by TW Brown
“Look, it doesn’t matter how big—” I started to protest.
“Says every single guy in the world.”
That caused Tracy to force back a laugh despite the knife at her throat. Darya had the courtesy to at least look away. But she made very little attempt at holding back her own chuckle.
“Listen, we aren’t wanting any trouble,” I said, doing my best to claw back a shade of my pride that was becoming a bit of a casualty of this woman’s quips. “We will roll out of here if you’ll just let us ride things out for a while. The same people that hit my friends are back and hunting for us to finish us off.”
“So you bring them to my place?”
She had a point, but in my defense, I had no idea she’d been here. She certainly hadn’t been the last time—
“I think I’ve saved your ass once already.” She removed her knife from Tracy’s throat and took a step back.
That was when it had hit me. During that madness with Brandon Cook, I’d run into some zombie trouble. A complete stranger dressed from head to toe in hunter’s camo had gunned down the closest threats. I hadn’t ever seen the person up close, and they’d just gave a tip of their hat and ducked back into the woods after basically saving my ass.
“You…?” I let that hang in the air.
“And here we go,” she grumbled.
The woman tore the hat from her head to allow long reddish-brown locks to fall in a cascade past her shoulders. And now, as things appeared to be settling down, I could get a better look at her. The thing is, I was having a tough time making it all fit. There was one part of me that was appraising a very female body that had all the right amount of curves offering a teasing glimpse of what was probably an extremely attractive figure under that open camo jacket and those loose-fitting camo pants. She was wearing some sort of skin tight black top with a logo I didn’t recognize emblazoned in hot pink.
That was the feminine side of what I was seeing.
Then there were the multiple blades, a pair of rifles including the one that just looked like it would mow down a hundred zombies with one squeeze of the trigger, a spiked baseball bat, a shotgun with what I swore had to be an under-the-barrel grenade launcher attached, and a pair of scoped pistols slung low on her hips. Basically…I was looking at a real-life Laura Croft.
“Hey, buddy,” the woman snapped her fingers in front of my eyes. “My face is up here.”
“I wasn’t…umm…” I stammered.
Had I been gawking? I think I was just blown away by the firepower she was carrying. Also, I was thinking back to when we’d first “met” and trying to figure out if I’d been aware my savior that day had been a woman.
“Marshawn King.” I felt myself being nudged aside. “My friend here is Evan Berry…”
Marshawn rattled off the rest of the introductions, even going so far as to introduce both of the boys. “And this little guy is Toby Kennedy.”
Huh, Toby. How come I hadn’t even learned the kid’s name yet? If I was the supposed leader of this band of misfits, I was going to need to tighten things up a bit.
“Yeah…that’s all fine and good, my name is Alexandria Morris, but nobody calls me that. It’s just Alex,” the woman said with a shrug.
“Then why did you go through the trouble of telling us a name that nobody uses?” Tracy challenged.
I glanced over, more than a little surprised to see that both Tracy and Darya were standing shoulder-to-shoulder with a serious case of resting bitch face etched in deep on both their expressions. I had no idea what it was about, but now wasn’t the time.
“Wait, let me see if I got this straight.” Alex turned to face the other two women. “If this is the same lunatic I saw take your old compound down earlier, you are going all Mean Girls on me while there is some asswipe with a .50 cal mounted on a school bus looking to mow you down? How have you managed to survive this long?”
Not exactly how I would’ve put it, but she made a very good point. We needed to get moving and put some distance between us and Don Evans…for now. Once things settled and I was in better condition, I would seek him out as well as Natasha, and do my best to free Carl and the others if they were still alive, and end those two stains on civilization once and for all.
4
Running…again!
I was still trying to decide what to do—whether we should stay put or move out—when the terrible roar of a powerful machine gun caused everybody to jump. I noticed Alex jump a little, so I was bit relieved to see that she wasn’t impervious to fear. That might seem like a neat trait to have but, in my limited experience, that is what led a person to be killed. I shuddered at my own brushes with death when I’d been running around thinking that I was going to die, and thus, had nothing to worry about.
“I think we need to move. He might not be the brightest bulb on the tree, but it’s not much of a stretch to think he won’t come over here and poke around,” I said with a clap of my hands that was meant to get everybody’s attention. I actually caused a couple of our group to jump.
“Where do we go?” Darya whispered. The fear in her voice was so thick, her voice dipped a register or two and sounded raspy.
“I think the idea of staying anywhere near the city is officially a bad one.” I looked around and noticed that everybody except Alex was listening. She had sauntered over to the window.
I found my eyes following her and quickly forced myself to look away before anybody got the wrong idea. And that was another thing about a lot of the zombie stories that I’d had trouble with. The last thing I felt like doing right now was trying to hook up with somebody. I gave a covert sniff of my armpit to confirm that thought and my nose wrinkled at what hit me full on.
“So?” Tracy snapped, bringing my focus back to her and the others. My face felt a bit warm, but I pushed it away and wrote it off to nothing more than a surge of hormones in the midst of all the chaos.
“So?” I shot back. I had forgotten what point I was about to make.
“Where do we go if we can’t stay here?” Tracy said with a tone that made me wonder if I’d missed something and she was now being forced to repeat herself.
I thought back to my idea of heading out to someplace like McIver Park. That was still close enough that we could perhaps slip in and raid some of the smaller communities nearby that existed on the outskirts of Portland while still being remote enough that maybe the zombie problem would be very minimal.
I laid it out for the group and said that I was open to other ideas if anybody had some other location in mind. I told them that there was enough open area that we could perhaps secure the location we chose and then go so far as to set up gardens and things along those lines.
“Whatever we are going to do, I think we need to decide now,” Alex called over her shoulder from where she’d been peering out the window.
I rushed over and couldn’t hear anything. I glanced at her, suddenly a bit self-conscious about what my breath must smell like at this close to another person.
“The shooting stopped.” She looked at me for a second and then returned her gaze back out the window.
“Okay?” I pressed, not sure where she was going with things.
“They have been quiet for a bit.” Alex returned her gaze to me for a moment with an expression that said she was waiting for me to connect the dots. Apparently, I failed. She huffed, blowing a strand of hair that had slipped from her floppy-brimmed hat and now hung lazily over one eye. “That means they either found something, turned around and left, or are now figuring out just where you ran off to. Judging solely on the little I’ve seen and heard, I would vote on the last one.”
“Okay, folks, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but we gotta go,” I announced.
“Evan, these children can’t keep this pace up,” Darya moaned.
“We just got started,” I shot back as I grabbed my bag and took Michael by the hand, leading him towards the back door of this house. “They are going to have to m
ove or they are done for.”
The moment I said it, I wished that I could take it back. The problem was…it was truth. Cold. But real.
“Jesus, brutha,” Rickey whispered as he came up beside me as I unlatched the gate that opened up to a narrow alley that ran behind the houses on this block and those on the other side.
I had become so focused on what needed to be done and trying to figure out the best path for us to take that I’d stopped paying attention to my surroundings. I opened the gate and found myself standing before a zombie that had apparently been waiting for an idiot like me.
The girl was perhaps ten. Maybe twelve, but no older. She, like previous child versions that I’d encountered, did not just start for me, teeth gnashing and hands grabbing. She stared at me, her head cocked to the side like she was waiting for me to say something. Rickey started to reach for his machete, but something in me made me grab his arm. The sudden activity did have one reaction…the little girl zombie took a step backwards! I am guessing by the look on his face, and how it changed, that he was about to voice a protest regarding me keeping him from drawing a weapon, but I think that, by the time the words dripped from his mouth, it was likely about what he was seeing.
“The children are still frightened,” Michael whispered.
I glanced down at him and wanted to ask how he knew, but when I looked back at the pathetic creature facing us, I had to agree that such an assessment was as good of an explanation as anything I could throw out there.
“How do you know?” I whispered. “Can you talk to them?”
Michael continued to stare at the ground, but he made a sound that I am certain was him holding back a laugh. “Monsters can’t talk, Evan.”
“Jeez,” Rickey exhaled more than spoke. “Everybody knows that, Evan. What are you thinking?”
I shot him my best withering glare, but I doubt Rickey even noticed. Instead, he moved laterally, keeping his distance from the zombie girl. Chewie was a different story.
As soon as she squeezed through the gate, her eyes locked on the creature. The hackles on the back of her neck and between her broad shoulders stood up and she let loose with a low rumbling growl.
Before the apocalypse, I could not recall hearing my big fur ball making any noises that could be remotely intimidating. Mostly she made noises that were very similar to her silver screen namesake. The sounds coming from her now were fierce and more than a little scary.
“Easy, girl,” I breathed.
I was suddenly very glad that I’d slipped her collar on. She was already straining against it, and I am certain that, had I not held on tight, she would’ve laid into that zombie like nobody’s business.
“There is a zombie child on the other side of the gate,” I said over my shoulders so that the others would hopefully not be alarmed. Since she was now a good fifteen or so feet back up the alley, and making no attempt to come for us, I figured everybody would be able to slip by with no problems.
I was only partially correct.
The last person through the gate was Alex. She had one of her big blades in her hand and turned toward the child as soon as she saw it. In an instant, the creature was just like any other zombie as it made a hissing sound and began to stagger towards the woman who waited patiently for it to close the distance.
“Pay attention, Evan,” she said over her shoulder without taking her eyes off the zombie girl that drew nearer and nearer, her teeth clicking in anticipation of tearing into the woman who faced her down.
Now Chewie was even more aggressive and yanked me back towards the scene of what was about to be a quick kill. Sure enough, as soon as the girl closed to within range, Alex leaned in and brought her blade down in a skull shattering overhand smash. As the child fell, Alex jerked the blade free, knelt, and wiped it off on the little girl’s shirt before sliding it back into its sheath.
“At least your dog isn’t an idiot,” she scolded as she stalked past me to catch up with Rickey.
“What the hell do you mean by that?” I said as I pulled Chewie around and jogged to catch up.
“The dog knows that a zombie is a fucking zombie.”
“It wasn’t attacking,” I insisted.
“Did you see it change?” Alex spun on me. She wasn’t yelling, but she was whisper-shouting pretty dang loud, and it made everybody stop and stare.
“It saw you pull a knife,” I said.
Even as the words were coming out of my mouth, I heard the foolishness. But I couldn’t help it. These were children…or at least they had been. And in each case, when I’d encountered them, they’d never attacked until I drew a weapon.
As that thought tried to entrench itself in my mind, I remembered the church. I remembered the feeling of absolute fear that dug its claws into my soul when those children had basically rang a dinner bell and brought on an onslaught of so-called regular zombies as I’d driven through them.
“Can you two do this later?” Marshawn stepped in between us. “We need to go…now!”
As soon as he said it, I heard it. The sound of what I knew to be a school bus chugging up Johnson Creek Boulevard. It would reach the intersection and turn left, putting it at the gates of this once opulent neighborhood. We had to go.
I hated that I was not anywhere close to a hundred percent. If so, I would do everything in my power to put an end to this creep right now. The longer he floated out there in the world, the harder it would be to take him down simply because he would amass not only more firepower, but he would find other like-minded idiots just looking to take advantage of the unfortunate situations of others. I’d seen way more of the Don Evans sort out in the wilderness than I did people like Marshawn—and even Alex for that matter. She had saved my ass once.
We cut down the alley and emerged to discover a litter-strewn street with corpses decaying in what was promising to be a rather unseasonably hot early spring day. I kept the pace brisk, but tried to remember that we had little ones in tow and their legs could only go so fast.
By the time we reached the wall, the sound of the school bus was echoing off every surface, and impossible to pinpoint. We reached the end of the street where it split off in a tee-intersection. To the left was just a short distance before it terminated in a dead-end node of a street that went between two homes. A large sign announced the expansion of the neighborhood that would never happen.
As we reached the little barricade Rickey hopped up and turned to start giving people a hand over. Marshawn cleared the wall and waited on the other side to help everybody down and I hung back just a bit to keep an eye back up the street we’d jogged down in case the school bus from hell appeared. Rickey was just boosting Alex when our time ran out.
The nose of the bus was just creeping into view. I bolted, hoping that I’d managed to avoid being seen. I heard a few rounds of gunfire come from back that direction, but nothing to indicate it had been directed at me.
“Run!” I yelled, backpedaling to the barricade, hopping onto it, and following Rickey over.
I dropped to the ground and got my bearings. We were at the bottom of a moderately steep slope that would take us to another patch of forest. I was pretty certain that would take us to Altamont Summit, an upscale condo complex that sat on the far side of the residential neighborhood where one of my many nightmares originated.
The first night away from the group, I had stumbled across a young man and an infant. He’d been perhaps thrown out of yet another gated community (I’d had no idea how many of those existed until this zombie thing started), but that hadn’t stopped him from taking a shot at me. Thinking back, I guess he had his reasons considering what I’d encountered since that day. My last memory of that young man and the baby was what haunted me.
Zombies had come through the door and windows. I escaped out back, but he and the baby had stayed. I was almost across the open field beyond that home when I heard those first screams. I’d heard adults scream ‘the scream’ before, but that had been the first time I’
d heard a child. That sound often echoed in my head, even when I was awake.
Part of me didn’t really want to return to that scene, but our other option was to blunder forward through yet another neighborhood. At least this way, if we made it up the hill, we could take a moment to catch our breath in those woods before pushing on.
“Up there.” I pointed.
“Evan…” Darya started.
Before she could finish, Rickey leaned over and scooped up Toby Kennedy in one arm and hoisted him onto his shoulders. Marshawn quickly followed suit with Michael. I held my breath, waiting for the boy to absolutely lose it. Instead, he leaned forward, crossing his arms and laying them across Marshawn’s head like it was all perfectly natural and normal.
I was officially done trying to figure kids out. A quick glance at Alex made me amend my list and add women to it as well.
We started up the hill. Oddly enough (or not, considering everything that had happened these past several days), I was the weak link in the chain. I tried to play it off like I was simply doing my part to bring up the rear, but a few glances over his shoulder, and the look I was getting, told me that Marshawn wasn’t even a little bit fooled.
We were halfway up when I heard the .50 cal on the school bus open up. I froze for an instant, certain that I was about to be shredded. When nothing happened, I risked stopping to get a look back towards the neighborhood we’d left behind.
I was almost relieved…no, who am I kidding? I was giddy. Apparently, Dumbass Don had brought out every single zombie trapped inside that gated community. Even better, he thought that he’d be able to just plow through them in that school bus. Scores of the undead were on all sides of the bus and more were coming from every narrow street of the grid.
Part of me, a sick part admittedly, wanted to stay and watch. I wanted to see the zombies pour into that bus. I wanted to wait until I saw that mohawked bastard come staggering out with a chunk bitten out of his ass. And if he was still dressed like he was last time I saw him, that wouldn’t be a problem to see for real.
