The tension and lack of electricity turned the hours into years. In the cabin-fever insanity that ensued, it almost seemed better for something to happen just to get it over with. How did the kidnapped neighbors fare? Had the raiders killed them—or worse? Amanda pushed the thought out of her mind. She had her own family to worry about.
Monday. No work, of course. Would she ever return to the office?
That afternoon, after returning from checking on a few of the neighbors, Amanda sat down to listen to the news on the radio. “I must be a masochist,” she muttered as she reached for the earbuds.
A man’s voice came from outside.
She crept to the window, where she peeked between the blind slats. A tall, fit blond man in glasses and casual clothing stood on the sidewalk. He waited for another man, who knocked on the neighbor’s door. No one had seen that neighbor since Friday morning.
The man returned to the sidewalk. He had tan skin, black hair, and a goatee. He was slightly taller than his companion and wore jeans, sunglasses, and a leather jacket. The two exchanged words, then the dark-haired man pointed to Amanda’s house.
Amanda’s eyes narrowed. She reached for the bat.
While the blond waited, his friend strode down her walkway. His knock echoed. “Hello? I’m here to help, but I need your help first. I’m not going to hurt you, I promise. Hello? Is anybody there?”
A door in the rear of the house slammed. Denver and Taylor stalked down the hall, arguing.
“Shh!” Amanda hissed.
The kids went silent as they hurried over. “What is it?” Taylor whispered.
“Get your weapons. We have to be ready.”
Denver squinted between the lower slats. “Who are they? They look familiar somehow.”
“Maybe they were on TV,” Taylor responded.
“Yeah, but a lot of people have been on TV.”
“We’ve wasted enough time,” the knocking man told his cohort, who joined him on the porch. “Somebody may have already broken into the truck and stolen the water.”
“Perhaps we should return to the vehicle and await assistance?”
“Maybe. It’s too bad. These people need help.”
“As do we.”
The black-haired one turned back to the door. “If you can hear me, we can help you.”
Something about the pair, as if . . . as if they handle situations like this every day. Capable described the impression they gave. Still, strangers were strangers.
“Maybe they really are here to help.” Hope shone in Denver’s eyes.
“Maybe,” Amanda murmured. But what could these men do? They had no army, no weapons. How could they stand against the raiders and cannibals?
The visitors moved off down the sidewalk. Then their attention snapped rightward, toward the Nelsons’ home. The next moment, they hopped over the neighbors’ hedge and took cover.
Across the street, a woman emerged from the bushes. Jennifer!
Denver started, but Amanda put a hand on her back. “Shh.”
Jennifer looked even more out of it now. Black sludge still dribbled from her mouth. She meandered through the picket-fence gate, onto the sidewalk.
Behind her, a window in the Nelsons’ house opened. Zander leaned out. Amanda bit back a gasp.
Taylor grabbed Amanda’s arm. “Mom—”
“I know.”
Zander climbed out the window.
“No,” Amanda breathed. “Get back inside!”
Jennifer swung about to stare at her son. Mouth open, he gawked at her.
The men hiding behind the shrubs split up, with the blond jogging stealth-style parallel to the street.
The remaining guy, apparently the one with the leadership role, stood. “Get back in the house, kid! That’s not your mom. Now!” He stepped over the hedge and onto the sidewalk. Clapping, he called, “Cannibal! Come get me!”
Jennifer took a wary step toward him and away from Zander.
“See?” Denver hissed. “He’s trying to help. Can’t we help him?”
“I don’t—”
Denver scooted toward the door. Amanda reached but missed.
“Denver—”
She whipped it open. “Hey, you! Come here!”
“Are you stupid?” Taylor blurted as she grabbed the dandelion weeder / spear.
Swallowing a choice bit of profanity, Amanda hurried to the door. “Spread out. Get ready to—to defend yourselves.” What am I doing!
If Amanda stood back, the kitchen window to the left of the door provided a view of the scene outside. The black-haired man eased toward the escape Denver provided. Not until Jennifer dropped to all fours in that appalling lope did he head for safety. Wincing, he kept his left arm wrapped about his torso as he jogged toward Amanda’s porch.
In the Nelsons’ yard, Zander climbed back into the house, his attention on something to the left.
“Oy! Here!” the blond called, pushing out of the Nelsons’ bushes. He tossed a—a yard gnome? It shattered ahead of Jennifer.
“Come on!” Taylor encouraged.
The man charged in, then slammed the door behind him. Ignoring his rescuers, he pressed his eye to the peephole.
A thud reverberated through the door. The knob rattled.
He clicked the lock and shot the bolt.
“Turn around with your hands up,” Amanda ordered.
Hand still on the bolt, he turned. Confusion furrowed his brow. At this distance, Amanda could see bruises and scratches on his face. Taking in the defenders and their weapons, he raised his hands, his back against the door. “Easy now.”
“Don’t move,” Denver snarled as she raised her BB gun rifle.
“I’m not moving, see?” He lifted his sunglasses to reveal dark brown eyes.
“What do you want?” Amanda adjusted her grip on the bat.
“Ma’am, I’m here to help.” Calm filled his deep voice.
“Sure you are,” Taylor sneered. “We’re not stupid.”
The door handle rattled again and another thud came. The stranger looked out the peephole. “No, but you are trapped.”
“She’ll wander off eventually,” Amanda returned. I hope.
“Let me reach into my bag”—the shoulder satchel under his jacket—“and get my radio. My friend Albin can lure it—her—away. If you lend me your spear, I’ll subdue her. I won’t kill her.”
“No.” Amanda shook her head. “As soon as Jennifer leaves, you’re leaving.” She raised the bat an inch more.
“Jennifer?” the man repeated. “You know her?”
Explaining it to this invader didn’t seem right.
“I see.” He looked disappointed. “People like it—her—will kill anyone they encounter. She was going to attack her own son.”
“No.” Or would she?
“Listen—sorry, I didn’t get your name. I’m Nathan.”
“Amanda.” Shit! Reflex answer.
“Amanda, if I don’t stop her, she will hurt people. If she bites you, you’ll become like her. You’ll attack your loved ones.”
No. No. “She’s just sick. It’s a drug or illness—”
“It’s infecting people.”
“Then the government can quarantine them until . . . until they—”
“Mom,” Taylor urged in frustration, like she always did before an argument. “Chas said he saw video of them killing people. The Army’s shooting them!”
“Zombies,” Denver confirmed.
“Worse. Trust me.” Nathan winced.
“Mom, we should listen to him.” Taylor lowered her spear.
“Taylor—”
“Amanda.” Nathan raised his hands again. “We came here to bring supplies, but our truck suffered two flats—”
“Mom.” Denver turned to Amanda, pleading gaze at full force. “We’re almost out of bottled water.”
“Denver . . .” Maybe he told the truth. His story did make sense. Amanda let the bat fall to her side. “Go ahead, Nathan. You can’
t be with those raiders if you helped Zander.”
He withdrew a walkie-talkie. “Albin, distract the cannibal.”
“If you are certain.”
“H-here.” Taylor offered her spear to him.
He received it. “Thank you; this is excellent.”
After squinting through the peephole again, Nathan opened the door. He swung around the frame. Jennifer, now at the sidewalk, had her back to him as the blond—Albin—distracted her.
Nathan closed in.
Taylor gasped. “Now I remember! He was on TV. He and his friend—”
“Fought terrorists!” Denver finished, eyes wide. “They are the Good Guys!”
Outside, Nathan chambered the weeder, ready to swing.
“Jen!” Jeremy’s voice rang from across the street. He charged around the corner of his house. “Get away from my wife!”
Nathan halted, spear still poised.
“Honey?” Jeremy eased toward her, hands out. “Come into the garage.”
She stopped and watched him.
“Come on back, Jennifer. We’ll get you help.” Sorrow filled his entire being.
Jennifer took a faltering step in his direction.
“That’s right.” Jeremy forced a miserable smile.
Then she dropped to all fours.
Nathan cocked the weeder like a bat. “Hey!”
Jeremy retreated to the knee-high picket fence. Jennifer lunged. The fence tripped him, sending him onto his back. Jennifer’s swipe missed his throat by a hair. Her momentum carried her into him.
Nathan jumped the fence. As he landed, he swung the weeder. It crashed into Jennifer’s back. This grounded her, but in an instant she rolled onto all fours, ready to leap.
The blond man joined Nathan, a rake in hand. The two garden tools caught Jennifer on the back of the head. The picket fence hid the severity of the attack, but it still drew a wince from Amanda.
The newcomers backed up a pace but kept their weapons ready.
Amanda growled as she gripped the bat. A coil of rope she’d been intending to string up for vines to crawl up lay amid the shoes beside the door. She snatched up the line. “This is getting out of hand. Stay here, girls.”
Jeremy rushed toward his wife.
Nathan stepped between them, holding the distraught husband at spear-point.
Amanda dashed toward the scene. “Jeremy,” she barked. On the ground, Jennifer lay unconscious. Blood poured from beneath a flap of skin the strikes had sheered from her skull. Damn it, maybe I made a mistake with these people! “Don’t touch her. The blood—”
“She’s my fucking wife!” Jeremy roared. “They killed her!”
“She is functional,” Albin related in a matter-of-fact tone. He gestured to Amanda’s rope. She tossed it to him, then he began tying a loop.
“Functional?” Jeremy hauled back his fist—
Amanda grabbed his arm. “She attacked you!”
“W-we love each other.”
Nathan eyed him. “She doesn’t understand love anymore.”
“You don’t know that! Have you seen anybody like this hurt people they loved? Well?”
“I never waited to experiment, but I can recognize danger.”
Meanwhile, Albin slid the rope loop down the rake handle and around Jennifer’s neck. Like . . . like a dog. And like a dog, she would attack. Amanda moved to tie her hands with the rope-end that hung from the noose. “Jeremy, this is the first time she’s gotten out of the garage?”
“Yes.”
Albin ran the rope around one of the porch’s brick pillars. He tied it around a nearby sapling.
“Jeremy.” Nathan pointed the weeder at the man. “You can keep her in your garage or barn or wherever you please, but it’s your fault if she hurts anyone.”
Amanda looked from the unconscious wife to the devastated husband. “She might have attacked Zander, and she did attack you. These guys saved you both. If they hadn’t shown up, well . . .”
“You would be mourning two family members,” Albin announced, apparently nonplussed by the situation.
A white SUV tore around the corner. It screeched to a halt beside Amanda and the others. Carolyn jumped out. “What’s going on? Who are these people?”
Amanda stepped up. “They saved Zander and Jeremy. They came to help us.” If only they’d come in time to save Jacinda.
Trusting these two seemed like a long shot. Still, she could hope. And where there is life, there is hope.
About L.C. Champlin
Writer, traveler, adventurer. Lover of all things Geek and Dark. I admire villains, antagonists, and rogues more than a little. They really do have more fun, and they can teach us important life lessons.
I write fiction because the characters in my head have too much attitude to stay in my skull, I want to see the world through different eyes, and I want to live life through different souls.
I write zombie apocalypse/horror/thriller books because it's in the dark that we see a person's true character. Plus, who doesn't like shooting zombies?
Check out my site lcchamplin.com for book updates, and blog posts about villains, weird science, and more.
11
Airborne
by Arthur Mongelli
Kristen stepped toward the counter with her boarding pass in hand. She had been listening to her mother arguing with her father through the phone for nearly five minutes.
“Mom. Mom. Mom, I have to go!” she called into her Iphone. “I'm about to get on a plane, Mom. I have to hang up.”
“What's that, Kris?” her mother replied.
“I have to go, I'm about to board.”
“Oh, well, I wish you didn't always rush me off the phone. It'd be nice to get to talk for more than a few minutes at a time, you know.”
Kristen's eyes rolled back in her head at the comment. It seemed like every time she spoke with her mother she got to speak less and less. Usually she was forced to patiently listen to an hour of what TV shows her parents had been watching and what meals her mother had prepared. Between telling the same stories repeatedly and her short temper, she was beginning to think that her mother was suffering from the onset of Alzheimer's. Still, despite it all, her mother always managed to throw some guilt her way.
“I know, Mom. I'm sorry. I'll be back in Boston this evening, we can talk then.”
“Okay, Kris. Safe travels.”
Kristen looked up from the phone and met eyes with the counter clerk at boarding. The woman's eyes shined with pleasantry, tinged by a subtle hint of annoyance.
“I'm sorry!”
“It's okay, I have a mother too.” the woman replied with a wink. “Boarding pass, please.”
Kristen tensed at the request. She held her breath as she handed the computer printout across the desk to the woman. Going AWOL was a cardinal sin in the military. It had been drummed into her head since basic training that desertion, abandoning your brothers and sisters, was one of the worst transgressions a soldier could make. She also knew that with everything going on, her absence mere hours before, would likely be insignificant if it was even noticed. In her haze of guilt, she pictured the airline attendant pressing a secret button under the desk and a handful of MPs swarming out to arrest her.
“Welcome, Ms. Harris. Please have a seat, we will start boarding by sections momentarily.”
Kristen let out the pent breath in a gasp and hoped the woman didn't notice. She stepped away from the counter and moved across to the wall of windows overlooking the tarmac. For what she thought would likely be the last time, she looked out across the city of San Diego. Numerous plumes of smoke crept skyward from the sun-baked city beyond the fences of the airport. She wondered, for perhaps the hundredth time since the day before, if she was making a huge mistake by leaving like this.
She had been operating in near complete panic for the past eighteen hours, since the orders came down. The civil unrest that had begun the day previous was steadily intensifying. The National Guard
was completely unprepared and had no time to recall its troops. The men and women that were available to them, on active duty, were spread too thin across the major cities. Their efforts had been largely ineffective. That's when the orders came down, when they called on the rest of the branches of the military to help quell the madness. Kristen knew that the orders were illegal. The military was prohibited from acting on American soil by the Posse Comitatus Act.
The fact that the orders had been given at all told her beyond a shadow of a doubt that things were not okay. She figured that once the troops were en route to the riots, they would get ordered to treat US citizens as enemy combatants. She knew that she could not follow that order if given and feared the penalty for that would be much worse than going AWOL. The only other reason she could think for troops getting sent in, was that some kind of coup was happening. Either way, it was not what she had enlisted for. She knew that she needed to get home to her family.
She looked at her boarding pass once more, reminding herself that she was seated in Economy, row 25. She concentrated on regulating her breathing as the feelings of panic started to creep in. She knew that people went AWOL all the time. As long as they weren't in active combat, the most that usually happened was that they got sent an inflated bill for gear that “Wasn't returned”. With the scene before her, San Diego in flames, she was worried that this was different. She worried that the penalties, in what might be a domestic war zone, might be much harsher. She also felt guilt for letting down her brothers and sisters in arms, but she would not, she could not raise arms against American civilians. She wondered if she could claim conscientious objector if her case were ever tried.
Any disabled persons, Military personnel, and people who have purchased an additional room seat may now board, squawked the intercom.
Kristen started forward but caught herself mid-stride, reminding herself that she was a civilian now. The last thing she wanted was to draw attention to the fact that she was deserting. She needn't have worried, as soon as the call for boarding began, the entire gathered crowd of nearly two-hundred people rushed the gate. For the first time, she noticed that the crowd around her wore faces of thinly masked fear. The attendant behind the counter shouted into the loudspeaker, but it was too late, the floodgates had been opened. The throng of panicked people surged down the boarding tunnel, past the captain and first officer, and onto the plane. Kristen followed behind the mob.
Undead Worlds 2: A Post-Apocalyptic Zombie Anthology Page 18
