Taking It Back

by Joseph Talluto

  “Just glad to see I’m headed in the right direction. My name is John and this is Charlie. We’ve come from Coal City to let anyone still alive know they’re welcome to come live there if they want to. But you all seem to have a decent town here, people working to grow food and such. We’ll let you get back to what you’re doing.” I turned to walk away when the man grabbed my arm.

  “You ain’t with them, then?” His voice was a hushed whisper and the other men with him quickly looked around.

  “With who? You saw me and my friend come down the rails. Who do you think we are?” I was more than curious as I disengaged my arm.

  The men looked around again. “A group of about twenty came in at the end of the winter, looking for supplies and a place to rest. We obliged, them being the first people we’d seen for a while. Well, they had another notion, and we were overwhelmed in short order. They took our food, took our young women, shot a few who resisted, and made the rest of us work to keep them in food and supplies. They threaten to kill the kids unless we help them.” The man’s voice shook with anger as the other men nodded their agreement.

  The man continued. “They say they have a horde of zombies at their place that they’ll let loose on the kids if we don’t do things their way and then tie up the parents for the kids to eat.” The man hung his head. “We don’t have any weapons and we can’t leave. We’re trapped.”

  I thought about this for a second. Rock and a hard place, for these people. I made a decision. “Where is their base?”

  The man on the left, a shorter, heavyset man of around sixty said, “We don’t know for sure. They tend to head back in a northerly direction, so we figure they’re up that way, but the last guys to go looking came back as zombies.”

  “What protection do you have from the occasional zombie or three.?” Charlie asked.

  “We use garden tools, even though the group said they would protect us. The attacks have been less, lately, but there’s still one every other day or so.”

  My response was interrupted by the sound of a vehicle coming down the road at a high rate of speed. Charlie and I sidled into the store so as not to be seen. I could see Tommy slide out of the truck bed and work his way into the ditch by the tracks so he could see under the truck. Charlie opened a window up on the store and knelt down, aiming his rifle in the direction of the noise. I waited by the door to see what was going to happen.

  I didn’t have long to wait. A black truck barreled around the corner, screeching to a halt in front of the general store. The three men out front looked very scared and tried to keep their eyes down.

  The truck belched out four men, all in various clothing, most of it black. Two of the men wore t-shirts that had large skulls on them and the other two, teenagers, wore typical youth dress. All of them sported earrings and necklaces and all of them were wearing black leather jackets. I was reminded of the dead man we found at the farmhouse and the cold fire began to burn again. All of the men were armed with a pistol in their belts, ala Pancho Villa style, with two of the men carrying AK-47 variants. I was a little disappointed, since we wouldn’t be able to use the guns once we dealt with this.

  The leader of the group immediately started screaming at the men at the store. “What the fuck is going on? Whose truck is that? You know the goddamn rules, no fucking strangers! Do I need to make an example out of you, you old fuck?” The screamer was a man about twenty-five years old, with dirty blond hair and what I called ‘trouble eyes’. His tirade caused the men to flinch, but he didn’t notice the fist the oldest man clenched at being addressed by this punk.

  “No, sir.” came the reply.

  “I better not, you useless piece of shit. Boxer!” the leader called.

  A small specimen by the truck spoke up. “Yeah!”

  “Check out that truck. Tell me what you find.”

  “You got it, Van.” The little guy ran over to the truck, opened the door and brought up his rifle dramatically to cover the interior. I nearly laughed. I could see Charlie just shake his head in my peripheral vision.

  Van, the leader, shoved his nasty face into the oldest man’s face. “Where are the people who drove that truck?” No answer. Van‘s face got red and he pulled out his pistol and aimed into the face of the man next to him. “I don’t like to repeat myself, fucker. I’m counting to three, then I’m killing your friend and feeding him to the zombies. Got it? One…”

  I stepped out of the store and pointed my rifle barrel at Van’s forehead. “Two,” was all I had to say. Behind Van, the other two men were caught off guard and fumbled for their weapons. I could see Tommy coming around the black truck, his gun up and ready. Behind him I could see the inert form of Boxer on the tracks.

  To his credit, Van didn’t flinch. “I’ll still kill this fucker, unless you drop your gun, hero.” Van sneered at me.

  I pressed the barrel of the rifle into Van’s head. “What makes you think I’ll let you live one second after that gun goes off? Kill him, he’s nothing to me.” That earned me a panicked look from the man under Van’s gun.

  Van worked that one around in his head and I could tell he wasn’t good at math. “Boys! Shoot this asshole!” Van yelled to his men.

  Nothing happened. Van was becoming confused. Something was wrong, but he didn’t dare take his eyes off me. Behind him, Tommy had effectively disarmed his cohorts and they were kneeling on the ground, hands on their heads, mumbling threats I couldn’t hear.

  “Question for you, Van,” I said.

  “Fuck you.”

  “What comes after two?”

  Van’s eyes got wide and it finally dawned on him that he was going to actually die if he kept this up. He reluctantly lowered his gun and I used my left hand to take it from him. It was an engraved, ivory stocked Springfield .45. Very nice. I wondered who he stole it from. I passed it over to Charlie who came out of the store aiming his gun at Van as well. I figured Van’s eyes were going to pop out of his head if we offered up any more surprises. Resistance was the last thing he expected. Instead of tired, scared old men, he was suddenly facing battle-hardened veterans of the Upheaval. I’m sure had he suspected we were there, we would have had a more serious disagreement.

  I shoved Van out into the street where he landed unceremoniously in front of his men. He jumped up immediately, but I was ready and slammed a fist into his head, knocking him back face first against the truck door, denting the panel. Van slid down, holding his nose, which seeped blood through his fingers.

  I hunkered down in front of the two men and they stared hatred at me. “Howdy,” I said. “I need to know where your base is and if you tell me, I’ll let you go warn them. If you don’t, I imagine things will go badly for you.”

  “Fuck you,” the older of the two said. “We’ll kill your punk ass. Who the fuck do you think you are? We own this area which includes you.”

  I was unfazed. “Okay. The hard way it is.” I stood up and Charlie and I gathered up the weapons. I walked back to the men at the general store, and handed them the guns.

  “These are yours. Do what you want, but I would suggest you get everyone out of here. Head down the tracks and get to Verona. They’ll take you in.” Several people had wandered over from the fields and were standing in the distance.

  I addressed the people. “My name is John Talon. You people need to decide how you want to live. If you stay here, you’ll likely be killed by the group that has been terrorizing you or fall prey to the next gang that comes along. Verona is alive and so is Coal City. Take the tracks and move quickly.”

  I started to walk back to the truck, Charlie following with Tommy bringing up the rear. The old man called out, “What do we do with these guys?”

  I turned back and smiled at him. “They’re all yours.” I watched the people of the town surge forward and as I climbed into the cab of the truck, I could hear a high pitched scream as the people took their revenge against their oppressors.

  “Three,” I said to no one in particular.
Charlie chuckled and Tommy looked at me like I was nuts.

  18

  We found more of the same in Ransom with the populace being cowed by the group of renegades. Ransom had actually put up a fight against the group and had several people hanging outside town as an example to the rest. Another score to settle.

  Ransom had about three hundred or so people living in it and they were all looking for a way out. I pointed them in the direction of the tracks and when we pulled out, a long line of people and belongings was headed northeast. None of the gang showed up, so I imagine they were in for a surprise when they came back to a ghost town.

  Kernan was similar to Ransom with the exception that we managed to get into a little firefight with the representatives of the renegades. Charlie took a graze to his upper arm and I got nicked in the leg because I wasn’t bright enough to get myself fully under cover, but neither was serious. We killed four of the group with the remaining two beating a hasty retreat to the north. I came to the conclusion that we were not going to finish this unless we went after the rest of the gang, so after a brief powwow, it was decided that Charlie was going to take the survivors of Kernan over to Streator, if anything was left of it, and establish connections there. We did manage to find Tim Harlan, who was overjoyed to hear his brother was still alive.

  For Tommy and myself, it was time to go hunting. We had a pretty good idea where our quarry was, but it was still going to take some doing to find them and deal them a blow they would not forget. As Machiavelli once said, “If you must do injury to a man, it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared.” So it would be.

  I pulled out the map that had brought us this far and I outlined what we knew so far. “The farmhouse was about here,” I said, placing a small pebble on the map. “The group had extended its activity over these towns here.” I placed additional pebbles on Kernan, Ransom, and Kinsman. “Everyone says that the scumbags always went north in some fashion. Since most scumbags rarely show any incentive beyond really lazy, I’m going to hazard a guess that our little friends are probably here.” I pointed to a spot labeled LaSalle Lake Fish & Wildlife Area.

  “What’s there?” asked Tommy.

  “As far as I can tell, water. But without any serious intelligence or someone telling us where to go, we have to start somewhere.” I wasn’t sure, but I did have a gut feeling about the place.

  “Are we leaving in the morning?” Tommy wanted to know.

  I hesitated. “We may have to do this one at night.”

  Tommy stared at me. “Are you nuts? We never go out at night. The Z’s are always more active at night. It would be suicide!”

  I shrugged. “What choice do we have? We go in the morning, they’ll see us miles before we will see them. We at least know that they won’t be out at night, for the same reason we shouldn’t be, so we can move around without alerting anyone.”

  “Fine.” Tommy said grudgingly. “But I get the shotgun.”

  “Deal. But get some rest. We move out in 3 hours.”

  “Oh, like I’m gonna sleep now.”

  We moved out just as the sun was setting. It was the best time to be moving since it was hard for zombies’ vision to adjust between the light of the sky and the dark of the ground. With any luck, we would be past any problems before they could figure out where we were. We couldn’t find a vehicle to take us where we wanted to go, but we did manage to scrounge up a couple of usable bicycles. In all honesty, if I had to travel at night, I would rather have the bike. It was quiet, it was quick, and could go overland much easier than a car could. Besides, with the way my luck was running, we probably wouldn’t have been able to find anything better than a beat up Cutlass with a bad muffler and out of time cylinder.

  Tommy and I pedaled north and based on the map we had roughly ten miles to go, five miles north and five miles east. We were going to stick to the roads since we were not sure of the overland route and we really didn’t want to have to sidestep any natural barriers.

  I didn’t relate this to Tommy, but I had a dark suspicion that wherever we wound up, the local ghouls might be out in force because these yahoos had been tearing up the countryside for a while with their travels back and forth. Too much activity tends to cause zombie investigation, and if they had been taking shots at the Z’s they’d come from even farther away.

  We pedaled quickly on the road, passing by untended fields and empty farmhouses. I didn’t feel the remotest desire to check out any of the farms, the memory of the last one we checked out too fresh. The evening air was cooler and the moon hadn’t risen yet. The land was darkening with the sky following suit. I was hoping for a clear night sky to give us some light to work with, but that was really out of my hands.

  We passed the first crossroads without incident and moved along the road towards the next. The nice thing about country roads in Illinois is they are laid out in one mile square increments. At each mile was a crossroad. If you didn’t know where you were going, you could still do a decent job just following the pattern of the roads. I told this to Tommy who seemed dubious.

  “How do you know this stuff?” He whispered as we worked our way past another farm.

  “My wife’s family is from downstate. They own a farm and she told me. Never thought it would be useful.” I swerved around a large pothole.

  “Never thought the world would end, but here we are.”

  “Yep.”

  Our conversation seemed normal, but underneath we were both wired as tight as snare drums. I knew we were being heard by Z’s in the area, and in all likelihood many zombies were rousing themselves out of their holes and on the prowl for prey.

  We traveled down the road, glancing briefly at the dark homes that rose up out of the darkness like gravestones. Not a light was seen, not a sound was heard. I felt like a trespasser, like we were intruding on a world no longer ours. Stay in the light children, for the dark hides monsters.

  Tommy raised a hand as we approached the second mile road crossing. The stop signs looked lonely and out of place, and the street lamp that once lit this little intersection stood silent and dark, watching sentry over its little corner of the world. We slowed to a stop in the middle of the intersection. I looked over at Tommy, and his eyes were locked on the road ahead.

  “See something?” I asked

  “Hang on.” He looked off to the left a little bit.

  “Yeah, there it is. It’s in the ditch on the left side, about fifty yards up,” he said, pulling out his blunt weapon.

  I squinted into the darkness. “What’s that weird glow?”

  “I don’t know. Never saw that before.”

  I shrugged and pulled out my own weapon, the handle-modified pickaxe. “I guess we should go see.”

  I pedaled a bit forward, then parked the bike. I was not about to engage a Z while still straddling a bicycle. I got off and stood in the center of the road, figuring it gave me the best purchase for fighting. I listened as the zombie made its way along the ditch, aware of me now, and zeroing in for the kill. As it approached, I could see more details in the waning light. Its clothes were in tatters, hanging off more than hanging on, its dead skin stretched over its dead features. Its nose had been torn off, giving its face a more ghastly, skeletal appearance. Wispy hairs stuck out from its head, and its glowing eyes focused on me as its mouth opened to reveal jagged teeth.

  I did a double take. Glowing eyes? When the hell did that start happening? I didn’t think it was possible to make a creepy dead thing creepier, but here it was. The eyes of the zombie actually glowed with a mild luminescence, like a glow in the dark toy that was starting to fade.

  As twitchy as glowing zombie eyes made me, I was actually curious how it happened. Was this a side effect? Had it always happened and we just never noticed because we didn’t go out at night? On the plus side, it sure made it easier to spot them at night. On the minus side, it gave me the willies.

  The Z scrambled up the ditch and crawled out onto the road. Before
it had the chance to get up, I ran up to it and hit it on the head with my pickaxe. The new handle worked well. I didn’t take as large a swing as I normally did, but the additional weight carried well and the pointed end crushed the ghoul’s head easily. I pulled out the pick and noticed that the zombie’s brains were glowing as well. Stranger still. I wiped off the pickaxe and climbed back about the bike. Tommy stepped down to inspect the corpse.

  That’s just wrong,” he said, getting back on his bike.

  “Makes them easier to spot at night, now, I guess,” I said, putting my weapon back into its place.

  “Some consolation,” Tommy said. “Can you imagine hiding in a dark room only to see glowing pairs of eyes coming at you from the blackness?” He shuddered for effect.

  “You mean like that?” I pointed to a very dark spot in a small grove of trees. Sure enough, three pairs of glowing eyes could be seen, weaving back and forth, unblinking, unwavering. They had seen us and were now coming for us.

  “I will never look at fireflies the same way again,” Tommy said as he started his bike. I pedaled after him. We could have stayed and killed the converging dead, but we had places to go and we only fought when we really had to. I had run into lunatics who felt it was their mission to eradicate the undead threat and wound up taking chances that got themselves killed.

  We moved steadily north without further incident, although Tommy and I saw several more zombies in the countryside as the sky grew darker and darker. No doubt, there were a lot more we couldn’t see, since the glowing eyes weren’t like flashlights, more like a slow dull glow. If they had hair falling in front of their faces we could not see their eyes.

  Still, it was creepy as all hell to be riding through the dark country and seeing spots of lights dancing in my peripheral vision and I knew they weren’t little harmless insects.

  We reached the five mile crossroads and finally turned our bikes east. The sky was even darker and the stars were coming out in force. Without the glow of civilization muting the light of the stars, the night sky was amazing. We could see thousands of stars and a couple of planets low in the sky. The arm of the galaxy could be seen, something I had only seen once a long time ago when Ellie and I visited the southwest deserts.