by D C P Fox
“A child?” The same skinhead said. “Shit, okay, bring out the child.”
Alexander saw Emily emerge from the van, eyes wide, frowning, but silent. It was an act of bravery from someone so young.
Janice came out next.
“Okay,” the skinhead called loudly. “Peter, escort the driver out.”
“He’s badly wounded—” Alexander started to say before being interrupted.
“I thought I told you to shut the fuck up.”
Vin suspected he was mortally wounded, as he couldn’t stop the bleeding out of his abdomen. While lamenting his pre-apocalypse time was too short, he admitted, as he imagined the life getting sucked out from him, that post-apocalyptic life would be shitty. But his biggest regret was he’d never started a family. He’d told himself he didn’t want one, but now he realized that was a rationalization. He would never know what it was like to marry and have children. At least you could still do that in a post-apocalyptic society, but even so he wouldn’t want to bring up any children in this environment. Not having to grieve over a family turned into zombies assuaged his regret. Because he didn’t have children, there were fewer people in this post-apocalyptic cluster-fuck. Give them four years of life only to pull the rug out from under them and make them live out miserable lives.
He wondered if zombies felt the pain, loss, and trauma the remaining normals suffered from.
Emily.
Emily was probably the reason he now regretted not having kids. Yet at the same time, he felt fortunate not to have brought any children into this world.
At least he got to enjoy a comfortable life, albeit a short one.
Will Emily even remember any of her life before the apocalypse? Would she remember anything if she turned into a zombie? And if she turned into a zombie, and if that condition were reversed, would she remember anything from her past life?
Vin, by dying, was getting off easy. It was Emily he mourned for.
“Let’s go,” commanded the man outside the van’s open sliding door. Thinking about going out in a blaze of glory, he decided against it as the skinheads would probably take his resistance out on the rest of his group.
“I’m weak,” Vin managed to say before groaning in pain. “I think I’m dying.”
“I’ll kill you myself if you don’t come out . . . Your choice.”
“I can’t take my hands off the . . . wound. I’ll bleed out . . .”
“I’ll open the door for you,” the skinhead said.
The white-hot pain almost unbearable, he got out one more warning. “I’ve got a handgun . . . in a holster . . . I can’t take it out or . . . I’d have to . . . remove my hands.”
“Use one hand for the bleeding. Use the other to open the door a crack and then hold it high. Understood?”
“Yes.” He took his right hand off the wound and started to move. Sharp pain greeted him and he cried out. He exited the van as commanded.
Dizzy. And cold.
The bad men brought Prince Charming around the front of the van at gunpoint. His face all scrunched up, he gasped and tumbled down onto the road. The bad men with the guns had done nothing to break his fall.
All the bad men had funny drawings on their foreheads.
“Charming!” Emily called as his head hit the ground.
“He can’t hear you, miss,” said one of the bad men. “He’s too busy dying.” He laughed and the rest of the bad men laughed along with him.
Was he really dying? Was her savior dying? That’s not how the fairytale was supposed to go.
But this was no fairytale. This was not pretend anymore.
She noticed she was absent-mindedly scratching around her bandaged arm wound. She stopped as she remembered Janice had told her not to do it, especially when others were around. She should keep her wound covered in public. Because people shouldn’t know that she might become a zombie.
It still throbbed in pain.
Nobody was helping Charming! She ran toward him. Someone needs to help him! She heard someone say, “Let her go.”
But she didn’t know what to do. She asked him a few times if he was dead. He didn’t respond. She shook him a few times, but he just wouldn’t wake up.
“Help him!” she cried to the others. “Somebody please make him not dead!”
Dead. Like her brother, her father, and her mother.
She looked at Janice, who was doing nothing. “Ms. Fernley! Make him not die! You need to stop everyone from dying!”
“Please, let me go to him,” Janice begged one of the bad men.
“He’s dead already,” said a bad man.
“You have to let me help him,” Janice said as she nodded in Emily’s direction.
“Sorry lady,” said another of the bad men. “Only the kid. And he’s dead anyway.”
No!
Vin still had his gun, and Emily stared at it. It was right there in a holster at his side.
“Don’t think about it, little lady. You’ll be dead before you have a chance to raise it.”
Chapter Thirty-Five
Day Nine
Jocelyn lay face-down on the ground, not moving at all. Alexander wondered if Jocelyn was actually dead. If she wasn’t, she was either unconscious or doing a good job of faking. He hoped everyone in the group had sense enough not to check on her. Could she survive a gunshot wound to the head? It would stand to reason she could, if she possessed the healing powers of the zombies.
Vin was most likely dying, and although he also lay face down on the road, his stomach obscured his right hand. Could he also be faking it while staunching the bleeding with his hand?
Emily hugged Vin. Alexander hoped she didn’t hug him so hard that she squeezed any blood out of him.
And would the neo-Nazis kill them all, anyway?
Alexander could tell they were neo-Nazis because they all had unprofessional, sloppy swastika tattoos on their foreheads, with various lines around them, below their shaved heads. They were white men, wearing jeans and t-shirts, in their twenties and thirties, except for the one who had let Emily go, who was older. He looked around. “Corporal Brien, where is Private Spearman?” he asked.
One man, whose swastika was decorated with a horizontal line on top and then a vertical line on the right crossed by two horizontal lines, and looked to be in his thirties, said, “Private Spearman is dead, Captain.”
“Shit,” the Captain, the one in his forties, said. “We’ll take his body back.” He smirked. “We can put him in a back seat with the woman and child.”
“Are we killing any of them, Captain?” Brien asked.
“No.” He pointed to Jocelyn and Vin. “Leave these two to rot and die. The rest are slaves and should be addressed as ‘Slave.’” The last part he said while turning his head around, clearly announcing this to everyone.
“And the van?”
“Loot it and leave it. It won’t be of any use. Who knows what kind of shape it’s in? And without Spearman, there’s no one to drive it.”
Alexander said, “I can drive a car.”
“What’s your name?” The Captain asked.
“Alexander Williams, Captain.”
“You will not address me that way, Slave Williams. You will use ‘Slave’ when referring to another slave when in the presence of a non-slave, and you will use ‘Sir’ when addressing non-slaves. Except everyone addresses The Führer as ‘Führer’ or ‘Mein Führer’” He raised an eyebrow. “Understand?”
“Yes, Sir,” Alexander said.
The Captain gave a broad smile. “That goes for the rest of you slaves. A bar underneath the swastika indicates a slave. Anything without one is not a slave, understood?”
No one said anything. “Good, let’s get moving. Cuff the slaves. And no, Slave Williams, you won’t drive.”
While they looted the van, Brien said, “There’s a cat in a carrier here, Captain.”
“We don’t need no cats. Leave it to starve.”
“But, Captain, we could e
at it?”
The Captain got a disgusted look on his face. “I don’t think we’re that desperate yet.”
When they had finished their looting, Alexander noted they never found Jocelyn’s sword underneath the middle seat.
Marty was a dead man if they ever identified him as a county sheriff. Handcuffed and riding in the Colfax County Sheriff’s car, Marty sat next to Alexander, also in handcuffs, in the back seat.
He hoped most of the six thousand Colfax Country prisoners perished, but he realized that a prison was probably one of the safest places to be when the apocalypse occurred.
The car reeked inside of pot smoke, though no one was smoking. They were privileged enough to be driven by the Captain.
Marty leaned over to Alexander next to him and whispered in his ear, “I’m not a sheriff.” Alexander nodded almost imperceptibly.
“Where are you taking us?” Marty said aloud.
“Where are you taking us, Sir?” the Captain corrected.
“I’m sorry, where are you taking us, Sir?”
“To the Führer. He’ll want to talk to you, seeing as how you’re the first people we’ve met outside of the valley.”
“How many remain in the valley, Sir?”
“I’ll leave that information for the Führer to give, if he wants to.”
“How are you dealing with the zombies? Um . . . Sir?” Alexander asked.
“Zombies, eh? That’s a good word for ‘em. Like in the TV show. We’ve just been calling ‘em ‘Crazies.’ I never seen one myself, but the guards at the prison did. Talked about madmen killing everyone in sight without weapons. We’d thought the guards had gone mad until they let us out. When we got out, you know what we found?”
“Nobody,” Alexander answered, then added “Sir” hastily.
“That’s right. How did you know? Not a soul . . . but I’ve said too much already. Best wait for the Führer to decide what to tell you and what not.”
Alexander must be thinking the same thing as Marty. If the neo-Nazis hadn’t seen one yet, they may not know how to fight them off when they return home. And why hadn’t any returned to Bullhead City when they’d returned to Beaver Park?
Marty looked behind him. The car carrying Janice and Emily was following them.
Janice, handcuffed, sat in the middle of the back seat in an old Toyota Camry. On her left was the dead body, the skinhead Jocelyn killed. She thought her days dealing with dead bodies were over years ago.
At least she was a buffer between the body and Emily. Still, Emily had been through enough already, and now Janice wasn’t sure how Emily would cope with this latest development. And at least Emily wasn’t in handcuffs—too big for her wrists.
In fact, Emily was super-quiet. She hadn’t said a word since they peeled her off of Vin’s body, dead or not. And now she had stopped crying. She just seemed to stare off into space. To Janice, it was eerie, even though she knew Emily was disassociating.
“Where are you taking us, Sir?” Janice asked.
“To the Führer. He’ll be happy we captured a woman.”
Janice shuddered.
As the convoy reached the edge of town, Alexander saw plumes of gray-brown smoke move Eastward away from them in the distance against a clear, blue sky.
“What’s burning?” he casually asked.
“Prisons,” the Captain answered. Alexander decided not to ask follow-up questions.
They approached a checkpoint on the edge of town, next to one of the burning prisons. Alexander smelled the smoke in the air. The rest of the prisons were miles ahead, at least assuming all were being burned. He counted eight skinheads with assault rifles of assorted kinds. Alexander eyed the assault rifle propped up against the passenger seat.
“How much of the town do you control?” Marty asked as they pulled in.
“Save your questions for The Führer,” the Captain said. “But he’ll like them less than I do.”
“Sieg Heil! Captain McNulty. You probably never knew my last name. It’s Buchan, Captain. It’s gonna be hard, Don, to remember all these ranks and names.”
Buchan looked down at the cars behind them and peered in.
“Got some slaves?”
“Yes, Captain Buchan, permission to take these slaves to The Führer?”
“Granted, Captain McNulty . . . Cliff . . . er, sorry Captain . . . The Führer is an odd one.”
“Be careful not to call him by name. He’s likely to shoot ‘ya.”
“I know, it won’t happen again. Though it’ll be hard to remember calling people by their title. At least you and I don’t have to ‘cause we’re the same rank.”
“That’s what he said. Okay, Stephen, we’ll proceed to the school now.”
“Okay, but I’ll need to inspect all the cars.”
“Do what you gotta do. I’ll wait up ahead for ‘em.” They pulled up a ways down the road and waited.
After a few minutes, Captain Buchan approached them. “Okay, you’re free to go to the school.”
“Thank you,” McNulty said, and they proceeded into town.
Bullhead City was a quaint little town with small trees and one- and two-story brick buildings through the center. These gave way to scattered one-story buildings with more trees lining the main street. Motor vehicles of various sorts stood on the sides of the roads haphazardly. They must have cleared the road, but that must have been a huge effort. How many people did they have here?
They got to the three-story school on the left. “BULLHEAD CITY MIDDLE SCHOOL” was carved in stone just below the roof. Dead bodies littered the front lawn, and Alexander let out a “holy shit.” They were all lying face up, neatly displayed in rows on each side of the center walkway.
Alexander counted the bodies in a row, then counted the number of rows and multiplied. The number came out to greater than 500.
Holy shit was right. He sat there gaping at the bodies. He then turned back to Marty, who was on the other side of the car from the gruesome scene. Given the astonished expression on Marty’s face, though, he must have seen them, too.
His car door opened. “Get out. Stop your staring and get out. Watch your head.”
Alexander got out, and it in fact was hard to duck his head enough with handcuffs on behind his back. Marty was let out the other side. Near the car behind them, Janice, cuffed in the front, carried Emily as best as she could while Emily clung onto her with her face buried in her bosom.
Good. The less Emily sees the better.
Alexander, Marty, Janice and Emily were all forced at gunpoint to walk down the concrete path that bisected all the dead bodies that led to the school entrance.
Alexander retched as the scent of death overcame him. He looked at the others. Marty held his head down. Emily continued to have her face in Janice’s bosom.
The skinheads escorting them pinched their noses with one hand, their other hand on the trigger of their assault rifles.
Alexander noticed that most of the bodies were minorities—generally Hispanic or African-American, along with a few Asians. But there were some white people, too. These all had knife carvings on their foreheads. For the men, many, but not all, said, “TRAITOR,” while all the women bore “WHORE” tattoos. Alexander noted one that said, “PEDOPHILE.”
They were escorted in through the front door, through about ten skinheads dressed in orange prison smocks. None of them seemed fazed by the odor. Alexander felt a relief to have those corpses behind him. Though he didn’t look forward to having to exit back through them.
If they were allowed to leave. If they weren’t killed.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Day Nine
Jocelyn found herself in a building, an atrium. At least fifty floors of milled stone balconies, with rounded archways and wooden doors, towered above her. In front of the balconies straight across from her, a cascading waterfall fell into a turbulent pond, amidst lush vegetation.
She recognized this place—her Inner Temple.
Then she remembered the battle, the gunshot, blacking out.
Dying.
She died.
Well, this was what it was like to be dead. In my Inner Temple. Am I stuck here for all eternity?
But she realized there was no better place to spend eternity. She could make her Inner Temple anything she wanted it to be, make this into her own little paradise, conjure up a man to fall in love with, conjure up servants to cater to her every whim.
Or even dream up an adventure for fun.
Like a zombie apocalypse . . .
The thought occurred to her that she had been dead the whole time. That she had frozen to death in that cabin. And now that she was dead in her dreamed-up adventure, she was back in her Inner Temple.
The world waited for her instructions.
But she needed answers.
She turned around and walked over to her altar, inspecting it, facing eastward (she got to choose the cardinal directions in the temple). Beyond the altar, a lattice of mirrors reflected the “other half” of the temple. In the mirrors, she observed herself. She wore a red ritual robe, her head obscured in the hood. Lifting the hood off, she could see the bullet hole through her bangs, right in the center of her forehead.
Right before her eyes, her forehead healed.
Dead in my Inner Temple. I can do anything.
On her altar laid her familiar ritual tools, mimics of those she used on the material plane: a wood pentacle on her left, in the north, representing Earth; a crystal chalice immediately in front of her, in the west, representing Water; a wand (a polished, de-barked branch she had found in the woods that called to her—wands always chose you, rather than the other way around) on her right, in the south, representing Fire; a double-edged, nondescript knife with a wood handle, in front of her at the far side of the altar in the east, representing Air; and a cauldron in the center—to burn things safely, not that she couldn’t contain a fire in her Inner Temple. Anything else she might put on the table she could conjure up on command.
