He rolled off the hood, grabbed his M4 and a couple of extra magazines and shoved them in his back pockets. Whatever was happening was close, no use taking the car and letting the whole world know he was coming. He had good mufflers, but it was still a diesel. It was noisy. He didn’t know if whoever being chased was friend or foe and he wanted to see them before they saw him. He considered his armor for a second but it was hot, he was sweating sitting still. The undead were just too dead to be a real risk anymore if you were careful. They no longer leaped and ran and screamed. They bumbled along in unsteady gaits or dragged themselves along the ground.
He flipped the dead man switches on the Merc and took off towards the sound, stepping around the debris littering the parking lot. Shredded plastic bags caught in the fences still fluttered listlessly with the light breeze. As he went up the street, he kept his head on a swivel looking for danger and also signs of life. He stayed in the middle of the road and set a brisk pace towards the town center. A quarter mile later, he saw what had stirred up the crows.
In the parking lot of the Piggly Wiggly grocery store a dozen or more zombies were half-leaping and clawing at someone trapped on the roof of an RV. She was little, just a kid, with an unruly mop of black hair. The undead were fairly fresh ones, they still moved fast and jumped and they all had clothes on. They must have been stuck inside the store, out of the weather and the baking sun. That kid on the roof, or whoever she was with, had set them free. They’d probably been trapped in a break room or something. Maybe he should have brought his armor. Too many of them to take on with his blades, not without protection. He didn’t feel like getting bit or covered in their stinking blood. Too bad Bob wasn’t here. He’d have to use the carbine and be quick about it because anything within blocks was already on the way, following the keening of the undead. Even with the suppressor it was still loud in the silence of the dead world. Once he started shooting, every crawler, shambler and runner within a mile would be headed towards him as fast as it could.
He dropped to a knee, shouldered the M-4 and started popping heads. They turned, saw the fresh meat, and ran towards him as fast as they could. They were in better shape than most he’d come across recently but still, they’d been dead for a long time. Fourteen became twelve became ten. They were closing the distance too fast and he wasn’t getting enough head shots. Their uneven gait made their ugly, open-mouthed heads bob and weave. This was gonna be close. Even above the sound of the rifle double tapping and their breathless screams, he heard more glass shatter across the street behind him. He’d have company from one of the houses lurching for his blood. This plan sucked. He needed a plan B. He emptied the magazine and sprang to his feet, sprinting towards the RV. He dodged around the six still running for him and smashed the stock of his rifle into a mummified store clerk's face as he dashed by. The jawbone shattered and teeth went skittering across the parking lot as Jessie kept going, not even breaking stride. He leaped for the hood then bounded up to the roof, pulling one of the spare magazines from his pocket to reload. The girl was gone and he spotted her disappearing into the undergrowth at the side of the store, tote bags of groceries in her hands.
“You’re welcome,” he grumbled to himself, then waited a few minutes for the shufflers and shamblers to make their way to him. He let them all gather around the RV and start reaching for him before he began killing them again. He checked each face, looking for a brand new one that may have been with the girl but they were all old, lips dry and shriveled and exposing their snapping teeth. When they all lay in heaps around the camper, he double checked the bodies he’d already put down but they were withered and dried out, too. No freshly turned zeds. The kid had been alone. She wasn’t too bright, though, if she’d loosed a pack of zombies on herself. Jessie wondered if she had recently lost her guardians. No way had she been out here on her own for very long. She’d made a bunch of rookie mistakes. She wasn’t armored. She didn’t have weapons or a go-bag on her back and she had just run in a blind terror to climb on top of the RV. She would have been dead in a day or so if he hadn’t come along.
Now he had a choice. Go gear up or take off after her immediately. He grimaced. Both choices were bad. The smart thing to do would be to leave her. She’d ran off and left him, she could take care of herself.
But she couldn’t. That had been pretty obvious. She'd had maybe a ten-minute lead by the time he’d finished off all of the zeds so he skipped the armor and started off at an easy jog into the undergrowth. The woods and kudzu were slowly reclaiming the town, the back of the building already covered in the vines, the dumpster shapes barely recognizable. He had seen where she went in and it was easy to pick up her trail. She was running in a panic with an armload of groceries. He followed the broken branches and the bent weeds over the edge of the hilltop and down the grassy hillside.
The little town of Cattle Creek was situated on a South Carolina knoll with only a few dozen streets and the one county road snaking through it. The area behind the Piggly Wiggly dropped off into a valley and there was another wooded hill on the other side of the creek at the bottom. Her path through the waist high grass was easy to see and when she started following a game trail on the other side of the stream, her footprints were evident in the dirt. Small, bare feet left impressions alongside the hoof prints of deer.
Jessie was hot, sweat was rolling off of him and biting insects buzzed his head. This is ridiculous he kept thinking as he swatted mosquitoes and deer flies. Why am I even bothering? But every time he was ready to call it quits, head back to his car and get something cool to drink, he would see her bare footprints. The girl didn’t even have shoes. He could only imagine she was the last survivor of some hillbilly clan that was way up a holler. There couldn’t be any adults left alive, not if some ten-year-old with no training and no shoes was going into town on her own.
He trudged on.
He almost missed where she turned off the trail, he was too busy muttering curses and trying to kill a particularly annoying horse fly that kept buzzing his ears. There was a break in the underbrush where a nearly dry creek trickled down a cut between two hills. He double checked, there were no footprints in the grass but it was still bent where she had stepped. He wasn’t far behind her.
Ten minutes later, far up a holler, he was looking up at a cluster of ramshackle houses situated in the woods on a low rise. The dirt road leading into them was washed out in places, overgrown with weeds and unused. There were a couple of sagging pickup trucks but they hadn’t been moved in a long time. He didn’t see the girl so he hunkered down beside a tree in the wood line and watched, evaluating what he saw. He didn’t want to get shot, just wandering up. There were a couple of tarpaper houses and a few mobile homes run-down to the point of decrepitude. Sagging porches. Missing tin from the roofs. No cooking fire smoke. No solar panels. A couple of them looked like a strong wind would knock them over. There was a well-tended garden, a big one, set off a good distance from the houses with a couple of scarecrows stirring around in the slight breeze. He turned his gaze back to the shacks. Maybe the kid had been after medical supplies. There was a small woodpile and an ax in the chopping block. Maybe her mom or dad or whoever, had gotten hurt. He watched, looking for any indication of life. Other than the scarecrows and their ragged clothes flapping in his peripheral vision, nothing moved.
Jessie crushed a deer fly that bit his neck, smearing blood as he cursed its mother, its cousins and every relative it ever had. He made up his mind, he couldn’t stay here in the sweltering heat, swatting flies, waiting for something to happen. He stood and walked quickly towards the houses keeping a close eye on the one that looked like it was actually in use. The closer he got, the more apparent it became that only one of the shacks was lived in. The dirt path leading to it was the only one not overgrown with uncut grass. He heard the sounds of someone eating noisily as he approached and off to his right he heard the sudden keening of the undead.
The garden. They’re coming through th
e garden! His mind screamed as he swung around and brought up his carbine. He heard the girl shriek behind him.
Ambush! He thought, they saw me coming.
An explosion of crows came flurrying out of the nearest trees and took to the air, cawing their annoyance. She was the closest threat so he brought the gun back around to her but she burst out of the door and ran past him to the zombies in the garden, standing in front of them with her hands up, yelling at him in a foreign language. The undead were almost on her, one fast and one shambling. He yelled at her to move and brought the gun up to his shoulder. Jessie could hear the closest zombie snapping at her, his teeth clacking noisily. It tried to reach for her but his arms were tied to a pole running across his shoulders, holding them straight out from his sides like he was crucified. He stopped suddenly with a jerk. Jessie watched as he screeched through shredded vocal cords and thrashed violently against the chain holding him. She stayed in front of him, protecting him, as she gabbled on in some language Jessie couldn’t understand. He yelled at her to move again and motioned her away, the other one was getting close but the girl held her ground, hands up, pleading.
What the hell was going on? Jessie sighted above her mop of tangled hair at the feed sack over the head of the closest zombie; it had a smiling face painted on it.
It was the scarecrows.
He looked closer and noticed the chains around them that snaked back to large, round, fence posts driven deep into the ground. He snapped his sights over to the other one, it had obviously been dead much longer and was just now shuffling to the end of her restraints.
What was this? They both had burlap bags over their heads with happy faces painted on them.
The crows cawed and circled, the little girl babbled on and the undead cried for blood. Jessie didn’t know what to do. He had ALWAYS killed them. He never hesitated. There were two right in front of him but the kid was begging for their lives. Lives? No, not lives but whatever they were, she was pleading for him not to end it.
Jessie lowered the gun in frustration.
“ENGLISH!” he yelled at her. “Do you speak English?”
She stopped babbling in whatever language she was yelling at him in and nodded her head.
“Get away from those things.” He jerked a finger at the scarecrows and motioned her over.
She shook her head and started up again in her weird tongue, pointing at the zombies and then at his gun.
“Oh, for the love of Pete,” he said in exasperation and slung the rifle over his shoulder, then showed her both his hands. “I won’t shoot them. Just get away from there.”
He motioned her over again and she came slowly, her dirty, tear streaked face showing mistrust.
She was small, brown skinned, malnourished and had numerous cuts and scrapes on her that didn’t look like they were healing very well. Her hair hadn’t seen a brush in months and the tangled mess hung wild. She was young, Jessie guessed maybe 11 or 12. She still had food on her chin from where she’d been hungrily eating something from the bag she had brought back.
“You’re here alone?” Jessie asked “No mom? No dad?” He was trying to remember high school Spanish classes but she didn’t sound like she was Mexican. It sounded like something else. She didn’t really look Mexican, either. He couldn’t put a finger on it, but she just looked different. More… exotic, maybe.
She pointed behind her.
“Mamma. Poppa,” she said and indicated the two scarecrows struggling at the end of their chains to get at them.
Jessie needed to sit down. He’d seen some messed up things but this had to be right there near the top of the list. He looked closer, saw the chains could be reeled in to keep the two zombies away from the garden so she could harvest or weed. He saw the knee-high fences along the rows that kept them out of the vegetables but close enough to scare off any crows or raccoons or deer that tried to help themselves. He looked at the two walking corpses. The mom had been dead for a while. She had been pulling scarecrow duty for a long time from the looks of it. The dad was still fresh, no more than a few weeks dead. Jessie could see the bite mark on his arm. He had probably gone into town to get things they needed and came back infected. Before he died, he had rigged up his chains so she could make the garden larger and keep more animals at bay.
Desperate, hard and sad times. He had tried to be a good father to her. He had tried to give her a life. Jessie stared at the painted boot black smile on the bag covering his snarling face. He knew if he removed it, he would find the remains of a Middle Eastern man. One of the Muslims in hiding. He sighed heavily and closed his eyes. He opened them to the gentle tugging of the girl, she was pulling him towards the house. Away from the scarecrows. Away from the people who loved her enough to become eternal guardians of the garden.
It wasn’t enough, though. She was out of food; the vegetables weren’t ripe and she was starving. She had made her first trip into town and had almost died. She’d never survive on her own. Her parents hadn’t taught her the skills she needed in this unforgiving world. The father had been raiding surrounding houses and stores but he’d made a mistake. He had gotten bitten.
He sat in the small house as she insisted on setting out food for him. They’d been hiding out, fearing the zombies, fearing the Americans and trying to scratch a living from the land. Probably afraid to fire a gun because if it didn’t bring the dead around, it might bring other survivors. They couldn’t be found, couldn’t be seen or they would have been killed. Even the child.
Jessie sighed again. If another Retriever found her, they would probably sell her into indentured servitude at one of the wilder outposts. A nanny or a maid if she was lucky. If he walked away and left her, she’d be dead before winter. She’d never make it on her own. He couldn’t take her back to any of the walled cities, they wouldn’t accept the children of their enemies, the people that had nearly killed the whole world. The wounds were too fresh. Her life there would be harsh and she’d always be a second-class citizen, never accepted into polite society. He knew a little about that.
Jessie considered his options as he ate, as she opened the precious cans she’d nearly died for and fed them to him. He wondered if he could pass her off as Hispanic. Teach her better English and say he found her in Texas.
“How old are you?” he asked as he watched her finish eating from the can of corn.
“I think I am still sixteen,” she said with a halting and thick accent, pulling the words from a long way back in her mind. “What month is it?”
Jessie blanched. She was so tiny, so skinny and flat chested. He thought she was maybe 12 at the most.
After the minimal meal was finished, he slowly rolled a cigarette as he thought. There really were only two options. Leave her to die or take her with him. Not much of a choice, really. He had gotten used to traveling alone. No Scarlet to love, no Bob to take care of and no Maddy to talk and argue with. Just him and his thoughts and most of the time he tried not to think. He didn’t generally care for people too much. They tried not to stare at his face and always seemed to be talking to someone just over his shoulder. This girl didn’t bat an eye. Maybe living with your parents as zombies made little things like a scar unimportant.
Maybe she could ride with him for a while. It might be nice to have someone to talk to. He didn’t realize how much he missed company. Not people necessarily, Bob would have been great but Bob wasn’t here. She was. Maybe she could fill the emptiness when he didn’t want to think by teaching her how to survive on her own. Maybe he could find a bookstore and get some of those Spanish courses on CD, teach her the language and she could pass as a Latina from Guatemala or something. If she did that, she could join the settlements in the heartland.
If she wanted to go, that is.
When he asked her and she finally understood, she jumped up and ran into one of the back rooms. She came out a few minutes later, draping a small silver necklace over her head and stood looking at him, expectantly.
“Guess
that means yes,” Jessie said, his half smile looking more like a snarl.
She smiled back, her eyes bright and dancing.
“We’ll have to get you a good pair of boots,” he said and stood.
They left the falling down shack and she took nothing from her old life except memories, the necklace and the threadbare clothes she was wearing. She wiped the dust from her feet as she crossed over their property line and stopped. She pointed to his gun, to her parents, then turned and walked down the hill. She jumped a little at the two quick shots that echoed through the valley but she didn’t look back. Her parents had been gone for a long time. Now the scarecrows were, too.
38
Natacha
“Really?” Jessie asked “You’re hungry again?”
“It is lunchtime.” Natacha said. “And you are the strange one. You don’t eat properly, you cannot live on beef jerky and candy bars.”
“I eat more than that.” He said defensively. “You eat like a horse and you’re going to as big as one if you keep it up.”
She ignored his comment and started looking for likely places.
He would stop.
He always did.
They had been on the road for over a month meandering their way north. It turned out she spoke English just fine. She hadn’t used it in over a year and it only took a day or two before he was halfway wishing she didn’t. She never shut up. He probably should have run her back to one of the settlements but even though she could be annoying, he kind of liked having her around. She spoke with a faint middle eastern accent, not quite as pronounced as Scarlets but enough that it reminded him of her. It was comforting in a way. Almost like she was still close. Natacha was a fast learner and he started teaching her the basics of survival in the harsh new world. Within a few hours he had her taking down two and three shamblers at a time with the .22. lever action rifle. Her shots were fast and accurate, she eliminated the quickest ones first and didn’t get tunnel vision, she remained aware of her surroundings. They graduated to pistols and she became good in close quarters and recovered without panic when he sabotaged the third round in both her magazines. He found houses with day one zombies and within a week she was clearing them flawlessly, killing with precision and mastering her guns. They listened to Spanish language CD’s and she learned to speak with a slight Latina accent and sprinkle in a few Spanish words once in a while. She wouldn’t have any problem fitting in as long as she didn’t tell anyone the truth of where she came from. She understood, she knew her heritage could cause her problems and said her new name was Natalie.
Zombie Road | Book 8 | Crossroads of Chaos Page 24
