The Feral Children [A Zombie Road Tale] Box Set | Books 1-3

by Simpson, David A.

  “It seems to be working out for Vanessa.” Kodiak said. “I’m happy for her. It gives me hope for the rest of you. There’s still a chance, you know. We made it, maybe some of your families did, too.”

  “Maybe.” Harper said doubtfully. “Mr. Bastille has been broadcasting our names for over a week. I think they would have replied by now.

  He changed the subject. “A retriever told me about an African safari park they stumbled across down in Texas. The fences were intact and there was a large herd of gazelles being stalked by lions. Elephants were bathing in the river and tigers were basking in the sun.”

  “Was it Rye?” She asked.

  “No, it was a Lady called Fat Nancy. She seemed nice enough. I asked about Rye, no one has heard from him since he left Gallatin. Some of them didn’t seem to like him very much. They say he’s a scoundrel and cheats at cards.”

  “True.” Harper said. “He admitted as much.”

  “Still, I like him. He helped us get away, I don’t think we could have without him.”

  They sat in comfortable silence until the day faded into darkness and the chill night air sent them home.

  41

  Geeks and Freaks

  Winter was coming but the tribe didn’t feel anxious about it. The homes were warm, heated with an inexhaustible supply of natural gas, the weather was mild and blizzards were unheard of. Thanksgiving was over and Christmas was three weeks away. Their animals didn’t seem to mind the new homes either. Bert could wander the acres of wilderness inside the walls, the bears were content in their back-yard habitats and Yewan became the house cat down at Tommy’s shop. The children had more or less settled in even though they didn’t really fit in. The same old clicks they’d all experienced in high school were still there. The jocks and the nerds, the stoners and the entitled. Lakota had the best schools and teachers in any of the walled cities and accordingly they had the largest number of students. Many parents moved there not only for the schools but also because it was the capital city. Work was easy to find and more and more positions were needed to fill in the growing government. Power and wealth were becoming important again.

  “I want to show you something.” Harper said and ran to her room. “Wait here.”

  They were in the big apartment above the jail. When Griz and Sheriff Collins had taken in the triplets they had expanded the little flat to encompass the whole floor. They had knocked out a few walls, added a bathroom and now all six of them lived there.

  Analise and the boys didn’t look away from the TV, they were all mashing furiously on their controllers in a four-way Super Smash Brothers battle. Vanessa was the only one to jump up and admire the tooled leather armor Harper held out. It was a beautiful hard leather piece that had been formed to fit her perfectly. It contoured her waist and breasts, buckled along the sides and had boiled leather pieces riveted around the bottom to give it the appearance of a short skirt. Cody stole a quick glance to see what Vanessa was exclaiming about and did a double take. He got knocked out on screen but didn’t care. The cuirass was amazing, it looked like it could have been in a museum.

  “Where did you get that?” he asked and hopped up to check it out.

  Donny and Analise did too and fingered the fine leather, admired the quality workmanship.

  “Griz made it.” She said. “Not only is he the best gunsmith in town, he’s pretty handy at armor, too.”

  “Can he make me some?” Tobias asked. “I mean real Viking stuff?”

  “Of course. He wants us all to come down to his shop so he can take some measurements. He said you can never have too many guns or too much armor. He saw the one I made and wanted to try his hand at working with leather. He said he’d make some for all of us if we wanted.”

  The game was forgotten as she modeled the outfit, complete with arm guards and bindings for her legs. He’d improved her morning star, too.

  “You’re ready to ride again.” Vanessa said.

  “Yeah.” Harper replied a little wistfully. “I guess those days are over, though.”

  At first the other kids wanted to befriend them, after all they were famous, but the friendships were forced and all they ever wanted was to hear the same stories over and over again. There were constant requests to show them their scars or tattoos or bring the animals to school and have them do tricks. It got old after a while. Vanessa may have had it harder than any of them. She was tiny and the ritual scars on her face couldn’t be covered up. No matter how often they saw her, they still turned their heads and stared. She wore dresses and long sleeves to cover the scars from the savage ones. Her hair was growing out and she’d started straightening it again but they still talked about her. Snickered behind her back. She was the smallest of the group of freaks and the daily insults were getting worse as they grew bolder.

  Swan’s arm had healed up completely and she was already in trouble for fighting. A boy had made fun of her for the way she drank at the fountain. She cupped her hand, filled it and drank from it. It was how she drank from a creek, you never stuck your face in and lapped like a dog. It was too dangerous. When she snarled a warning at him, he’d laughed. When she broke his nose and threatened to squish his eyes out with her thumbs, he’d cried.

  Nobody messed with Tobias or Analise, they looked too wild even though she’d tried to appear normal for the first month. He wouldn’t let even the slightest insult go unnoticed. He was quick to anger and even quicker to react. They learned to avoid him and not to whistle at his sister. He seemed to take great offense at that. Donny was almost invisible to them. He was quiet and stayed to the back of the room. Some tried to goad Cody but out of them all, he and Harper were the ones they accepted the most. Aside from some scars they usually kept covered, they seemed almost normal. It was easy to forget they were barely tamed savages.

  The school was big enough that they only shared a few classes together and were usually spread out all across the campus. The worst class for all of them was gym. They had to wear shorts and t-shirts and if the kids ever forgot they weren’t the same as them, gym class brought it all back. The battle with the Savage Ones had left them all scratched and torn. Uneven slashes and skin ripped open from jagged teeth had been sewn without anesthesia. The infected wounds had healed but they didn’t heal pretty. Pink and white lines crisscrossed their legs and arms.

  It was a Friday, dodge ball day, and Vanessa was actually glad. It was cold outside and she didn’t want to run around the track or play soccer. She was good at most sports but she excelled with the red rubber balls. Especially the one little one the size of a softball. The burn ball. If she got her hands on it, whoever she targeted was out. A year of slinging heavy steel spears had built up her muscles and her aim was true. She was always one of the last to be picked as they were choosing sides. Even though she was tiny and fast, could dodge the ball with crazy skill and was nearly impossible to hit nobody wanted to pick her. She was weird. As they were lining up to, the coach’s phone rang. He put it to his ear for a second, yelled at Goldberg to take charge and disappeared down the hall towards his office.

  He was the boy Swan had punched. There was still some faint bruising around his eyes and his nose looked tender. Goldberg waited until he was sure the gym teacher was gone and announced they were playing a different version of the game. A better version.

  “This is called whack a geek.” He said and his buddies guffawed. “The rules are simple. Throw balls at the freak until your arms get tired.”

  He shoved Vanessa hard and she stumbled behind the basketball backboard.

  “That’s not fair.” Someone said and he got pushed across the line too.

  “Anybody else wanna join the freak team?” he asked and no one did.

  Goldberg and his friends were the biggest boys in the class, they were seniors, and Vanessa recognized the meanness in them. The savage that hid beneath the veneer of civility. She’d seen it in Gordon but it had taken him a long time before he worked up the courage to hurt someone.
To kill someone. Her savage wasn’t buried deep, it hovered right near the surface and she smiled her warrior smile. These boys thought they were going to hurt her, give her a few welts and sore spots from a rubber ball. She laughed and her grin got wider. She welcomed it. She wanted it.

  “You can’t do this.” The boy who stood up for Vanessa said. “I’ll tell.”

  “And I’ll toss you over the wall and let the zombies eat you.” Goldberg said. “Bet I won’t.”

  They were hesitant to throw the first ball, thirty kids against two of the smallest in the class but when Goldberg whizzed the burn ball and it landed with a satisfying smack against the boys leg, his cry of pain sent the rest of the balls flying at the dodging figures. They bounced off the walls and were snatched back up to be thrown again. Vanessa dodged most of them and grabbed a big red one. She used it as a shield and smacked the balls out of the air with it. She laughed louder and pissed them off even more. They couldn’t land a solid hit, she moved too fast. The boy was already crying, big red welts covered his body and he’d curled up into fetal position.

  Somebody dragged the basketball cart over and started throwing them. Then the footballs and softballs and finally the baseballs. They hurt when they hit and now they had so many, twenty balls at once were flying in at her. She moved to protect the boy, bouncing as many as she could off her dodge ball but they were aiming at her head, her legs and her body from both sides. Goldberg was getting angrier, he couldn’t make her stop smiling. He couldn’t make her cry out in pain. She’d taken a basketball to the face, blood poured from her nose but it only accented her shining white teeth. She was actually laughing at him, at his feeble attempts and it infuriated him. He ran to the storage closet and pulled the fast pitch machine out to the floor. It was loaded with baseballs and he aimed it right for her and flipped the switch. The first ball slammed against the concrete wall and exploded. The next one barely missed her head and the game was over. It would have killed her if it made contact but no once seemed to realize that but her. The others kept throwing, kept thinking it was a cruel game to teach the freak a lesson, whatever that lesson was supposed to be. She raised her voice, screamed her war cry and it rang through the school.

  The tribe reacted instantly. Desks flew, papers were scattered, and door glass shattered as they bounced off the wall. Cody raced down the hall as doors flew open and the tribe joined him. Stunned students and teachers sat at their desks not knowing what happened, why the new students had dashed out of the room. Tobias and Cody slammed through the doors first and didn’t hesitate for an instant. They plowed into the crowd and started smashing heads with Donny half a step behind. They all carried weapons, things they’d grabbed on their dash to help their sister. Math books knocked people out of the way. A laptop computer sent keys and teeth flying across the gym floor. A soda can in each hand delivered devastating blows. Vanessa ducked under the ninety mile an hour baseball that would have shattered her ribcage and leaped for the desperate looking Goldberg. She drove both knees into his chest and pummeled him mercilessly with one punch after another. His nose exploded again as he tried to fend off the blows raining down. The machine twisted and sent bone breaking fastballs careening around the gym and off the screaming students. Swan snarled and jumped from one opponent to another, bashing them with a metal pencil sharpener she’d ripped off the wall on her way out of history class. Caleb, Landon and Clara all had metal toys in their hands and were laying knees and shins open to the bone. The tribe was brutal, they fought as a unit, side by side and back to back, until none of the others were left standing and all they heard was the shriek of the coach’s whistle.

  They stopped swinging and all eyes darted for danger, for others coming to attack them. The backboard was shattered, windows and overhead lights were broken and teens were trying to get away from the savage kids. The whirr-thunk of the empty baseball machine wound down when Donny flipped it off.

  “You okay?” Cody asked as Vanessa slid into the circle, all of them facing outward among the students laying on the ground.

  “Yeah.” She said and pinched her nose to get it to stop bleeding. “You guys?”

  “I broke a nail.” Swan complained. “I knew I shouldn’t have tried to grow them out.”

  Teachers looked in at the carnage through the windows in the gym doors, wary of the flying baseballs. The new kids had laid out a whole class of students, most of them juniors or seniors. They were afraid to enter, afraid the out of control children would attack anything that moved. The coach finally stopped blowing his whistle and stood looking at them, the damage to the gym and the bloody mess of his class.

  “Get out.” He said and pointed to the side door. “You don’t belong here.”

  Vanessa made it a point to walk on top of Goldberg instead of around him as they picked their way through the groaning people. The ones that hadn’t been knocked unconscious hurried to move out of their way.

  42

  Fireside

  Tobias was still angry. They were gathered in Runa’s backyard, watching the polar bears laze in the pool.

  “They had it coming.” He said again. “They started it.”

  “And we finished it.” Cody said with a little exasperation “I know, you’ve told us a million times. The question is, now what do we do?”

  “I don’t think they’ll bother us anymore.” Analise said. “Not after that ass whooping they took.”

  But they might bother the animals. Donny signed. They might poison them to get back at us.

  “He’s right.” Harper said. “Look what Gordon did to Teddy.”

  “I say we get out of here.” Tobias said. “We don’t need this place, they have electricity, big deal. Who needs it? We did just fine without it.”

  “What about the triplets?” Swan asked. “You want to drag them back out there? They were doing good until we showed up.”

  “Well, they can stay.” He shot back. “I meant us.”

  “Me, too?” Vanessa asked. “You want me to leave my dad?”

  “Nobody has to go anywhere.” Gunny said as he came through the gate in the fence with Lacy, Runa and others following him. “We’ve just come from the school, heard their side of the story. Now I’d like to hear yours.”

  They told him and the adults nodded. It was pretty much as they expected. They had seen the damage and heard the defensive stories but the big picture was easy to piece together. Older kids started bullying the odd ball and she fought back. Her friends came to help and the bullies got their asses handed to them. It happened. The difference this time was the ferocity of the attack. The teens could have killed Vanessa or the boy she was shielding. What started out as meanness and cruelty had elevated quickly. The tribe answered with overwhelming force and had put a hurting on some of the older teens. It wasn’t just cuts and scrapes, a black eye or two. There were broken bones, missing teeth and slashes that required stitches. Vanessa was the only one of the group that had any injuries and that was only because she’d been outnumbered thirty to one.

  “The parents are concerned.” Lacy said. “The school board doesn’t want to let you go back. They think you were too long in the wilds.”

  “They started it.” Tobias said defiantly.

  “They could have killed her with the pitching machine.” Kodiak said evenly. “They were trying, they were shooting at her. None of them were ever in any danger of dying, we weren’t trying to kill them or they’d be dead.”

  Gunny looked at the ground to hide his grin. He liked this kid. Hell, he liked all of them.

  “I know.” Lacy said. “And I know it’s not fair but if you go back, it won’t get any better. You’re the outsiders.”

  “I don’t want to go back anyway.” Tobias mumbled. “It was a waste of time.”

  “There are options.” Lacy continued. “There is home schooling or apprenticeship programs. You can start working and earning a living. We can get you into any career you want.”

  “We just wanted to be
normal kids again.” Harper said. “We thought we could go back to like it was, like they did.”

  They talked for another half hour and told the grownups they’d figure it out. Donny was already working at Tommy’s shop, Harper wanted to be a nurse, Tobias and Analise wanted to be chefs, Kodiak a veterinarian, Vanessa wanted to finish school and Swan had just shrugged when they asked her. The grownups left and they told them they’d let them know tomorrow so arrangements could be made.

  Darkness fell and Cody started a fire to chase the chill as they sat around and discussed options. Nobody was very excited about their prospects. They hardly ever saw each other anymore except on weekends and a little at school. If they started jobs, they’d be just like the grownups. Work all day, take care of house when you got home, watch something on a DVD and fall asleep just to wake up and do it all over again. Life inside the walls was pretty much what it had been before the fall.

  “I’m going south.” Swan announced.

  “What do you mean?” Tobias asked. “South Dakota? South America? South Park?”

  She flicked an acorn at him.

  “South of here.” She said. “I’m going to check out that safari park in Texas. If they’re still caged, I’m going to set them free.”

  “That’s a long way.” Cody said. “It’ll take weeks.”

  “Yep.” She replied and stared into the flames. “Maybe months.”

  There was silence around the fire as they contemplated her words. They knew what they meant.

  When are you leaving? Donny signed.

  Swan looked up at the moon. It was almost full and the stars were twinkling brightly. No rain, no snow.

  “There’s no time like the present.” She said and stood.

  Donny nodded and looked at Analise. She smiled and he saw the answer in her eyes.

  Meet you at the front gate he signed, touched foreheads with Vanessa then slipped off into the darkness.