by James, Jill
She bit her lip to stop a laugh from escaping. Four serious faces stared at her. Michelle reached out and ruffled little Dylan’s hair. “Sorry. How is the Rogue Vantage doing today?”
Smiles broke out across white, tan, and brown faces. Her friend, Emily was always sprouting off that the zombie apocalypse allowed everyone to start anew. She could play along if her boys wanted to sound like a ‘gang.’ Although, with the oldest being ten years old and the youngest just turned six, they weren’t too tough of a gang. Her breath still caught in her throat at the memory of these four kids being the only ones left at this RV storage facility after a deadly virus took all the adults and everyone else just left. Her eyes watered with the thought of the children living with dead bodies too heavy for their young arms to move and dispose of properly.
She cheered up as they pulled her toward the eating area of the compound with shouts of breakfast and food and now. Today, Dylan stayed by her side as the other three rushed to get a place in line. Over their heads she could see Beth Evans and Miranda Stevens had food duty today. Her gaze traveled over Beth’s pregnant stomach as the girls moved back and forth to serve the group. The stomach seemed to have ballooned overnight. Last month Beth had started borrowing bigger clothes from some of the ladies and now she looked like the scavengers would need to find a maternity store for her.
Someone bumped into her from behind and she knew without looking that it was her friend, Emily. She’d know that stomach anywhere. If there was anyone bigger than Beth at the moment, it was her friend who was at least a month behind the young girl in her pregnancy.
Turning, she looked down. Even knowing what to expect she still gasped. “You look like you’re going to give birth any day.”
“Thanks a lot,” Emily said, lightly smacking her arm. “I still have months to go.”
“No way,” Dylan put in. “You’ll explode by then.” He spread his arms and made the sound of an explosion.
Michelle held her breath as Emily’s eyes watered up and she started crying. “Oh, sure. Pick on the fat lady.”
“Crying? There’s no crying in the zombie apocalypse. Zombie hunters don’t cry,” she said, hoping to turn the unusual mood around.
Emily started laughing and crying at the same time and Michelle let out her held breath. “Maybe you’ll have the first triplets or quads of the apocalypse.”
“Bite your tongue,” her friend said. “No fucking way.”
“Yeah, no fucking way,” Dylan parroted.
At first she’d been appalled by the boys’ behavior and language but she’d learned quickly if she ‘mothered’ too much she’d lose them. They were the first generation of AZ, after the Z virus. Somehow, worrying about cussing and minor scuffles seemed ridiculous when you had bigger problems to worry about, like being some zombie’s lunch or how to have enough food for dinner.
Laughing, they all got their meals and moved to a picnic table. Dylan stayed by her side and Emily sat across from them. The rest of the boys scattered to eat with friends. She looked around and sighed.
“I never would have thought I’d miss The Streets of Brentwood mall so much.”
Emily stuffed food in her mouth, swallowed, and looked around. “Pretty bad, when eating at a burger place with folding chairs and tables, seems like eating at Top of the Mark in comparison.”
She wouldn’t know anything about Top of the Mark, San Francisco’s premier restaurant. It would have been beyond Mitch’s paycheck to go there without some serious dollar stretching ... for months. Michelle stared at the gray cinderblocks making up the walls of their haven and sighed. “I just miss being able to see for miles around. All I see all day long is motor homes and gray walls.”
“You could go outside, you know,” Emily threw out there with an evil twinkle in her eye.
“Not me. No way. You zombie hunters can go risk your lives. The ride here was scary enough after we blew up the old compound. Maybe I’ll paint some hills and trees on the walls. That’s as close to ‘outside’ as I’m getting.”
“Chicken,” Emily said.
“Bawk, bawk,” Dylan added.
“Traitor,” she murmured, pulling him in close to her with an arm wrapped around his shoulders.
“Need I remind you, you jumped off that fence and ran outside fast enough when I got here,” Emily said.
She shuddered. “I thought you were dead. That’s different. If I had been thinking clearly, I wouldn’t have done it at all.”
“Maybe you were thinking clearly for once,” Emily mumbled.
“Mr. Teddy. Mr. Teddy,” several young voices called out.
She turned in her seat to see Teddy Ridgewood and several other men returning from zombie hunting and killing for the morning shift. As usual, the enormous, African-American man was covered from shaved head to boots in blood and gore. Sighing, she got up from the table. As if blood and gore could disguise broad shoulders, flat abs, and a face that got her libido going in seconds flat. She swallowed and looked away. She wasn’t going there—ever again. Even if Teddy was a dark chocolate mountain of yumminess. Sex appeal and lust meant nothing when a man put duty before you. For him, it wasn’t even duty. The man acted like hunting zombies was a video game with infinite lives. She shook her head. Nope, one and dead. Or undead, and then dead. A knot grew in her throat. Never again, she vowed silently.
“Laundry duty sucks sometimes,” she mumbled to Emily.
“You could wait until they’re all undressed,” her friend said.
She stared at the other woman. “No way. Do you know how hard blood and guts is to get out if I wait for them to finally change clothes, and to remember to bring the dirty ones to me? Impossible, that’s what.” She turned to walk away.
“By all means, go strip Teddy out of his clothes,” Emily said, with what sounded suspiciously like a laugh covered by a fake cough.
Her face heated up to flame temperature. “I have to get all the clothes.”
“Of course you do. I see you rushing to get Morales’ too,” Emily yelled in a sarcastic tone as Michelle stomped off. Sometimes it sucked to have a friend who could read her so well. She needed to work on her poker face.
***
Teddy Ridgewood sat on the wooden bench, trying to pry off his gore-covered boots.
“Damn it,” he muttered as he pushed one boot with the foot of the other. He couldn’t afford to lose another pair. His size fourteen boots were darned near impossible to find. He’d been in sneakers for weeks until they’d found this pair at a workman’s clothing store.
Looking up, he spotted Michelle Greggs. The woman was a firecracker for sure, always yelling at him for his dirty clothes. As if she thought they could kill the skinbags all day and come home looking as clean as if they’d been to the office, writing reports or something.
He tried to be extra nice to her, but something about him always set her off. He smiled every time he saw her. He talked to her quiet-like, knowing his big booming voice startled some women. He spent time with her boys, which was no biggie. The little ones tugged at his heart, making it ache at the thought of them here all alone for months. A chill went up his spine at the thought of the world they were inheriting.
But the woman didn’t crack a smile at him. Although, he did catch her staring at him at odd times. He would glance back and she would whip her head around fast enough to wrench her neck something awful.
“Mr. Ridgewood,” she announced as she approached. Her hips swayed in a feminine way that made his hands itch to explore, even with her ‘don’t touch’ airs. Her face could have graced the Madonna as a statue in a chapel. Her voice was sweet, when it wasn’t yelling at him. Sometimes he sat out of view just to hear her talk to her boys with those soft, dulcet tones.
She snapped on Latex gloves and he jumped in his seat. Miss Emily had explained that they were an idiosyncrasy,as if they all weren’t already infected, but they made him feel dirtier than the blood, guts, and gore alone. Her gaze raked over him and heat cove
red his face. He lowered his head even though the red wouldn’t show on his dark cheeks.
“Sorry, Mrs. Greggs. I know you got things to do. Seem to be having trouble with my boots.”
Michelle squatted down and started untying the laces.
It shouldn’t have been erotic in the least, having his shoes taken off like he was a child, but tell that to the erection straining against the zipper of his pants. He stared at her glossy dark hair, pulled back into a ponytail he’d like to let loose and run his fingers through, and he imagined her all too easily in this position, and not for untying his shoes.
She stood and he realized his boots were off. The woman turned her back and held out her hand. “I need the rest of your clothes. I’ll try to save your boots, but I can’t make any promises.”
Peeling off his clothes, Teddy wondered, not for the first time, what she thought when she looked at him. Even if she hadn’t been such a petite woman, he would still have been large next to her. Even with his boots off, he didn’t believe she would reach much farther than his chest with the top of her head.
He’d never considered himself an overly modest man, but his time of being alone as the self-proclaimed King of Pittsburg had changed him. Being alone was a lot easier than being surrounded by people all day long in the small confines of the RV facility. Standing near Michelle and stripping was nerve-racking as well. He needed the time away from the yard each day before it started feeling like a prison.
At last, he was down to his boxer briefs, which he was able to leave on. Teddy grabbed a towel from the bench and wrapped it as far as it would go around his ample waist. He shot a quick glance to reassure himself that the erection was hidden. He pressed it down. Good enough.
Michelle turned around to stare him in the face and it returned to full attention. At least her glance seemed to stay on his face, at least most of the time. That glance did seem to wander to his chest a few times. Her cheeks were red and she seemed to search for words.
“I—I’ll have these ready by dinner.” She bent and picked up his boots. “These may take longer to dry.”
“I can clean them.” He reached for the boots and caught her hand instead. She pulled back so fast the clothes fell to the ground. They both reached for them, but she yanked them away.
Standing, he stepped back. “Thank you, Mrs. Greggs.”
“No problem, umm—umm Mr. Ridgewood.”
She strolled back to the laundry area, holding his boots in one hand and his clothes in the other with her arms straight out, as if they were contaminated with more than zombie guts.
Teddy shook his head and walked across the cracked asphalt to his motor home. He laughed and felt a smile break on his face. Just because it was the zombie apocalypse didn’t mean men had any better hope of understanding women than before the world went to hell in a hand basket, as his mother used to say. But he sure wanted to understand Michelle Greggs. Because for just a second there she’d looked at him as a man, a man she liked looking at, not as a nuisance.
A shower and a set of clean clothes later and he was ready to find his friend, Seth Ripley to see if he understood women any better than Teddy did.
Chapter Three
The Fruitful Harvest Church
Highway 4, between Antioch and Oakley
Canvas snapped in the constant wind. The moans of the Resurrected carried from the cages on the edge of the encampment. The tent filled with the cries of the captured women before a few well-placed slaps from the men surrounding them brought silence.
Billy Joe Bennett slid his leg down from the arm of the chair. Sitting up straight, he turned to the woman beside him.
“Is this all, Roberta?”
She nodded. “Yes, Reverend. A heavy march of the Resurrected has been through here. The men found this group in a broken-down car up the highway.”
He pushed off from the chair and marched to the sniveling group on their knees in the middle of the tent. Two men stood guard at the flapping entrance. The three young women were one of each—a blonde, a brunette, and a redhead. The fourth female had salt and pepper strands of hair covering her head and face in a tangled mess.
Reaching down, he grabbed the blonde’s chin and yanked her head up. Dark-blue eyes were the best feature in a plain face. His hand dropped away and he moved on. The brunette had promise, if her waist-length curls were any indication. He leaned down and grasped a silky handful. She moaned as he pulled her head back. The face of an angel glared back at him with the devil in her eyes. Good. He liked them with spunk. It made it so much fun to beat it out of them. He hated red hair, even his own, so he walked right past the last young woman huddled in a ball on the ground.
He placed himself in front of the last female. Shaking hands reached up and pushed the gray-speckled dark hair out of her face. A face that had lived a long lifetime with the lines and wrinkles to prove it stared back at him. The gentle face of a grandmother or beloved aunt.
“If you’re going to kill me, do it already,” she cried out.
Billy Joe took her hand and pulled her up. “I can’t kill you, for you have not sinned against me, old woman. I can only give you resurrection.”
“I don’t understand ...” she managed to get out as he pulled his knife, yanked her in close, and stabbed her in the chest.
The body fell to the ground, twitched a few times, and went still, her eyes glazing over in death. A hush filled the tent until a moment later she rolled over and rose with moans and a snapping of her jaw.
Cries of ‘hallelujah’ rang out from his group, along with the screams of the captured females sitting by the newly-risen as he wiped the blade on his pants.
Two of his men rushed over and restrained the woman, tying her hands behind her back and with some difficulty getting a gag into her mouth. They dragged her out of the tent as the younger women settled down into hysterical whimpers.
He grew light-headed as the blood rushed to his racing heart. The power of life, death, and resurrection had been placed in his hands by God. Only he could decide which was granted.
With a spreading of his arms, the women were grabbed and yanked to their feet. A glare at them and silence reigned again in his canvas cathedral. He turned and walked back to his chair, sitting and leaning against the high back, like a king on his throne. Bubbling laughter escaped him.
Pushing down the glee, he grew serious and turned his gaze on the sniveling females. It just reiterated his belief in the faults of the weaker sex. Females needed men to be in control. The world had been going in the wrong direction for too long. The influenza pandemic and the virus that raised the dead just reset the world, back to where it belonged.
“God sent a plague upon us. He wanted to cleanse the Earth of its evil. This church, Fruitful Harvest, is the new beginning. A return to the ways of our forefathers. A return to the right way. A return to man as the master and woman as the obedient servant, the bearer of his children, the submissive sitting at his feet, waiting to provide his every wish.”
He pointed to each of the young women. “You will each be chosen as a bride of the church, a bride of man, or one of the anointed Resurrected. I alone have this power. God has given me the right to choose your future path.”
Pushing away from the chair, he walked toward them. Their tears increased, music to his ears. He had been given the power of life and undeath. He stepped in front of the redhead. Grabbing her chin, he forced her to look at him.
“What is your name, woman?”
She glared at him and refused to speak.
In a split-second the knife was under her chin, piercing the skin, a bead of red running down the blade. “I will ask one more time, and then you will be joining the Resurrected. What is your name?”
Her throat convulsed as she swallowed. “April.”
His hand dropped and he slid the knife into the sheath on his belt. “See, that wasn’t so hard, was it? I’m sure this next question won’t be either. Are you a virgin? Think before you answer. If
you lie, you will not be resurrected, you’ll just be dead as your lies will be a sin against me.”
The young woman’s face turned beet red, bright enough to match her face. Her ‘yes’ was low, but he didn’t need it, her blush had proclaimed it loud and clear.
“Elias,” he called to a large, ugly man standing to his left. “I believe you are in need of a wife as Abigail proved infertile and joined the Resurrected ones. April is yours. Claim her and mark her as your wife and helpmate.”
The girl tried to pull away, but her meager strength was no match for the two men, the one holding her and the other now at her side. One held her wrists in his large hands as the man named Elias stepped up behind her and grabbed a handful of her long auburn hair.
The man pulled his knife from his belt and turned to the group. “I claim April as my wife and helpmate. I mark her with her shorn hair to show her fidelity and loyalty as a good wife.” The knife slid through her hair with ease and the man dropped handfuls to the ground.
Billy Joe grasped his hands in front of this mouth to hide his smirk. Good riddance. Her shining, copper-tinted hair was too much of a reminder of his whore-mother. Her glossy hair, red-painted lips, and skintight outfits as she strutted across the stage of his father’s steel and glass cathedral.
He pulled himself back to the present as Elias finished and the young woman was left with ragged and uneven tufts of hair, the luxurious tresses in a pile at her feet. Her whimpering cries filled the tent, but were soon drowned out from the ringing ‘amens’ from the church members.
Walking up to Elias, he placed his hand on the man’s shoulder. “Go with God and may you find your wife submissive and pure.”
“Go with God and may you find your wife submissive and pure,” echoed the congregation.
The large man grabbed the young woman by the arm and dragged her from the tent, her squeals and struggles ignored by the group.
