by TW Brown
Jerking the child to her, Alex hacked at the back of the child’s head. Twice, her blows struck between the shoulder blades with a teeth-jarring crack. The third strike hit at the base of the skull, breaking it open somewhat. It was the fourth that completely shattered the skull into at least two large pieces.
I made quick work of the adult and then joined in finishing off the remaining zombie children. As I did, I had to shut out the sounds of Chewie’s frantic barking. I could tell she was very upset.
When I reached the top of the berm and looked down into the trench we’d been so proud of, I felt my stomach roll. It was a writhing sea of arms and legs straight out of a nightmare. As I watched, a face broke free from the mass and I swear it locked eyes with me. I know in my rational mind that these creatures have never shown any sort of emotion on their faces, but I couldn’t help but project. I am convinced that I saw a hopeless state of despair.
Of course, there was no way I could reach the thing. Besides, by the time I’d taken three steps down the berm, it was gone. I glanced at Alex who was standing about halfway down and considering the scene before us.
Just past the trench was the start of our fence. It was supposed to be a secondary defense after the hill and the huge, deep ditch we’d dug. I could see the strands of barbed wire had been snapped like nothing. There were chunks and bits still clinging to the wire, but it had been totally useless.
I had to force down my own sense of despair. The defense I’d been so proud of had utterly failed. And now, just beyond those snapped strands of barbed wire and the thick bushes that obscured being able to see the camp, my people were fighting for their lives.
“You ready?” Alex glanced back at me.
I looked at her and noticed that her face was drained of all color. Her lips almost looked purple they stood out so starkly.
“For?” I moved closer to her, wondering what had brought her fear to the forefront.
She turned away from me, and I saw her body tense. Surely she couldn’t be about to do what I thought she looked to be preparing for. My gaze slid to the trench and I could see movement in both directions. So many of the zombies hadn’t made it and were now wandering freely in the makeshift moat.
Before I could really get my mind wrapped around what I thought Alex might be planning, she took off in a few bounding steps, reached the bottom of the berm, and launched herself into the air. She landed on the other side with plenty to spare.
Okay, it was only ten feet. Even with just a few steps, the jump wouldn’t be that big of a deal. Only…with the undead filling our moat, it wasn’t a jump you wanted to botch. This was playing the childhood game “the floor is lava” with completely real stakes.
I couldn’t spend too much time thinking. Alex had already taken off at a sprint for the camp. I watched her vanish through the branches, leaving me to do what needed to be done.
I took a deep breath, instantly regretting it as the foul stench of the undead flooded my mouth and nose. The oily sensation was enough to make me gag, but I shoved that aside as I took off at a sprint.
My eyes were fixed on the other side of the trench. As I reached that last step before I would go over the edge, I pushed off with everything I had. My body went airborne and I had the briefest sensation of flight…until I landed. My feet tangled and I ended up skidding on my stomach.
Other than some skinned knees and the palms of my hands, I appeared to be fine. I grabbed the machete I’d been holding from where it had skidded to a stop after I lost my grip.
Somewhere, in the back of my mind, I heard my mother telling me that I was going to poke my eye out running with an unsheathed weapon. I told that voice that, if this was the worst possibility waiting for me by the end of the day, I’d be okay.
I hurried off in the direction Alex had vanished. The sounds of battle were growing louder. When I emerged on the other side of the dense foliage that our camp hunkered down in the middle of, that sound amplified as if somebody had just turned the volume knob to eleven.
While I still hadn’t become instant-name-recall familiar with all of Drew’s people, I at least knew them by face. The first cluster of people my eyes lit upon were absolute strangers. Five faces I’d never seen before.
The thing that saved the closest one of these strangers came in the form of the three undead that turned my direction from my immediate left. I chopped with a sidearm swing, my blade almost making it through cleanly. I yanked my hand back in what was now instinctive response and pulled the weapon free.
I spun to the second zombie, prepared to come down with an overhand attack to keep my profile narrow to the third zombie while also allowing myself to drop my shoulder when it reached me. That move was one I used often in these situations. A zombie’s inability to adjust causes it to walk right into my dropped shoulder and take the brunt of my attack. Usually I catch it in the chest and send it flying backward. That made for an easy kill.
The first part of my move went off without a hitch. In fact, it was all good until I instinctively threw myself in the direction of the third zombie in order to knock it down. I met empty air and again found myself falling hard.
I rolled, my eyes looking every direction as I sought the zombie I knew to be close. One of the strangers had moved in and spiked it in the top of the head. The woman had a knit cap pulled low and a scarf around the lower half of her face, but I could absolutely tell it was a woman by the curves. She reached out with a gloved hand.
“Sorry, didn’t realize you knew it was right there on you.” She pulled me to my feet and stepped back. “Nice combo move by the way.”
And then she bounded off to cut down a pair of zombie children moving in behind one of the living. It was a pitched battle with more zombies than I’d ever faced. As I chopped, I found myself having to switch hands simply due to fatigue. One after another, the undead fell. On several occasions, I found myself shoulder-to-shoulder with an absolute stranger.
It was impossible to do more than give a nod of acknowledgement. When I found Marshawn, I felt a wave of relief. He’d taken Michael up a ladder to what was the start of our planned catwalk construct. It was supposed to eventually crisscross the entire camp. It would allow the patrolling sentry to have an unobstructed view of things. That idea sprung up before we’d gotten very far with the trench. One night, I’d been on patrol and rounded the corner of a tent when I collided with a walker.
Besides scaring me, it made me realize that the undead don’t always moan or cry. Also, they move slow enough that it is possible for them to actually sneak up on a person.
Seeing that Marshawn and the boy were safe was a huge relief. As for Chewie, she was posted up right below them. Anything that came close would find itself being bowled over. Maybe they’d worked it out over a few practice runs, but the whole thing looked surprisingly well-oiled. Marshawn never missed when the big Newfie would plow into an approaching zombie. I had the chance to observe one instance where he actually spun away from his current cluster of targets to end Chewie’s latest victim. Maybe Michael was involved, but it was impossible to give it much more than passing attention.
I turned to cut off a pair of undead moving towards a young woman who was trying to free her machete from the skull of a zombie. A quick assessment told me that she didn’t have any other weapons. My jog changed to a sprint and I took down the first one by severing its head which tumbled to the ground and came to a stop on its ear a few feet away. I didn’t need to look to know it wasn’t completely finished, but at least it was no longer a mobile threat.
The second one was a simple matter of me grabbing it by the shoulder. I spun it to face me and then drove the tip of my blade into its eye. The scream that came at that exact moment caused my hand to lose its grip just enough for me to drop my blade. It happened so perfectly that it took me a few heartbeats to realize the zombie hadn’t been the one to scream.
I turned as I collected my weapon and spotted the source of the scream. It was Alex. She was
on her knees with her machete buried deep in the face of the zombie sprawled on the ground. The problem existed in the two zombie children that looked to have caught her by surprise from behind.
During the melee, her wide-brimmed hat had obviously fallen or been knocked off. To complicate the issue, her hair wasn’t in a hair tie any longer. It was streaming around her face and fluttering behind her. One of the children had a fistful and was tugging her backwards by her hair.
The second child looked to be utilizing that distraction to her advantage as she moved in from the front. It had managed to get ahold of Alex’s jacket sleeve. The woman was jerking back and forth in an attempt to escape. As I started for her, I saw her yank so hard that the child with a fistful of hair fell back with a clump of her reddish-brown locks.
I heard her scream again, this time it was one that was more pain-based than fear. She was now thrashing about, kicking out and trying to shake the one off her arm. All that did was cause her hair to fly about, making it easy for the child to grab another handful of it in one fist.
The child moved in again, and I could see its mouth opening. Alex was trying to shake her head back and forth, but it was useless. Her weapon was also stuck, and she was too panicked to think rationally and grab one of the blades dangling from her belt.
I arrived just in time to knock the child back. Alex yelped, and I saw another handful of her hair fluttering in the zombie child’s fist. I stomped on the child’s arm and drove my own blade into its face.
I saw one more, and it was in “basic zombie mode” as it trudged to me with its arms wide and hands grabbing at the air in a twisted caricature that looked like it wanted a hug.
I’d just finished off the zombie child of perhaps seven or eight and then I looked around. It was then that I realized everybody else seemed to be either catching their breath, or wiping off a weapon. Scanning my own surroundings, there were no more threats.
We’d done it. Our little group had survived its first full-frontal attack. The undead had come in huge numbers—led by a child, I reminded myself—and we’d managed to defeat them with what looked to be minimal casualties.
I turned to Alex and saw that she was curled up into a ball, her arms wrapped around her knees which she held tight to her chest. She was sobbing and whispering something over and over. I approached her very slowly, not sure what her reaction might be. At last, I was close enough to hear.
“I’m not ready…I’m not ready…I’m not ready…”
14
Company
I knelt beside Alex. Honestly, I was at a loss. Up until this moment, she’d always come across as such a bad ass. I figured we needed her more than she did us. To see her like this was…confusing.
“You okay?” I warred with the idea of putting a hand on her shoulder, but decided against it.
“Do I look okay?” Her face tilted up to mine and I could see the redness around her eyes, the tracks made by tears that cut through the dust on her face. Her nose was running just a bit and the clear fluid from the left nostril was about to touch her upper lip.
These were the sorts of things you seldom saw on the pretty faces of the Hollywood version of a zombie apocalypse. When Alex simply wiped at her face with the back of her hand, basically leaving a smear across her face that could only partially be attributed to tears, I had to appreciate the reality of the moment even more.
“It’s all fake,” she whispered. It was so soft, that at first, I didn’t think I’d heard her correctly or if she’d even spoken. Then she continued after a harsh sniffle. “I’ve shot in plenty of ranges. Wasted plenty of rounds on targets, even clay pigeons. But I didn’t so much as nab a deer. First time I got one in my sights, my hands shook so bad that I almost dropped my rifle.”
I wasn’t sure what this had to do with anything. Perhaps I wasn’t seeing the big picture. I mean, in the short time we’ve travelled together, I’ve seen Alex fight and take down plenty of the undead.
“When those things busted into the room with my mom and me, I froze.” She took a deep, hitching breath before resuming. “It was my mom that pushed me out of the way. That’s why she cut her hand, because I was just standing there like an idiot and would’ve probably gotten bit myself if she hadn’t acted. When the infection set in, I was afraid to go out on my own. I only did it when she started getting delirious. Her fever was so bad that I could feel the heat pouring off her. That was what finally drove me to make that run to the hospital.”
We sat in silence for a spell. I looked around and saw that the rest of the people, both those I knew, and those I didn’t, were already making a dent in cleaning out the corpses scattered on the ground. I needed to be a part of that evolution so that folks didn’t start thinking that I felt myself above the crappy details around camp.
“I actually shit my pants,” she mumbled. “The first time I rounded a corner in that damn medical center and came face-to-face with one of those things. I’ve never been so scared.”
I was embarrassed for her, but I understood completely. This was nothing like the books, movies, television shows, or video games. We lived in a constant state of fear that wore down on the soul.
“Hey!” I brightened. “You still saved my butt that day. You picked off those zombies when I was trying to get up that hill.”
“I was drunk,” Alex replied.
I looked at her with a raised eyebrow. I wasn’t sure what that had to do with anything. Her shooting had been expert, and she’d saved my ass that day. I could still see that camo-wearing figure on the hill give me a salute before vanishing into the woods.
“I’d gotten blasted and decided to just go out and end it all. I had this stupid idea that I would go out in a hail of bullets as I took out as many zombies as possible. They’d stolen everything I loved, so I was going to kill until there were no more rounds left in the rifle, then I would switch to pistol and go until I had only one more round. I was going to eat a bullet as my last act.”
I took that all in. It didn’t make me see her any differently. All it did was make me see her as human. She had the same fears and frailties as the rest of us.
“We should get up and help,” she said, clapping her hands together and then wiping at her eyes one more time.
“Okay,” I agreed.
I stood and reached down to offer a hand. She glanced at it for a second and I believed that she was going to refuse. Instead, she took my gloved hand with hers and pulled herself to her feet.
I headed over to where Marshawn was helping Michael climb down from the beginnings of our catwalk. He was wincing, so I knew that his bullet wound was bothering him. He insisted that he was not in need of painkillers.
“We only have so much of these babies,” he’d said one day. “I think we should save them for something a bit more serious. This injury sucks, but it was a clean one and it is healing. The pain is bad, but manageable.”
“Umm…” I glanced over my shoulder at the bustling camp, “…not that I’m complaining about their help, but who exactly are these people?”
Marshawn looked past me like he was seeing them for the first time. His eyes didn’t widen or narrow, they just swept over everything before returning to me.
“Yeah…they showed up just a moment before the zombies. If not for the fact that they came in from the opposite direction and then jumped right in to help fight them off, I might’ve believed they were shady. Maybe even that they brought the herd with them.” Marshawn leaned in close before he whispered, “But we should still watch them. I have a vibe…like something ain’t right.”
Imagine that, I thought, something not right in a zombie apocalypse. What I said was, “Do we have a designated spokesman or leader?”
“I guess that would be me,” a man said as he strolled up making almost no noise at all.
I spun, and if I hadn’t known better, I would swear that the guy was sneaking up on us in order to maybe eavesdrop. The man was tall and thin. If you just glimpsed him and didn�
�t focus, he might be able to pass for Christian Bale. His eyes were like two pieces of coal, almost black as they stared right through you, burning a hole wherever they stayed for too long.
He had a nasty scratch that ran down his left cheek that looked suspiciously like somebody had raked him with their nails. His smile was cold, and despite having heard it probably a million times, I’d never understood that “smile that doesn’t reach the eyes” comment until this very minute. I now understood Marshawn’s trepidation. This guy gave me the creeps.
“Name’s Griffin Alistair Marshall. Most folks call me Griff…or hey you.” He laughed, and it sounded wrong. As if perhaps his body wasn’t sure how to process the noise it was making, or maybe the muscles simply weren’t used to that sort of action.
“Evan Berry.” I extended my hand to shake his and glanced down when he made no effort to reciprocate. My hand was covered in gore. I wiped it on my pants, but figured it would be best to just let things be on the handshake front. I did notice that Marshawn remained silent during this exchange.
“Looks like you folks have been putting down roots,” Griffin said as he looked around like he might be noticing our little camp for the very first time. “We don’t want to intrude, and if we ain’t welcome, we’ll be moving on.” The man paused and looked past us in the direction of the river. “Just ask that maybe we be allowed to fill our water containers?”
I felt a tinge of guilt shade the edges of my soul. While this guy might look like the serial killer next door, he seemed genuinely nice. Sure, I get that most folks said that about Ted Bundy, and if this guy was travelling alone, I might send him on his way.
