by Thomas, Jack
“I think we could handle this on our own,” Jack began, “We have the element of surprise. Richard doesn’t know we are going after him. If we get him at the right time…”
“We can take him and his men out alone!” I finished Jack’s sentence when I realized he was right. Richard couldn’t know Jack and I planned to take him out. Regardless of the number of men with him, if we could take them out quietly no one would hear it happen.
“Now you see things my way. There is one other thing that’ll give us a bit of an advantage,” Jack tried to persuade me, but he already succeeded in doing so, “Even if the rifle doesn’t have a scope it is still an incredibly accurate gun, and I can make my own makeshift scope to have more range with it.” He thought it all out. He wasn’tasleep when he was in the room. He planned out how to persuade me to leave Marcus behind and go after Richard ourselves. I couldn’t say I blamed him either. I had my own reason to leave Marcus behind and go after Richard without him. The idea wasn’t bad after all.
“The gun might be accurate, but are you?” All this talk meant nothing if he failed to pick out someone who tried to kill me. “That rifle only has six rounds. What’s to stop seven guys from coming after me?”
“As clever as you think all these questions are, there is still one thing I know that you do not,” a smug smile crawled over his face in victory. “One of Richard’s men has a sniper rifle of his own, and if we can take him out and use his rounds and gun…” There was more to be said but he expected me to piece the rest of it together.
“If he’s a sniper he’ll be at a vantage point. We find it; we take him out and take his gun.” I remembered Jack said Richard left men behind to scavenge for supplies. “How can you be sure this sniper is even with him instead of somewhere else searching for supplies?” I wondered how much of this plan was already figured out.
“Because he only had two snipers, and he always has one to watch his back. One of the guys I was with was the other sniper, so we can be sure that he isn’t going to leave the other one anywhere. He will always be in visual range of Richard to cover him,” Jack explained. He thought of everything.
“All we need to do if find the spot with the best view…” I said.
“And we will find Richard’s sneaky support.”
I couldn’t say no. There was a loaded sniper, someone we could see from everywhere, and the person who used it kept an eye on Richard. If we found the sniper we would also find Richard, Richard’s men, more ammo, a vantage point to have control of the situation and we could save the people in the school.
“This means we have to leave now in case he isn’t there yet so we could still warn the authorities at the school,” the volume in my voice hit an all time low when I realized I validated a reason to leave Marcus behind.
Chin up and a smile, he was confident we could do this. I questioned whether or not the short amount of time he spent with Richard was enough for all this information to be on point, but it was the only information and some information was significantly better than none.
It was our obligation to go through with it. Marcus would find us eventually. He knew where to go better than Jack and I could ever.
“Let’s get this over with before one of us thinks of a reason why this is an incredibly stupid idea,” I said and stood off of the couch to walk over to the backpack. I never let the gun go. As redundant as it is, I was even paranoid of Jack. It was safe to assume everyone was a danger to my well being. This mentality was going to get me far if I managed to keep it up.
Half an hour or so went by with us both getting ready to head out. We found Jack a backpack to carry extra weight in without being slowed down or held back. Pink would go down in history as the color which suited him best. Joy came purely from the pink bag being the only one we could find. We tried to locate other ones with no avail, we did nothing but fail. It was a pleasant kind of failure though. Jack pled and begged us to look longer but eventually he settled. He realized how much time was wasted.
We attacked the kitchen like a pack of wild starved jackals.
Atornado flew around the room before you came…
The food, a mess it made. Emptied out cereal boxes, empty soda bottles, cans of tuna and a million other kinds of empty food containers rested on the floor by the time we were done. We came up with odd food mixtures made up of these unspoiled foods.
Now don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I didn’t miss being able to have a more reasonable meal than dry cereal with a side of hot soda, but I weighed the other more current options and being able to eat anything was a privilege only those of us still alive could enjoy. I was thankful there was a meal at all.
We cleaned ourselves and suited up. Thin sweats underneath jeans with two shirts on and a jacket was our definition of suiting up. Mobility was on our minds at all times. If we couldn’t outrun and outmaneuver the infected we would also not survive them.
Back at the couch, we sat and enjoyed the silence. Our backpacks on, our clothes wrapped comfortably around us in layers, the handgun against my waist and the rifle stashed in Jack’s pink backpack; I was ready for one more stand against the infected and Richard before my family would be together and safe again.
We eventually dragged ourselves out of the apartment and down to the building’s front door.
My hand rested on the handle before I opened it. Jack and I took our last breaths of peace, appreciating the calm and quiet atmosphere the building provided for the last time.
The door opened and the sunlight filled the hallway into the building. The cold rushed at me and scratched at my face with full intent to harm, like an angry cat.
All in the name of survival.
Of all the craptastic seasons the apocalypse could have taken place in, it chose to happen during winter. What a douche.
The building Marcus wanted us stationed at was quite literally across the street from the ‘Welcome to the Hills’ sign. We were in the town. All that was left was to locate the school.
The Hills
Car wrecks were still the main attraction in the major cities and towns. Everywhere we went it was either a ghost town or a full blown scene of chaos and destruction. What made this particular town look so much different from the rest was its overall shape. The town was literally made up of hills. Everywhere there was either a hill going up from where Jack and I stood, or a hill going down. But there was one hill which stood taller than all the others. It stood in the distance and overlooked the town and everything in it. The hill was more like a standalone mountain and at its peak rested a large structure. From where Jack and I stood the structure looked miniscule, but this specific hill was quite a distance from us.
“Do you think that’s the school?” Jack asked me, he pointed at the structure on the hill.
“Maybe, I guess. Doesn’t hurt to find out, it’s not like we have any other leads.”
Everyday alive in the apocalypse was another training day for the things we could encounter, more preparation of sorts meant to better equip those still alive to survive even longer. The more adapted we became to the worst case scenarios the less stressful the more common horrors became. This applied specifically to the walkers, having dealt with so many runners in such a short period of time made all the walkers boring, ineffective and easy to avoid. Of course in large enough quantities we would be blocked off, pinned in, and ultimately screwed. But this wasn’t the case. We would come across one or two at a time, we’d move around them and stay on track. After enough of them gathered behind us, we would turn onto a different street and lose them; rinse, repeat.
The walk took forever. In reality it was only about an hour of our lives, but the lack of adrenaline made it so much longer than it really was. Even with what happened to Edwin I still wanted danger to surround me to kill the boredom, as terrible as it is to say. I couldn’t wait to get to the school because of the likelihood I would encounter some horrible life changing circumstances which would give me chills and an adrenaline ru
sh to take my mind off of the death itself.
I was obsessed.
We were bored, right up until the tension arrived.
“…And that’s how I got the bruise,” I answered Jack’s question of how I attained the bruise on my head back at the base.
“Do you hear that?” Jack asked and stopped in his tracks.
“Hear what?” I couldn’t hear a thing aside from the moans of the few infected around us.
“Listen closely.” Jack’s shoulders tensed and I swore I could see the hairs on his body rise.
The universal sign for upcoming havoc arrived; a chill went up and down my spine. I drew the handgun, Jack drew the rifle.
I started to hear something faint and far but present.
“Holy crap… Is that… is that screaming?” Jack asked.
Just as he asked the sound became clear to me, hundreds of screams. “Oh man, it is…”
“You think its runners?” His eyes opened widely while he waited for me to confirm what he suspected.
“I don’t know. Should we hide somewhere?” I didn’t know what to tell him. I didn’t even know what was about to happen myself.
“Yeah, good call. Let’s get the hell out of the sight before they reach us.” Immediately after he agreed we ran out of the way and in through the nearest door we could find; a clothing store. We both hid behind a counter which overlooked the entrance and carefully peeked over the edge to see outside.
Déjà vu, I pictured the man who tried to protect the little girl with his body as a shield against the group of infected. I remembered the screams of the survivors, the screams of the infected which attacked them, and the sudden silence that followed both instances.
My heart raced with anticipation.
From one second to another the screams became louder and louder till it was nearly on us. Screams pierced the store’s walls from the outside and bounced around inside.
Oh god… They aren’t infected…
My stomach churned. They were survivors running from something. Another faint sound became louder until it was no longer faint. A consistent rumbling came closer and closer, it echoed around with the screams of the survivors. The number of people who ran past the window thinned out till there were barely any left.
An old fashioned crank car, a pickup, similar to the car I drove out of my neighbor’s garage, drove right by the window and caught up to the survivors who ran trying to escape.
I left cover and ran back to the store’sfront door to see what the people in the pickup planned to do. Jack followed and we watched the events unfold.
The pickup slammed into two of the survivors and knocked over a few more. The men came out, guns drawn and opened fire on the survivors that remained.
I was stunned, stuck staring out at monsters that performed horrible acts, murder in the name of nothing.
The gunshots roared over the screams of the living.
I pulled back into the store. Jack tried to get my attention.
“Those are some of the guys Richard picked up along the way. We need to get out of here before they find us.” The wide eyed surprise paired with the speed of his words made it difficult to mask his obvious fear. I didn’t judge, I was horrified too.
We were close to the school, very close. A few more blocks and we’d be face to face with the hill that’ll lead us to it. Jack and I went out of the store through the back. Boxes leaned against the wall while they waited for the garbage truck which would never come for them.
Richard’s men were on one side of the block, we were on the other, virtually invisible to them. “Keep moving,” I told Jack.
Now it was fact, Richard beat us to the school.
I imagined different scenarios in which my family could be made to suffer. A strong disgust and an unsettling twist occupied my stomach.
I have to keep it together. I can’t lose what is left of my mind yet. Not until Jason is safe, not until mom is safe, not until Daviel is safe…
Jack stopped. He stared blankly ahead. For a second I didn’t catch on to the fact he stared at something instead of dazed out like me. I wondered what was wrong. The thought maybe he was infected crossed my mind but I remembered we were not pinned or cornered anywhere by the infected. There was no way he contracted the infection. So I instead looked in the direction he looked.
An Army; Richard managed to gather an army of men in a ten day time span. In front of us stood a large area clear of structures, nature dominated the view. A hill the size of a small mountain sat in front of us. Not a spot of green ahead. Stones so bright they looked yellow made up the mountain around an unpaved road winding all the way up to a massive building at the top. On the road, hundreds of infected killed off by hundreds of people, presumably more of Richard’s men on a mission to secure the outside of the school so they could take it for themselves with more ease.
“There is no way we are going to live for much longer if we have to work our way through so many of Richard’s men,” I said to Jack while both of us stared like idiots in awe at the mountain.
“How did he even gather so many followers in such a short time?” Jack asked in return, his eyebrow rose while he pondered his own question, “Wait… Look closer.”
I did as he said and tried to see more details up the road. I saw what was really going on. “Are those… Are those children?” Women and children were the ones we saw fight off the infected instead of Richard’s men. What we imagined paled in comparison to the truth of the matter.
We watched innocent people get slaughtered and murdered by the infected Richard most likely led to the school to do his dirty work. He gathered no army, he used the infected to do his dirty work.
“What do we do?” Jack’s voice strained and quivered.
“We have to get inside of the school!” I tried to keep a level head (which was incredibly hard at the time).
“We can’t leave these people out here to die either!” Jack began to raise his voice after we managed to avoid so many of the infected through silence. This wasn’t the time to get us caught. Not with so many infected this close.
“We can’t take them on either. We have no other moves here Jack! We have to go inside and fix this from the inside out!” I tried to persuade the guy to think my way. We were going to lose our lives if we tried to confront so much at once. It wasn’t worth it. “If we stop Richard inside, we get rid of whoever is left working for him, whoever survives out here can get back into the school! But if we take on the infected now we risk Richard taking control of the school assuming he hasn’t already. There is no option. We have to go inside!” I couldn’t understand why he was so bent on saving those people first. It made more sense to stop Richard first. Then they would have somewhere to stay safe after they were rescued. Instead he wanted to rescue them immediately which would only force them to roam the infected world all over again. There was safety in the school at some point; we needed to return the school to that state.
“Are you coming or are you going? Either way I am heading in. You do what you have to. I’ll do what I have to.” I couldn’t stand there to debate what the next plan of action was going to be. I was going to get inside the school, kill Richard, save Jason, and get to my mother and Daviel; end of story.
“Alright, better plan; we can help each other,” Jack’s words left his mouth so fluently in confidence there was no option but to listen.
“What do you have in mind?” I asked.
Curiosity: Responsible for the premeditated assassination of many cats.
“Okay, here we go!” he began, “I can’t take on many of the infected with just six rounds in the rifle. You can’t get through the school without someone to clear a path through this whole mess. You help me get rifle ammo or another gun, and in exchange I clear a path for you with the rifle. In addition, on the way up you can take some of the infected out. You successfully get in, and I successfully help some of these people.” Time was short but this explanation was important. This was a safe
and assured way to advance. The question was, where would we find another gun or ammo for the rifle?
As time wasted I became more desperate. Still, there we stood, watching people die up the road while we planned some kind of overhaul, one which would likely fail and result in both our deaths regardless.
“We can check the area and hope for the best. Maybe one of his guys is along the mountain side. It’s unlikely he will leave himself unprotected, and it’s even more unlikely he will allow his protection to proceed unarmed,” Jack explained.
“Under that logic it’s almost a sure thing Richard left someone else down here. Let’s hope you are right,” I had no choice but to agree. In order for me to make it inside the school under the safest conditions backup would be a must.
Infected collected all around the school, few in our area, none aware of us. To spot a single soldier amongst the chaos would be impossible, but to redirect the chaos with some noise made it easier to spot anyone less reactive.
“I can run out there and attempt to attract as many of the infected as I can. I’ll find cover somewhere and come back afterwards,” I was coming up with the plan as the words came out of my mouth.
“Go on, you’ve got my attention.” The palm of Jack’s right hand opened to the sky, he welcomed me to continue.
“Well…” I wasn’t ready to tell him what the plan asked for, but the time being wasted was extensive to say the least. It was a now or never moment, “Then you’ll have to use the rifle on the first soldier who sticks out.” I knew it wasn’t fair to ask anyone to do this, but someone had to do it. Survival called for extreme measures.
“Alright, let’s get this started!” Jack agreed with ease, no second thought given to it.
His reaction made me uneasy. I wondered what the source of his willingness to take life was. Had he experienced worse than I in the last few days? I struggled more to tell him the plan than he did to agree. Maybe he was better adjusted than I was to the new world.
