Dead Lost

by Flint Maxwell

  Clamoring outside. Shouting, screaming, then…shooting. One shot goes off and then another. The screams replace it. I don’t let the sound of battle hold me back. I rush toward the unhinged door and just as I’m about to go through, I hear something else, something I never thought I’d hear again.

  A voice, but not just any voice.

  “Bandit? You there, Bandit? FF4356, come in. I repeat, come in, FF4356.” I would know this woman's voice even if I was deaf. I stop and turn to the sound. It is coming from the room Lilly had gone into, the room where Bandit had rushed from. Lilly is on the floor. Absentmindedly, I reach down and help her up. Her eyes burrow into me, but I hardly notice.

  That voice.

  “Abby?” I say.

  But there’s no way. She’s been gone for two years. Is it like the way I’ve heard Darlene and Junior’s voice? My own hallucination?

  For a second, I think I’ve gone insane, really insane. A shot blasts through what’s left of the front parlor window, causing Lilly to scream in surprise. I don’t flinch, not even as I feel the rain of glass at my back.

  That voice. That impossible voice.

  “Jack, get down!” Lilly is saying.

  Stray bullets are flying in all directions, thudding into the house’s siding, eviscerating the wooden door even more than Bandit has. Suzanna has left us. I didn’t see her go, but I no longer sense her presence.

  “Jack!”

  A hand clutches around my ankle. It’s death-gripping my pants. I’m moving to the sound of that voice, pulling away from Lilly.

  “Jack, what the hell are you doing?” Lilly yells. I am at the bottom of a pool, barely aware of her speaking to me at the surface.

  “FF4356, what’s your status? I repeat, what is your status?”

  It’s Abby’s voice. It has to be. I would recognize that flair, that bite, in her tone anywhere.

  Now I’m running, running away from the screams and the fresh sounds of gunfire outside. I cross the room. A grand piano to my left. A fireplace to my right. A doorway in front of me. Through this doorway I go.

  No longer do I hear the voice; now, I hear a crackling—the feedback of a long-distance radio. It reminds me of walkie talkies, only amplified.

  “FF4356, come in!”

  There it is, the radio. It is a large gray box with angry red lights blinking on its face. Next to these lights are thick dials. Curly rubber wires hang from each side of it. Three longer wires hang from the back and plug into a power strip in the wall.

  It takes everything I have to move my foot forward. Each step is conscious, deliberate. On top of the radio sits a headset. I pick it up, slide it over my messy head. The speakers don’t work because the voice is played aloud, but the microphone does. It has to. Why else would it be plugged in?

  “Abby?” I say, my voice barely a whisper.

  No voice answers.

  Maybe I am crazy.

  A long moment passes. It feels like eternity to me, like the blurring days after Darlene and Junior were murdered.

  “He’s getting away!” one of the women with Suzanna yells outside, voice muffled.

  I can’t stand here and wait. I have to go out there and help. So turning around, ready to run back out to the battle and forget the phantom voice I heard—

  “Jack?”

  No, I think. No, this is impossible.

  But it’s not. That voice right there is Abby’s voice, thick with pain and confusion.

  “Abby?” I whisper. Then, gaining more power, “Abby!”

  On the other end of this radio line comes more static. It’s like someone is wrestling over the controls with her.

  No. No way. It’s really Abby, but someone is onto her. Just my luck. My head spins. Heart thumps my sternum. I feel sick, dizzy, all of the above.

  “Jack, Chicago. We’re in the Black Towers,” Abby says, and I still can’t believe what’s going on. My stomach clenches with excitement and nausea and fear. I might throw up or I might run to the rooftops and scream at the top of my lungs.

  “The Black Towers?” I ask, my voice getting stronger still. Living in Chicago for a few years before this all happened, I have never heard of the Black Towers.

  “I don’t have much time, Jack. Come to the Black Towers.”

  “Abby?”

  No answer.

  The line goes dead. I stand there for a moment clicking buttons and tweaking knobs. Feedback screams in my ears. My back prickles with sweat, my palms are slick.

  “Abby? Please answer me. Let me know I’m not crazy,” I’m saying, because that is what this feels like, some kind of crazy dream.

  Again, there’s no answer. I try to rationalize what has happened, what I heard, but I can’t. Nor do I have the time to because the yelling outside hits me like a tidal wave. The gunshots, too.

  “Jack?” Lilly says behind me. Her voice causes me to jump. If my finger had been on the trigger of my rifle, I would’ve sprayed a few bullets into the nice lacquer floors.

  I turn around. I must look pretty fucked up, judging by the crooked way Lilly is looking at me.

  “I—”

  “The Black Towers,” she says almost dreamily.

  “You heard that?”

  She ignores me. “Jack, Bandit’s getting away. We need to help.” Her eyes have gotten bigger; the dreamy quality to her voice is gone.

  I nod. Time to worry about this later, I think, still not totally believing what has happened.

  Pushing past Lilly, I go out the front door. There, lies one of the men I freed. He is no older than me, as skinny as a rail, as gaunt as a zombie. A fresh red hole is in his throat and his eyes are closed. The sight makes me sick and angry. I scan the front yard, looking for the man they call Bandit. Before I can locate him, the sound of a revving engine gives him away.

  Shit. He’s in the Lincoln and he’s flooring it, tearing through the grass and the gravel and the zombie corpses. One tire bounces over a dead body—I can’t tell if it’s zombie or human—and it leaves a bright crimson streak on the driveway.

  “Suzanna!” Lilly shouts.

  The crazy woman has jumped in front of the careening vehicle, her rifle raised. She pumps off a few shots, but the car keeps coming. Sparks fly and glass cracks as the bullets register home.

  Dread invades me as I see she has no intention to jump out of the way. For her, right now it’s kill or be killed, and the odds are definitely leaning toward be killed.

  I don’t think about what I have to do. I just do it. That’s how it works in this wasteland. If you hesitate, if you think too long or too hard, you make a mistake, and mistakes will now literally cost you an arm or a leg…or your life.

  The rifle rests on my shoulder. I suck in a deep breath and hold it. No clean shot in the driver’s side window, so I aim for the back tire.

  The rifle barks twice.

  Both shots hit the mark and the sound the rubber makes as it explodes seems to rival the sound the grenade made earlier.

  Bandit is going fast, but he’s not going fast enough for the car to flip out of control—thank God, because that’s my ticket to the Black Towers. Instead, he fishtails, swerving out of the way of Suzanna, just missing her by a few feet.

  Turns out, she jumps at the last possible millisecond.

  “Nice shot!” Lilly says in my ear.

  Not over yet, I’m thinking as I rush to the still moving car. He’s jerking the wheel. Rubber shrieks and burns, clumps of grass and dirt fly. A cloud of gray smoke fills the air.

  I stop in my tracks when I see where the Lincoln is heading—right for the small duck pond at the foot of the windmill.

  No. Please no.

  Spinning, the car comes to a rest right on the edge of it, sending whatever birds were floating there lazily up into the darkening sky. The front passenger’s tire nearly touches the water.

  Too close. My heart begins beating again and I rush to the scene.

  Suzanna and the Hispanic man beat me there, just as Bandit
opens the door to make a break for it. He has a chrome pistol in his hand, it catches the light and sends it back at us like its own form of deadly projectiles.

  Before he raises it, Suzanna’s gun goes off.

  The sound of a gun is enough to make me stop in my tracks, almost always is. You wonder if you’re getting shot at or if you’ve been shot…or if you’re dead.

  None of those things happen to me.

  The first bullet takes Bandit in the chest. He’s a big guy, so he barely jerks with the movement. Then the next shot—whether it comes from Suzanna or her friend, I don’t know—hits him in the stomach, sprays blood. He drops to his knees groaning.

  I almost want to tell them to stop. I need to question this man, need to find out more about the one-eyed leader of the District and the Black Towers, but I see in their stony faces that they have no intention of stopping until Bandit has suffered as much as he has made them suffer.

  He puts his blood-slick hands up in a last-ditch gesture of surrender. No luck. Suzanna and her cavalry have pulled their triggers one last time. The succession of shots rips Bandit’s broad jaw line into pieces. He flies over the hood and lands in the duck pond with a splash, leaving a rain of blood on the Lincoln’s paint job.

  A long silence follows this. Something great has just happened between these men and women. They have solidified their freedom. All I can think about while they wrap each other up in teary-eyed hugs is Abby.

  She has been with me since the beginning. Together, we have taken down warlords and scores of zombies. Once, just outside of DC, Abby was bitten. I carried her in my arms, this sister I never had, to a place of safety where a man named Jacob performed an immediate and gruesome amputation. I remember how I felt when I thought I lost her that time, how I thought the world was ending. But she came through. In only about a day’s worth of time, she was almost back to her normal self. That’s Abby for you, tough as nails. Then the District attacked Haven and I lost my wife and son and sister-in-law and so many others, including Abby, and I really did think the world had ended…for real this time. An apocalypse after the apocalypse.

  I heard her on the radio, and so did Lilly. I’m not crazy, I’m not hallucinating. Abby is all right; she’s alive, but why is she communicating to Bandit’s farm via District frequencies? This is the question burning up inside me as Lilly breaks away to my right and helps Suzanna drag their dead friend out of the grass and up to the concrete.

  I can’t just stand here and not help.

  I walk over there with them, help carry this bleeding man away.

  Suzanna tells the man who had helped her take down Bandit to give the signal. This confuses me for a moment before the man raises his rifle into the air and shoots. One shot…two, three, four.

  “Let’s hope they made out better than we did,” the man says. He looks at me, sees my arched eyebrow.

  “Bob and the young ones,” the man says. He sticks his hand and we shake. His name is David. He introduces me to the other men and women. There is Marco, Daphne, and Malorie. Eric is the one who has been shot in the throat, resting eternally at our feet. When this somber moment ends, David says, “That was good shooting back there, taking out his tire like that.”

  I shrug. I don’t need praised for doing the right thing. I only acted on instinct.

  “Surprised you did,” Lilly adds, “with how spaced-out you looked. Still kind of do.” She looks at me warily. In this look, I can tell we have a secret. I’m grateful for her not bringing up the fact that I had a clipped conversation with someone over District airwaves. It would raise too many questions that I’m not prepared to answer. Lilly looks away and helps Suzanna off of her feet. With the battle over, with Bandit dead, this woman, who was a slave no less than an hour ago, looks exhausted and older than her actual age. The tan she wears from constantly being out in the sun pales. She’s crying silent tears.

  “Yes,” Suzanna says. “Great shooting, Jack.” She musters up a slight smile. “I would have got him anyway.”

  I chuckle. “I don’t know about that…” My tone is joking, but I’m really not. If it wasn’t for me, Suzanna would be roadkill.

  “There they are,” the other man says, shielding his eyes from the waning sun. On the horizon, Bilbo walks, specks on his back, specks next to him. It’s the one-armed man and the children, back to the safety of this farm. Though how much longer this place will be safe, I have no idea. With the gunshots and the grenade explosion, it’s bound to draw unwanted attention—zombies or others.

  We can’t worry about this yet.

  I say, “If we start walking now, we’ll meet up with them about halfway, I think.”

  “We aren’t going anywhere, Jack,” Suzanna says. “There is no safety out there.”

  “No safety in here. With all that noise we made, a horde is bound to be on their way,” I argue. This shocking revelation is supposed to knock them off of their feet. It doesn’t.

  “Let them come,” David says.

  Daphne nods, fresh tears in her eyes. “We’ll be ready for them.”

  “We have the weapons and we have the manpower. When they come, we will put them back in the ground where they belong,” Suzanna continues. “This is a good place. The soil grows and the water flows.”

  “What about the District? They’re bound to show up sooner or later,” Lilly asks, honest fear in her voice.

  “We’ll be ready for them, too,” Marco says. He is the youngest of the bunch, Hispanic, a man no more than twenty years old, fifteen of those years spent in an apocalyptic wasteland. I can’t help but wonder if he remembers what it was like before all of this happened.

  Now the freed people stand shoulder to shoulder. On their faces, you can see this bond, this camaraderie. They are a family; what I once had all those years ago. They have found their Haven and there’s no taking it from them.

  But I know what happens to family. It’s ripped apart in this wasteland. The evil always wins out and the good always die. Like I’ve said, it’s not easy to have a family when the dead walk and hunt us like animals.

  There is no convincing them, though, and it’s not my job to do that, either.

  “Well,” I say, “let’s get rid of these bodies before the others show up. The youngins don’t need any more scarring than they’ve already had.”

  I can see Lilly smiling out of the corner of my eye.

  “Thank you, Jack,” Suzanna says. She smiles, too. It is somber, melancholy. She sticks her hand out and I take it. She squeezes, grateful for my help. I pull my hand away. Can’t get sucked into another trap, of caring for people that will only end up dying.

  The clean up begins. Each one of us is tired and hungry and—at least I am—afraid, but we drag the bodies to the back of the house. The District guards and the zombies go in one pile, while the other freed people who have lost their lives go elsewhere. They mean to bury them, and I mean to help. If anything, it’s a way to make up for the fact that I didn’t get this chance in Haven, a way to atone for that sin.

  Marco, David, and I go around with knives and stab each corpse in the head, killing the brain even if they’ve already been shot somewhere close by. Better safe than sorry, we’re all thinking.

  The rest start a large fire after this and the air fills with the sickeningly sweet smell of charred flesh with an undercurrent of burnt hair.

  Daphne disappears into the barn and reappears with two shovels. Lilly and I offer to dig the holes as they rest. Well, mostly I offered and Lilly reluctantly agreed.

  The night has come now, but it doesn’t seem like it with the large bonfire at our backs.

  Bob and the children have made it here. The smell in the air is unmistakable, and they paid it no attention.

  Bilbo roams free, comes over my way. I give him a reassuring nod he doesn’t understand then prances off like he doesn’t know me. Good, I think, let’s keep our relationship like that.

  “He’s going to make some new friends,” Lilly says, leaning on
her shovel. I follow Bilbo with my eyes, and sure enough, Lilly is right. The horse stops by the stables and examines the other two horses, who are sticking their heads out of the dark. Their ears move back and forth, along with their eyes. Somehow, I think this is their way of communication.

  A boy of maybe thirteen guides Bilbo into an empty stable.

  Then we’re back to digging graves for the freed people—our new friends.

  It takes nearly another half-hour before the graves are dug. We took our time, or at least I have. When I got done digging my hole I began on the second, then Lilly came to help me out.

  Suzanna and the rest come out of the house. They have washed up, put on better clothes. Some of the children wear oversized and baggy shirts and pants. Some of the women wear male sweatpants, tied over and over again at the waist to fit. Suzanna has scrubbed the dirt from her face, washed her hair. She looks stunning as only a woman of her age can. Matured beauty.

  Marco and I carry the wrapped bodies to the edge of the graves. Others offer to help, but I refuse them.

  The funeral is as beautiful as a funeral can be. Many tears are shed and hands held. Hugs and kisses and all the usual stuff. I watch with dry eyes. It’s not that I’m not sad or not heartbroken for the lives lost today or anything like that, I’m just so used to death that I’ve become numb. The only thing that gets me these days is thinking of Darlene with her throat slit and my own son with a bullet in the back of his head, lying lifeless on the blood-soaked ground. I try not to think of these things. My brain doesn’t always comply.

  Plus, I know this won’t be their last funeral. The funerals are constant in the wasteland.