by Chris Lowry
"Did you hit your head!" he shouted.
"I think I hit my head," I mumbled.
Unless the blood streaming down my face was from a bullet wound too. Wouldn't that be some kind of sniper, to take out the driver and the person in the rear passenger seat in less than a second.
A shooter like that would need military training.
"Am I shot?"
"You're mumbling," said Brian. "Roll over."
He rolled me over and I could feel his fingers probing my head and neck. I saw movement out of the corner of my eye and tried to aim. He slammed my wrist into the ground.
It was Harriet and Peg dragging Julie away from the front seat where she cradled her dead husband.
"You're not shot," said Brian. "Just a flesh wound."
"Fight like a man," I mumbled again.
"No time for the boys," Brian scooted me back into the dark interior of the store.
He ripped a part of his shirt and pressed it to my forehead to staunch the bleeding. We were in an old diner, abandoned for many years by the look of it. The half brick and window wall on the front was gone, blocked by the giant corpse of the Caddy with the corpse of our driver in the front seat and by the smell of it a punctured gas tank.
The rest of us were hidden behind the counter squatting in a layer of dust and rat droppings on the scuffed tile floor.
"Back door?" Peg looked at Brian.
"We can't drag two," he shot a look at me and then at Julie in a fetal position on the floor.
"I can move," she sniffed.
"What about you?" he grabbed my face and turned it toward him.
"Lead on McDuff," I said. "I'll follow."
"Did you understand him?" Peg asked. "How hard did he hit his head?"
"I don't know. It happened too fast."
Anna moved his hands out of the way and lifted the cloth I had pressed against my head.
"It's a graze," she said as she traced the long shallow trench across my skin and up into the hairline. I winced.
"Two shots," I said.
"Two shots," she said. "One for the driver, one for him."
"Ambush."
"It's a trap," I explained.
"A trap," Brian continued.
My speech may have been impacted, probably due to all the colors and stars that circled my head, along with that ringing noise that wouldn't stop, but I could still stand. If it was an ambush, we had to get out of here.
"We need to get out of here," Brian studied the shadows in the back of the diner searching for a hallway or something that would lead us out back.
I pushed off the counter and planted my feet on the floor before it tilted too far. The shelves behind the counter shattered as bullets ripped through the opening.
"Stay down," Brian grabbed one arm, Anna the other and yanked me back to the floor.
He waved the others toward the back of the store and they began crawling through the grimy shadows. I pulled on his pants leg.
"Distraction."
"Did you say distraction?"
I nodded. The floor canted hard to the left when I did, and I slipped over into the ground hard.
Anna held up a lighter from her pocket and tossed it to Brian. He caught it in one hand as she helped me up and led me back with the others.
Brian crawled through the debris to a puddle of gas and lit the edge. Blue flame licked along the surface of the fluid and spread across the floor faster than he could back away. It cost him an eyebrow and the hair on one arm, but he made it to the group as we huddled by the locked and barred wooden back door.
They jimmied and played with the lock a minute, but it wouldn't budge. I rolled over onto my back even though Anna tried to stop me and kicked just under the doorknob as hard as I could. It budged.
Just a little, not even a crack really. But Brian got the idea and with Harriet's help, they donkey kicked the door open and we spilled into the sunlight in an alley just as the Caddy went up in a fireball.
Distraction.
It took a minute for our eyes to adjust, but Brian gathered us all up and herded us toward the end of the alley away from the street. We weren't sure where we would end up, but maybe we could hide from the attackers. Harriet dragged Hannah, Peg dragged Julie and Anna dragged me as we hobbled toward the far street.
Brushy Bill stepped around the corner and racked the slide on his rifle. His feral grin peeped out of his beard.
"Do you know how long I've been waiting for you?"
Another soldier stepped out from behind the other building and the two of them blocked the alley.
Julie jerked her hand away from Peg and bounced away from us toward the far wall. She bent down to grab a rock.
"You mother-"
Brushy Bill and his soldier lifted their rifles toward her.
I took two steps forward, raised the Glock and sent my last bullet into Brushy Bill's nose. He dropped, finger locked on the trigger of his rifle as he fell, and he sent three rounds into the other soldier.
Distraction.
"Run!" Brian gasped and dragged us all forward.
Everyone grabbed somebody and started running after him. I slowed Anna long enough to pick up the soldier's gun, but we didn't clear him of anything else.
We made it across the street and around the back of a house before the rest of the platoon found their commander in the alley. Brian heard the order to spread out and search and kept us moving house to house until we ran out of them on the edge of town, and then we hid in the woods.
CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN
"Five years from now they'll never know we were here."
"Who?"
"People."
"Do you think there will be people left by then?"
Brian shrugged his shoulders and kept walking down the side of the road.
"It's been what, five weeks since this whole thing started and already nature is starting to reclaim it."
He brushed his hand along the tops of waist high grass that grew beside the asphalt. In some places vines had began to grow past the white line that delineated the side of the road and the beginning of the shoulder.
"The cities will hold out," I said.
He nodded in distraction.
"Out here it will go faster even if the cities are deserted. We'll have storms in the spring, trees will come down and then all of this will grow over the trees. The dirt will settle, dust will settle and seeds will get planted in it. If we come down this road next year I bet it will be covered in grass."
I stared up the long stretch of two lane highway that curved at the top of a hill. He was right. The trees overshadowed the road, and even though a path would remain I bet the road would be hidden in a year, maybe two.
It made me wonder about what we were going to do.
Nature was a harsh mistress. We had become so enamored of lifestyle that we never once considered how we would last if all of the trappings of civilization were peeled away.
I was reminded of Lord of the Flies and how the boys began to rebuild their own society based on savagery. Sure it was a metaphor for the beast within all of us, and the choices we make to straddle the thin line between man and caveman, but our encounters so far with cult leaders and megalomaniac National Guardsmen led me to believe that the writer wasn't far off the mark.
When society breaks down man becomes the beast.
I think I preferred the Robinson Crusoe approach. Man shipwrecked alone on an island, decides to retain civility and survive.
Maybe that account was more fiction than this zombie Armageddon we were going through. My own actions seemed to lend credence to that theory.
Nature might reclaim more than the progress of man, it was reclaiming man itself.
CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT
I don't remember the run through the woods. I don't recall being chased by Z or the sounds of pursuit from the vengeance fueled militia. I remember the trees, whipping past in a whirring burr of noise and the sound of the wind in the leaves rippling in
the sunlight.
We finally stopped when we crossed from the woods into a ditch and up onto asphalt. Directly across from us was a one room white church that looked like it had been slapped together out of scraps and whitewashed by Tom Sawyer and crew.
The sign said it was Methodist, but the broken spire probably meant abandoned, the long weeds around the lot confirming it hadn't been used in years.
Aged plywood covered the windows, the wood gone gray from rain and exposure, and the steps to the entrance were missing.
Brian checked both ways like a good little boy scout is supposed to, but the road had long since been abandoned. A layer of leaves was beginning to gather and dirt obscured the center line. We listened for the sounds of engine, the sounds of people chasing us, the sounds of Z, a low throat gurgle or slurping sound shuffle.
There were only the birds and the breeze and the sound of our wheezing until Julie's turned into quiet tears, shoulders shuddering as she huddled in the grass next to the road.
“Which way?” Peg glanced at me but directed her question toward Brian.
He aimed a hand in one direction, then turned in the opposite, trying to get his bearings. We had gotten turned around in the woods, but the sun was drifting west on the left side of the road. I almost told him to pick north, but he pointed and began to lead us in that direction.
Good man. Peg helped Julie up and we began a death march along the roadway.
I tried my best to stay upright and just grit through the pounding in my skull. It felt like my skin was being stretched like a balloon, and the crusty blood drew flies that buzzed in clouds over the top of me.
“Wish I had a hat,” I said.
“I wish you had a hat too,” Anna tried to swat them for me.
At least my speech was coming back.
Julie had to be led by an arm, the other clenched to her face as tears dripped on the asphalt, leaving a little trail that evaporated almost as soon as we passed.
Hannah and her mom brought up the rear, the young girl keeping watch over her shoulder for us.
We moved for hours as the sun set further and when the gray light of dusk began to filter through the trees it was time to get off the road and make camp.
“I hoped for a house,” said Brian as he peered into the growing darkness.
Everyone did. Out here we would be exposed.
Even if the Z surrounded a house the walls made us feel safer. In the woods, there were just the trees, the terrain not enough of a deterrent to keep us safe.
The Z could have kept walking. That's how I knew we were still alive. We were exhausted.
No one in normal life moved for more than eight hours a day. It was something we lost in the industrial revolution as the cities got crowded. People moved into office buildings and locked themselves behind desks, and then after work locked themselves onto couches. They weren't used to all day activity, and it showed in how we fell around the clearing Brian declared home for the night.
Hannah curled up by a tree and began sniffling. Julie leaned against a trunk and continued crying.
Brian though kept earning the mantle pressed upon him when I got hurt. He turned Harriet and Peg loose to find vines and branches, building a makeshift fence between the trees, just four or five thick, not enough to hold in horses if we had them, but good enough to give us warning if something tried to crash through them. And maybe they were strong enough to buy us time.
That done I heard them debate building a fire. Brian looked at Anna who shrugged.
“I gave you my lighter,” she said.
“Two sticks.”
“I'm not rubbing two sticks together,” he said to me.
Which meant we were out of options.
We didn't have anything to cook anyway. Our supplies were left in the trunk of the Caddy back in Milford and we hadn't run across any abandoned houses or cars in our time since.
We would have to find something tomorrow, especially since our escape had drained us.
There was water in a ditch that we could use as a last resort, but with no fire to boil it that was taking a chance we weren't ready for yet. At least you can fight against a Z or militiaman, but a microscopic bug in your gut could kill you just as dead.
“I miss music,” Hannah whimpered.
Harriet rubbed her hair back from her forehead in a soothing way mothers do. I never got to witness it on my children growing up, their mothers acting as mothers do during the formative post toddler years. That was one of my biggest regrets. Missing so much. I remembered my grandfather teaching me to fish, to shoot and how to build things with my hands, and those were the memories I carried with me.
My children would remember their step-fathers, and maybe carry the thought of me as someone who visited once a month and took them to do cool things.
Sure I tried to keep it fun, and make memories, but even a weekend at a theme park doesn't compare with sitting together in the backyard night after night and learning about the constellations. Or going to coach a T-ball game, or watching soccer.
There were thousands of little things I missed with each of them, and those ghosts of memories that never happened haunted me.
Even music.
One of my memories is of my mother vacuuming our small home with the wind coming through the screen door on a wet Saturday morning, and the radio blasting some pop disco song. I still smile when I hear it, or heard it, and sometimes still get a whiff of wind when it's wet and time travel back to her doing the boogie with the Hoover. Just a random moment on a random day. The kids didn't get that with me.
Maybe another reason I was so hell bent on riding to their rescue. That would be a good memory for them to carry.
“And Snapchat,” Hannah continued.
“Facebook,” Brian added from across the dark clearing. “We could sure use it now to find out what's going on in the rest of the world.”
“The rest of the world is just like this,” said Anna.
“How do you know?”
I could feel her shrug her shoulders next to me.
“How could it not be? If there were still people in charge, they would have come to the rescue here. You don't just write off Florida.”
“Maybe they contained it here,” Harriet cooed. “Maybe when we get to the border there will be a big wall and fence keeping all the bad down here in the swamp.”
“No,” said Anna. “It's bad all over. They wouldn't have time to build a fence and you see how fast it spreads. You saw the news before it went out. This is it.”
The silence stretched between us for a little bit.
“I'd still like to know,” Brian finally said. “I think once we find a place to fort up, we'll be able to start gathering news. It's not like we lost all of our infrastructure, we just lost the people who ran it. I bet the Internet is still there. Or here, I mean.”
Peg patted his arm.
“It's not like we revert back to frontier days.”
He said something I'd been thinking. I knew there were cavemen out there, so maybe I thought we devolved a little bit further than he did. But he was right.
We had been thinking roads, but trains ran into Arkansas too. We just needed to find one. Or a plane and someone who knew how to fly. There options out there, and the country didn't just all of the sudden stop having technology.
The electricity went out because something overloaded the circuits or someone forgot to feed the coal into the burner, or some simple human error. When Brian got to where he wanted, he could find some people with the knowledge to build a work around.
We just had to find those people. They had to be out there somewhere. They couldn't all be Z.
Anna stayed next to me and made concerned noises over the gash in my head.
She threw out words like concussed, and don't sleep, but I pretended not to hear her and closed my eyes anyway. She jostled me awake a few times, so I just waited until she passed out before following her into the abyss.
“Hannah!�
� Harriet screamed us awake.
I jumped up and instantly regretted it as a wave of pain reached out and grabbed my skull. It squeezed until I choked and hit the dirt retching.
Then it passed, like water receding off of the sand and I could breath.
“Hannah!” Harriet screamed again.
Brian examined the lowest vine between two trees, holding the two ends in each hand.
“It's been cut,” he stared at me.
Leader Brian had retreated somewhere, or just taken a backseat to me now that it was a new day.
I almost gave it to him. I almost cut out on my own and just chucked it all to good luck and fare thee well.
I took a deep breath instead.
“Look around,” I said. “Did she struggle?”
“I would have heard-” Harriet started to say, but went quiet when I held up my hand.
I was just glad they could understand me, even though my tongue felt like I had cotton in my mouth.
Brian and Peg swept the ground on both sides of the fence, tearing down the branches so they could access it better.
He came back and shook his head.
“Nothing?”
He shook it harder.
“So it wasn't a Z,” I said. “Pretty sure they don't cut, but just in case they bit through it or something.”
“I could have told you blade, if you asked,” Brian said. But he smiled when he said it.
“Shot in the head,” I pointed to my melon.
“Could be a marked improvement.”
“We'll see. No Z. That means human. The militia would have killed us.”
“Strangers? I think we would have heard them. Why would they just take a little girl.”
“Sacrifice,” Anna whispered.
We all turned to look at my little nursemaid cowering next to the trunk of a tree.
"It was them," she said.
Harriet turned on her and grabbed her. She jammed her against the rough bark of a pine tree and lifted her off the ground. Anna's tiny feet scrabbled against the tree for purchase, but just littered the ground with more scrapings.
"You," Harriet growled. "You were part of them. I knew we shouldn't trust you."
