by mike Evans
“Yeah, that isn’t my dad, that’s my Navy Seal,” Ellie added. “These two helped me; took me to a doctor and got my wrist wrapped. This guy doesn’t want to give me my gun back.”
Clary gave a firm eye fucking to Yassa.
“Hey man, I don’t mean anything. I was just screwing around. You don’t see many like this and I wanted to look at the gun. She can have it back. I just wanted to see if there were more of these that could be gotten. I mean, do you have a stockpile or what?”
Clary held out a hand for the rifle. Yassa didn’t appreciate the giant in front of him and what he was capable of doing. He tried to puff up his chest, but intimidation wasn’t one of things that Clary understood. “I might just wanna keep this one, seeing that you have the same damn thing that she does.”
Clary didn’t say anything. He moved faster than Yassa would have ever thought possible, and even as it was happening, didn’t realize that a man Clary’s size could do such things. Clary reached past Yassa’s head, gripping the rifle’s barrel with one hand and the strap with the other, then swinging him around off balance. The force made it almost impossible to stay on his feet. Clary brought a knife up in one swoop, cutting the rifle strap.
Al and Frank both thought that they were witnessing Yassa’s end. Neither of them cared for the man, but he’d been around a lot longer than any of these people and contributed quite a bit to hunting and overall getting things set up when they were new. The two of them raised their pistols, leveling them at Clary’s head. The knife came up and the strap was cut free, sending Yassa to the ground and the rifle into Clary’s hand.
Al, who still had it ingrained in his brain that he was a police officer—and once an officer, always one—screamed, “Get down on the fucking ground, now!”
Greg stepped forward with his machine gun and let a burst of fire go. Ellie yelled, “Damn it, Greg, you’re going to bring more here! What the hell are you thinking!”
“That if these two assholes don’t put down those pistols, I’ll run half a magazine through each of them. They won’t have to worry about the dead coming for them, because they’ll already be gone!” Greg screamed.
Clary tossed the rifle to Ellie, and he immediately felt like an asshole when he watched her face grimace from the pain in her wrist. “Sorry, Ellie. Now, why doesn’t everyone just settle the fuck down right now. A lot more is going on here than needs to. I might have over reacted, but if Ellie hasn’t informed you, this has been one hell of a day that we’ve-”
Yassa stumbled back to his feet running for Clary. “Yeah, I’ll take it real easy, son of a bitch with a cheap shot.”
Yassa ran, this time with a little more finesse in what he was doing, not being led around by a rifle strap. He ran straight into Clary, wrapping his arms around him, which were anything but chicken bones. But this man’s street experience was nothing compared to what Clary knew.
Clary bent down, gripping the man by his belt and lifting him up until he was forced to let go. When he did let go, the man swung up in the air, off balance, and made the wrong choice of punching Clary in the face. Clary let go of the man’s belt, letting him fall to the ground. A second before he was back to Earth Clary brought up a boot into Yassa’s gut. All the oxygen in his lungs exhaled at once, sending him into a coughing fit. Al and Frank just watched in disbelief at what was really happening in front of their own eyes.
Clary kicked him a second time for good measure and was actually impressed that he had not heard bones snap under his kicks. He’d done much less before and gotten much better results. He chalked it up to getting old, or still not being back to a hundred percent. The second kick had sent him in the air, but when he landed, he rolled onto his back. When Yassa attempted to get up again, Clary pushed him back down, straddling him and pulling a knife that looked as long as some people’s arms from its sheath on his waist. Clary pressed Yassa back down to the ground, watching him trying to catch his breath. Clary pressed until he could see the lightest amount of blood coming from a single spot on his neck above his Adam’s apple.
“You want me to give you a gun and this is how you are going to act? I don’t give anyone a fucking gun—especially one out of my stockpile—until I know they can handle it. But more importantly, when I know they aren’t going to turn around and try to take me or any of those that I care about out. You aren’t making shit for a first impression, now are you? You going to be good if I let this knife off your throat, or are you going to continue to be the world’s biggest asshole?”
Yassa tapped his forearm, trying to say let him up. Clary let off the knife and Yassa ran his hand over his neck. “Jesus, what are you gonna do, cut my fucking head off?”
“Yeah,” Clary said with no question in his voice.
“Don’t you know that life is precious now? That there aren’t enough left of us to go dying by each other’s hands?”
“It doesn’t mean anything to have an entire society of assholes. I take them out as I find them, and in your case, I'm wondering why your head is still attached, after all that.”
“I can fight, and I can contain myself. We don’t know you from shit, so you gotta give me a little break here,” Yassa said.
“Uh huh, you gonna be cool or carry on?” Clary said.
“I’ll be good for a while.”
Clary pushed up off the ground, holding out a hand for Yassa who grudgingly accepted it.
Greg stepped forward towards Al and Frank. Frank slapped Al on the shoulder. “We are going about this shit all wrong, Al. We need to settle down. This isn’t how we want things to go, and these guys don’t look like they’re the type we want for enemies, going forward. If this is just four of them, then imagine what’s going to happen if they all come. We’d rather them be pro us than not, right?”
“Yeah, I guess so. I don’t feel real good about any of it,” Al yelled, and against everything telling him not to let go of the pistol, he released his grip, holding it just by one finger. He held up his other hand in a, “whoa everything is cool,” kind of manner.
Greg didn’t drop his weapon an inch. He knew nothing about these people other than they knew how to bandage a wrist. His previous experience wasn’t anything remarkable with outsiders, like the others that they’d had to hunt down and kill, or worry about another round of life-ending attacks. The only thing that made Frank feel any better watching a teenager staring him down with a machine gun, was that he didn’t have his finger on the trigger. Had he known Greg and the training better, then he would be aware that Greg was just using good trigger safety.
Clary slid his knife back into his sheath and looked around. He saw the tree stands that they’d mounted everywhere as far as the eye could see. He pointed to three bodies that were hanging with their legs ripped off. “You got any more losses that you know of other than that, or is that it?”
“Is that it? Are you kidding me? We don’t have shit here, and you’re asking if that’s it. Christ, we had like, ten able-bodied men here. Now we are down to six or seven at best. If there’s any more of this shit, we aren’t going to have anyone left,” Al yelled.
Clary shrugged. “We can help you clean up your loss. And we could probably get you some supplies if you are running low. For the time being, we have enough. I don’t know how much Ellie has told you.”
Al and Frank took in his appearance, weapons, and clothing. With the exception of his beard, which was dominating most of his face. Al said, “You guys are the ones on base; she already let that slip out. We don’t want to take your shit. We aren’t out for handouts and we aren’t trying to steal your stuff. We just want to keep doing what it is that we do. It’d be nice to know we have someone we can rely on if we need the help. This place can be a real bitch during winter. Especially when those temps get too low. We about froze last winter. We thought we had enough wood, and I swear to god it was less than five degrees for a good week. At least that’s what our thermometer in the truck said. Didn’t have enough wood to burn. The onl
y thing that saved us was boxes upon boxes of clothes that were in the truck.”
Clary went to talk, but screams erupted, this time coming from behind them. Yassa, who had caught some of his breath by now, reached down slowly, not wanting to give the wrong impression or make any worse of one going forward. Clary looked for some sort of urgency from the other two, who tucked their pistols and took off running.
Ellie yelled to the two confused men. “We need to help them, come on let’s go!”
Clary followed Ellie. He’d known her long enough to trust her, like anyone else he’d had on his team. He ran fast enough to keep up with her. “Where the hell are we going?”
“Their kids are this way. There’s an entire camp that we left when the guards said there’d be more dead coming than they could handle. They try to keep things quiet here, so these guns definitely weren’t on the list of things they wanted to use. That guy you were messing with, Yassa, he had a bow, knives, and hatchets, and was taking those things out. These people really don’t seem too bad at all. They could have just as easily let me pass by in the river. I don’t know how far I would have waited to get out, but when the rope hit me, seemed like a good enough time to get out. There were enough of those things following me that by the time I finally started to try to swim, I thought I’d put enough distance between me and them. But it doesn’t seem to be the case.”
Greg, who was having no issues keeping up, yelled, “So, you think that maybe the dead circled around the base? Were they hiding, or were they leaving?”
“They were told to run. They sleep in these old shitty Wal-Mart semis and they don’t seem like they have a lot going for them other than they stocked the hell out of it with rations from the store. They said they had taken enough crap to fill two semi-trailers. They had shoes and socks and everything for me when I came up.”
Clary and Greg both kept running, and when they got to the edge, they saw that this day would have very little upsides to it.
Al fell to his knees when he saw his son Tony on the ground. One of The Turned had him down, holding his head in both hands and smashing his skull into the dirt. Al wanted nothing more but to help him, but the terror racing throughout his body paralyzed him. Clary and Greg rushed past him. Tony was crying for help, and the dead was screaming, trying to put enough pressure on his head to smash it open and get the wonderful treat stuck on the inside.
Clary took aim when a hatchet whistled past him. He watched in awe as the blade disappeared until there was nothing but a handle sticking out of The Turned’s skull. It wobbled in place for a second as fresh brains dripped down its neck onto its shoulder. Yassa sprinted by, putting a cowboy boot up into its face, sending it sideways to bounce lifeless off of the ground.
Clary shook his head, looking back at Al, and bent down, picking him up off of the ground. “Get the fuck up, Al. That guy just did your job for you. What the hell are you thinking, doing that? For god’s sake!”
“If you saw them do what I’ve seen, you wouldn’t be able to do that either,” Al said.
“You don’t have the first fucking clue what I’ve seen, Officer Al. Before this shit started I was knee deep in horrible places like you can’t believe. You think just because the dead have made us the minority, that was what made things go bad? That there weren’t bad things for you to worry about before that? I’ve made a life of going places that would turn your stomach. Now, get your ass up, help us take care of these things. For Christ’s sake, go check on your boy. Get up and help!”
Clary waited for him to nod before running off. There were eight of The Turned trying to fight their way into the semi. Frank used his pistol, missing the first two shots but hitting the rest of the magazine dead on, hitting four of the ten. The rest quit punching holes through the thin metal doors, looking at the dead and at the meal with its hand outstretched towards them. They leaped towards Frank, knocking him back four feet. The air practically exploded from his lungs. Frank tried to get up, but the four were on top of him.
Clary began shooting, taking out the first two, but the other pair bent down without hesitation clenching a mouthful of meat in their mouths and tearing it from his arm and chest. Frank’s screams echoed above everything else. Greg sprinted past Clary, trying to get an angle that would allow him to help Frank. He had flashbacks of what felt like a decade ago, but had only been twelve months to the date. He flashbacked to Frank saving their lives, putting his second to their own, and getting bit in the process. Defeat washed over him and he unloaded a magazine on the two of them, knocking them off to where he could put headshots in them and finish them off.
Greg watched Frank as he pushed to his feet shaking and convulsing. When he spun around, he recognized no one or thing. He stared at his arm and Greg, who hadn’t really questioned it, knew that it was over. Frank bent down slowly towards his arm, mouth opened, and gripped it tightly in his teeth, pulling away and salivating from the sweet dessert in his mouth. He chewed slowly as tears of blood slowly made their way down his cheeks. You could practically see the color of his eyes turning to black as he, too, became a monster.
Ellie screamed, “No!” over his shoulder. Greg spun to see her watching this, not yet knowing that Frank was his name. Ellie tried to run past him, forgetting everything she knew. The day had left her on the verge of delirium; her emotions were so out of control, she was a threat to herself and others around her at the moment.
Greg gripped her around the waist, tossing her kicking and screaming up on his shoulder, doing his best to hold onto his own emotions. “Christ, we need to be cool here Ellie. You know what is happening here. You know what is going on here. This isn’t your first Turned that you’ve had to deal with, damn it!”
“I want it to be done! I don’t want to do this anymore! We need to stop, it isn’t worth it, damn it!” she screamed.
Greg slammed her down on the ground, practically throwing her. She wasn’t used to such actions by him and he’d never hit anyone or done anything physical to someone that didn’t deserve it first. “You want to quit? You want to just give up and be like a fucking ant waiting for them to come for you? We’ve been through so much; that is just stupid. You’re too smart. There’s too many people depending on you.”
“In case you haven’t noticed, Greg, we are alone! Everyone keeps dying. It doesn’t matter what measures we take, we just keep losing people!”
Ellie got up off the ground, wiping at the tears—not like she was embarrassed, but as if she despised and hated them. She walked up to Greg, shoving him backwards two feet. “You ever do that to me again, I’ll kick you in the balls so hard you’ll never worry about girls again!”
Greg held up his hands, walking forward, and took her in a hug. “I'm sorry, Ellie. I wasn’t trying to be a dick, but there’s so few left that I can’t stand to think of one of the few left not being there for me to rely on. Shaun leaving, Patrick gone, Aslin, McQuaig… Fuck, it hurts just to think of all the shit we’ve lost, and that’s been in, like, a few weeks. We can’t take too many more hits like that, or there really will be just a few of us left.”
Ellie wiped her eyes on his shoulder, backing up and taking her rifle. The dead were gone and Clary was standing at the side of Frank, just before the full turn was allowed to happen. He leveled a pistol that would have looked like a cannon in anyone else’s hands, but in his looked like a gun you would have kept in your legging in the wild west. He fired one shot without hesitation and blew the side of his head off.
Clary watched as Al ran to his son, pulling up his sleeves, looking at his arms, his chest, his neck—everywhere to ensure that there was no bite or scratch marks. The only wound he saw was a deep gash on the rear of his head from a stone that The Turned had been slamming his skull into. He ripped off his shirt, cutting the sleeve and wrapping it around his head. “Mike? Mike, where are you? Where are you?” he yelled.
Al looked around wild-eyed, trying to find their lone doctor. Yassa pushed the doors open to the semi whe
n the gunfire had stopped and the immediate threat of the dead were gone. Allen was curled up in the rear of the truck with the others, doing their best to hide. When he saw Yassa, he ran forward, optimistic that the quick firefight had gone their way. “Is everyone all right? Is everyone safe? Where’s my dad? You know Frank, right? Well, where is he?” he asked, talking at a mile a minute.
Yassa looked around the clearing, seeing him on the ground. He opened his mouth to say something, but was void of anything that would be appropriate or make the teen feel better. Loss was something that everyone took differently, and he was confident that Allen was going to get a very quick lesson in how he was going to handle that. He nodded towards where his father lay and Allen leapt down out of the semi, leaving the other teens that had been hiding behind.
Allen smiled for a second when he saw the dead at the foot of the semi doors. That small hope burnt away when he saw his father on the ground, and what he could only assume were his brains another ten feet from where he was lying. Allen took two steps before he dropped to the ground, burying his hands in his face. “Why? He was all I had… He was all I had! He didn’t never hurt no one. He always wanted to help—he just wanted what was right for others. Why, damn it? Why, Yassa, why?!”
