by Kirk Allmond
"Then you know I can take you," replied Marshall calmly. The two men were standing almost chest-to-chest now.
"You're smaller than me, but maybe you can provide me some entertainment before I kill you,” Jerome said with a smirk. He nudged past Marshall, hitting him roughly in the shoulder. Marshall remained solid as his shoulder collided with Jerome’s, and he did not even budge at the impact. Jerome then shouted out, “Billy Joe! Let the men know there's a challenge for leadership of Legion!" Jerome walked out of the room, maniacal laughter trailing after him.
Chapter 30
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“Alone. Yes, that's the key word, the most awful word in the English tongue. ‘Murder’ doesn't hold a candle to it and ‘hell’ is only a poor synonym. Salem’s Lot, chapter six part five,” the Voice whispered to her. Kris walked away from the boarded up window, hands behind her head, and tried to control her breathing. In and out, Kris. Keep it together, baby. You got this.
Keeping her senses open, she made her way over to the door and tried to open it. She wasn’t surprised when the handle didn’t budge, and she felt the hand of terror gripping at her throat. She pushed against the door. Something must have been wedged against the door on the other side, keeping it solidly in place. “Fuck,” she groaned and wrapped her arms around her body.
Her jacket was gone. She had been stripped down to her fatigues, tank top, and socks. And she was cold. Freezing, even. Kris couldn’t recall a moment in her life when she had been so cold and so utterly alone.
“Hello!” she shouted. “Is anyone there? Please! Someone help me!” Kris heard her voice echo inside the empty motel room, sweep out of the blocked door, and run down either side of the hallway. As her voice traveled, Kris followed the sound. Her voice danced through the front lobby, and as the sound swept against the floor, a word was being spelled out. “Sheraton.” She could see that every room had been cleared out like the one she was in right now and that every window had been boarded up. It looked like whoever cleared the rooms out was hoping to save the building and the furniture in it so that they could open up again later. Or the people that took her were expecting a lot of business.
There was no one in the entire floor. Or any other floor or room nearby. She really was completely alone.
“Oh God,” she moaned, leaning against the door and slowly sliding down to the floor. She knew that calling for help was a complete waste of time. When she was still in Nag’s Head, she had spent months without seeing another living soul, so why would here be any different? However, when she was in North Carolina, she was never alone because Mac was always by her side. Now Mac was gone, and Kris was left alone in the dark with no comfort but her thoughts.
That was the first time she had thought of Mac since the day she met Victor Tookes and his crew. Kris had experienced so much loss in such a short amount of time. Everything that she came to love was violently stolen from her, and death was happening right before her very eyes. First, it was Jeff, and then it was Mac. She could still see blood pouring out of her mouth as the zeds tore into her flesh, ripping her apart. Kris was too slow to save her and too slow to fend them off.
Kris missed Mac’s presence, her smile, and her perfect way of cutting through the bullshit. She missed her touch, her embrace, and her kiss. Kris was an incomplete circle. Yin without yang. It truly had become her against the world just as she thought she had found a new home. New beginning. New life. “A new start, that’s the thing I need to give me new heart. Half a chance in life to find a new part - just a simple role that I can play,” the Voice sang.
Kris pulled her legs in close to her body and fought to keep the terror at bay. However, as the tears started to fall from her eyes, she felt her body shaking. Where was she? She wasn’t anyone important or noteworthy, so why was she here? Maybe one of the supers from four floors up had grabbed her once she passed out. She had passed out, hadn’t she? Kris wracked her brain but couldn't form a single coherent thought among the terror in her mind.
She had to get out of this box. Kris needed to see sunlight. Immediately, she got to her feet and ran over to the boarded up window. Kris tried to get her fingers under the board to pry the wood free, but the wood was nailed into the walls so tightly that it wouldn’t move. “Please! No, no, no!” she screamed as she violently tried to pull at the wood. She pounded her fists against the wood again and again and again until she couldn’t feel her hands anymore. Hysteria was ripping through her as she fell to the floor again, bringing her knees up to her chest, and Kris, feeling completely beaten, sobbed into the darkness.
-----
It took nearly ten minutes of agonizingly biting down on Reggie's wallet before Tookes could think somewhat clearly. As soon as the nerve endings in his back had stopped telling his body his back was on fire, frozen, and buried in magma all at the same time, his thoughts returned to Kris.
He scanned out as far as he could, looking for any sign of her. His strength had grown pretty substantially over the last couple of weeks. Once again, he was left to wonder if his increased abilities were the result of use or of continued exposure to zombies. There was no sign; he couldn't catch any trace of her aura as far as he could see.
The train was moving steadily but slowly south through downtown Atlanta. The track-clearing device was destroyed. The bulk of the yellow digging arm was laying beside the track in a mangled mess about three miles behind them. They still had the plow on the front, but every intersection they'd come to was blocked by traffic. At the last intersection, there had been an overturned tanker truck. The driver of that truck had been hauling some sort of caustic liquid. The tank had ruptured when the truck crashed, spilling thousands of gallons of chemical over the nearby cars, people, and earth. There were dozens of skeletons in the area; all of the bones looked slightly melted. Skulls were flattened where they lay on the concrete. Long bones drooped in the middle, and the rib cages were crushed almost flat. There was no trace of flesh on any of the bones.
That intersection had taken almost half an hour to get through, slowly pushing the truck, then backing up and pushing again, trying to get the tanker to spin out of the way, rather than just being pushed along in front of them. Shelton was being extra careful in an attempt to avoid further damage to the heavy plow mounted to the front of the engine until they could stop to make repairs. The stop in Centennial Park had taken about two hours.
Victor struggled to stand up. He slid himself backwards off the table he'd been laying on. When his feet were on the floor, he pushed up off the table. Fresh waves of pain shot through him.
"Mister Tookes, there isn't much skin on your back. You should lie still while it grows back," said Reggie.
"Sorry, Reggie. Kris is missing. They've taken her, and we have to find her," Tookes said. The words he'd heard so many times since this started echoed through his mind: If not you, who? If not now, when?
Victor walked slowly, stiffly towards his compartment. Every step shot pain up his exposed back. The thought of putting a shirt on was more than he could bear, but even with electric heat running, it was cold on the train. Stepping outside between cars took his breath away. Dust and grit from the tracks stung the exposed muscle, and the cold air felt like daggers digging into his flesh. He knew that he didn't have the strength to contact Kris, so she had to be pretty far away. Max was his only choice to find her.
Victor had sworn an oath not to involve Max in anything having to do with zombies. He'd promised himself he would spend his life sheltering the small child from the atrocities of the world. However, this was Kris—a living, breathing person. When he got to his cabin, he slid the door open and looked down at Max. He was sitting by himself, playing Lego Batman on an XBox and fifty-inch TV.
"Max, I need your help," he said. "Do you think you can talk to Miss Kris for me? She's lost, and I need help to find her."
"Sure, Dad. Do you want me to talk to her now?" he asked.
"Please. If you can contact her, we need to know where she
is so Miss Leo and I can go get her."
-----
“Hello?” The voice was faint, but it sounded very familiar. “Miss Kris?” It was Max. “My daddy is here. He wants to know if you know where you are. He sounds very worried.”
“Max?” she replied and then said to herself, “Fuck me, there’s hope.” “I’m in a Sheraton hotel somewhere. I can’t see anything, and I’m alone. The only thing I know is that there’s an ocean close by and that it’s not as cold here as it was in Atlanta. They took my jacket and my shoes, and I don’t know why I’m even here.”
“Daddy says not to worry. He and Leo are going to come get you. He wants to know if you can hear him if you listen very hard. He’s going to talk now.”
Kris inhaled deeply, trying to focus on her heart like she always did to center herself. Strong and steady. THUMP THUMP. THUMP THUMP. She waited. Two minutes passed, and there was nothing but silence. “Max, I don’t hear anything.”
“He says to tell you that means you’re not anywhere in Georgia. He says if you were in Florida, it would be warmer, so he thinks you’re either in North Carolina or Alabama, because the zombie that took you wouldn’t be strong enough to carry you and Laura more than a couple hundred miles.”
“Tell him that I know I’m not in North Carolina. I know the smell of the ocean there, and this is not it. But I’ve been wrong before... Max, you’re such a great kid, you know that?” If she was anywhere near the boy, she would have scooped him up and hugged him.
Outside her realm of thought, she heard the front lobby door to the motel open up, and two pairs of boots walked across the carpet and headed in her direction. “Shoot. Max, I gotta go. Someone’s coming. I don’t know if you can listen in to conversations from far away, but try very hard to listen, okay, buddy? Make sure you tell your daddy everything.”
The boots were getting closer to her, and as Kris listened, she didn’t hear a heartbeat between them. Her mind’s eye told her that one of them was the same man that was in the room four floors above her from Atlanta. The other one was a younger man that Kris didn’t recognize. Standing up, she tried to pull herself together and wiped the tears from her eyes just as the boots reached the outside of the door. She heard them slide something heavy across the carpet, and one of them reached for the handle of the door and turned it. The door popped opened with a creak, and light from the hallway spilled into the room; Kris brought her hand up to shield her eyes from it as a blond-haired man stepped into the room, looking smug.
“Looks like Sleeping Beauty finally decided to join us!”
“Fuck you,” Kris spat, feeling a new sense of purpose.
“My, my, my! Such words, Kris.” The man clicked his tongue and shook his head. “Not very nice of you to be that way, and we’ve only just met.”
“I don’t care who you are. Let me go, you prick.”
He laughed as he stepped into the room. Kris took one-step back in return, and now her back was against the plywood window. She had nowhere else to go. He took another step, and Kris noted that he was taller than her by six to eight inches. It was difficult too not feel intimidated by him as he stood right in front of her. With a slow inhale, she kept her eyes locked on his. No fear, Kris. No fear. The man smiled, and it made Kris’s skin crawl. The man wore flesh, but any ounce of “human” had been drained from him. He leaned down slightly, and his face was right in front of hers now.
“What I need from you is very simple, Kris,” he said. “Where is Victor Tookes going? What are his plans?”
She felt a hard blow on the exterior of her dome of silence. It felt like someone was taking a sledgehammer to her thoughts. Panic started to rise in her again, and she redirected her attention back to her heartbeat.
“I don’t know,” she said. Everything inside her screamed to drop her eyes and look away from him, and she struggled to maintain that eye contact. He was powerful. Strong. She had never encountered someone like him before, and for whatever reason, she could feel herself longing to tell him everything he wanted to know.
He smirked and said, “Oh, Kris, I know you’re lying. You’re such a bad liar.”
The hammer came down on her dome again. She cringed in pain as she felt a crack form in the dome.
“I told you that I don’t know,” she said again and pulled back into the thoughts of her heartbeat. If he gets in, then everything that they are fighting for will be over. Every death made worthless. You know that they’re the hope. Believe in that hope, Kris. Believe in yourself.
The next blow to her dome knocked Kris to the floor, and she moaned in pain. The blond man laughed again, took her by her arm, and roughly lifted her to her feet. He grabbed her chin and locked eyes with her again.
“I’m not going to ask you again.”
Kris spat in his face in a last ditch effort. “Fuck you!”
He snarled and again, the hammer came down on her, and Kris screamed. “We have always held to the hope, the belief, the conviction that there is a better life, a better world, beyond the horizon. As said by Franklin D. Roosevelt.” The Voice was a gentle whisper above her pain. It gave Kris something to hold onto as the pain tore through her mind and down her spine. She could hear a song forming in her mind. A beautiful song burst forth in Kris’s thoughts as her dome cracked and shattered. The blond man tried again to get into her thoughts, but the song blocked him, and he was drowned out by the music. Where was the song coming from? Kris didn’t have time to think about it as she was hit with sudden inspiration. “Exploding head syndrome is a parasomnia condition that causes the sufferer occasionally to experience a tremendously loud noise as originating from within his own head. It is usually described as the sound of an explosion, roar, gunshot, loud voices, or screams, a ringing noise, or the sound of electrical arcing (buzzing),” the Voice reminded her. “Take that, Kris, and use it in his mind. I can’t keep singing much longer.”
Kris took all the strength she had left in her and re-created her dome. She pushed it outward, wrapping it around the blond man’s head, and she screamed into the space. She projected all of her fear, her pain, and her hope into that scream. The man dropped to the floor like a rock and began to shake violently, his eyes rolling back into his skull. A gurgling sound came from his mouth, and spit began to foam at the corners of his lips. Kris maintained the dome around his brain and could feel the organ shaking from the sound.
The other man ran in, dragged the blond man from the room, and shouted at Kris, “This isn’t over, you bitch!”
The man slammed the door behind him, and she heard the bolt lock in place. There was the sound like a back swing of a whip followed by a WHOOSH, and once again, Kristina Thompson was alone.
Chapter 31
Legion Part 2
As Marshall waited in the room with the gunslinger and Billy Joe, he collected his thoughts and wondered how he was going to get out of this. His father stood silently by his side with Harley at his feet. The stillness of the room made the two Legion members uneasy, and they shifted their weight from side to side. The silence stretched on forever.
Billy Joe spoke up first.
"Jerome's going to kill you," he said. It wasn't boastful or arrogant; it was a simple statement of fact.
"Maybe he will,” Marshall said. “He was going to kill me either way, but at least now I have a chance.”
"Not really," said the gunslinger with a shrug. "He's dismantled thousands of zombies by hand. He can throw a car like it’s a toy, and bullets just bounce off of him.” The man paused, looked Marshall in the eye, and added, “He is invincible."
As always, Marshall considered his next words before he spoke. "Someone has to stand up for what's right," he said. "There aren't many humans left, and those that are are mostly led by guys like Jerome. Might doesn't make right. What's right and wrong hasn't changed, and what Jerome is trying to do to us is wrong. Just because there aren't laws anymore doesn't change the fact that a man has the right to make his own decisions."
&nb
sp; "Jerome takes care of all of us. We get a share of what food we have, and there's security in this building," said Billy Joe. “It’s a hell of a lot better than trying to survive this alone.”
"Maybe it’s time for us to start taking care of ourselves and stop relying on someone else."
Victor looked at his son and placed a hand on his shoulder. "You're a good man, Marshall. I'm proud of you," he said slowly.
"All right, let's get this over with,” the shooter said. “Jerome's always in a good mood when he kills someone. Follow me; they'll be ready by now."
He turned and opened the door. Marshall spoke one last time. "What's your name, Gunslinger?"
"Roland," he said as he walked through the door. Marshall, Victor, Harley, and Billy Joe followed him. Roland led them around the back of the office to a big open area in the middle of the store. Given the location, Marshall figured it used to be the flooring and window treatment portion of the store. There were dozens of men forming a large ring with Jerome standing in the middle of it with his shirt off. His muscles were well defined. He was lean and huge, and his smooth black skin glistened with sweat. His arms were the size of a normal man's thigh, and his stomach rippled like a washboard. He wore digital camouflage pants cut off just at the knee, a belt, and combat boots.
Marshall hadn't been cold since the day he was bitten, but aside from wearing shorts all the time, he wore lots of layers to hide just how big he was. Most men found it intimidating, something Marshall tried to avoid. Now he stripped his clothes off. He handed his fleece jacket, flannel shirt, and two t-shirts to his father, revealing his own set of muscles. Marshall was a study in human anatomy. There wasn't an ounce of fat on him; the outline of every muscle in his upper body was visible. He wore almost the same cut-off shorts as Jerome and work boots instead of combat boots. He cracked his knuckles, causing his arms to flex. The vein along the top of his bicep popped out as his arms swelled to the size of tree trunks. Marshall stood up fully and stretched his back. When he did, he revealed he was exactly the same height as Jerome.
