “Depends on what we’re doing at the time. We’re Raiders when we go out to scavenge and raid. When we go after the Z.E.D.s, whether for revenge or in defense, then we’re Resistance Fighters. And of course wiping out ghouls is always a public service!” Antonio joked, getting some laughs.
“Why can’t we just say we’re both?” Joe asked, Sheila holding his hand.
Antonio and Chuck looked at each other and shrugged.
“Damned good answer,” Chuck replied, “Makes sense to me.”
“We won’t be leaving this home, Salvation, unprotected. Ever. Sabaton is larger and stronger than ever and this is why I want everyone trained in self-defense at the very least. We’ll always discuss any missions before we go out so everyone knows what’s going on. Agreed?”
Everyone nodded and a few cheered and clapped. Less than six sat quietly, unsure to voice their opposition. Chuck and Antonio noted who they were and realized that all five of them were cannibal captives. Their hesitation was expected. They were just about to break when they heard the sound of the bells. Everyone froze and silently counted them. Four! Zombies.
Sabaton split up immediately, implementing their emergency procedure. They’d practiced this for two days and had it down after three perfect runs. One half gathered up all the community and made sure they were guarded by members of Sabaton, as well as Gracie and Holly. Two more ran around, both inside and out, and collected everyone who wasn’t already inside. The rest went outside and lined the fence around the building until they knew where the threat was coming from. Antonio went up to Mason Henry and waited for his assessment.
“Six human zombies, two of them are freaking mutants and holy shit, are they big!”
Survive (Book 1): Salvation Page 12
