THE COALITION PART II
LORD OF THE LIVING
Robert Mathis Kurtz.
LORD OF THE LIVING
For the first time since the day he’d set his mind to denying himself the luxury of most emotions, Ron hesitated. The warm summer wind blew around him and lifted his dark brown hair from his brow, revealing the high hairline that seemed to recede a little more every month. His hand was on the .357 handgun, but he hadn’t pulled it free of the holster.
Below them he could hear the elephants marching off, vanishing into some distant street. Overhead the sun was shining and all around them was yellow light. He looked down at the top of Oliver’s head, the boy’s golden hair was blowing in the warm wind even as that same wind took the strands on his own scalp and tossed them. He swallowed, hesitating again, allowing seconds to pass—seconds when he should have already acted. It was for the boy’s own good, to save Oliver from suffering, to save himself and Jean from danger.
He had to do it.
The gun came free of its leather sheath. There was hardly a sound. Oliver did not move, but Ron thought he could see the boy take in a quick sniff of air. It would be quick, and sure.
Just as the barrel came free of the holster, he felt Jean’s hands clamping on his wrist. With surprise he turned; a look of shock on his ruddy face.
“Wait,” Jean said.
“I…it needs to be done,” he told her. “I promised Oliver,” he tried to whisper it, but he knew the boy had heard him.
“No,” she said. “You don’t understand.” Kneeling, she took Oliver’s wounded arm in her own hands and examined it, holding the crescent form—the slight curvature where teeth had penetrated his pale skin.
Oliver stiffened, but said nothing.
“Relax, Oliver. Please.” Ron could see the boy’s muscles go slack; his shoulders slumped as if in resignation or some kind of secret defeat.
Jean took the boy’s arm and pushed it until the wound was flush with his lips. “Look, Ron. He did it himself. No deader bit Oliver. He did it himself.”
Ron shoved the gun back into his holster. He put his work-roughened hands on the boy’s shoulders and turned him around so that he could face the child. “Jesus H. Christ, son! What are you trying to do? I almost…” he choked. “I almost shot you, boy.”
And at that point Oliver really did collapse. He fell into Jean’s arms, his head resting on her shoulder, tears welling up out of his streaked face, revealing all for them to see and acknowledge. The façade of the tough little man was gone—vanished—and it was only a child clinging desperately to a woman.
“I…” he choked, sobbed. “I miss my parents,” he said. “I’m LONELY,” he wailed it out. “I just want to die. I want to go to sleep forever and you…” Oliver lifted his right hand and pointed at Ron. “You promised me you’d do it. If I got bit. If I was going to…” he drew in a breath. “Turn into one of them.”
Burying his face in Jean’s shoulder, hiding his eyes from those who were staring at him, watching him weaken, he cried like the child he really was. “I couldn’t do it myself, but I knew that you would do it. Because you promised me.”
Cutter stood there, unspeaking. All he could do was look down at the boy who was now clinging to Jean, his dirty arms around her torso, his head on her shoulder wetting it with his tears and his runny nose. For the first time since he’d first spotted the boy, he was painfully aware of how small and vulnerable the kid was. This was not a precocious child wise beyond his years; he was not a creature of wire and steel made hard by the mad situation. He was just a little boy, and Ron had failed him.
“Oliver.” He breathed in and felt the breath hitch in his chest. “You don’t have to be lonely. You don’t have to live by yourself. You can stay here. With me.” Jean was staring up at him now, and he was finding it hard to read the emotions in her face. It had been too long since he had dealt with people so closely. “You can stay with us, with me and Jean.”
Jean’s hands were stroking his hair, patting his back, rubbing his tear-streaked cheeks. “We’ll be your family,” she told him.
Buttoning the pistol down tight, Ron knelt with the two and let out a long and satisfying sigh. “It’ll be okay, Oliver. We’ll take care of you.”
**
Later, Ron left Jean to minister to the boy’s wound. They’d pried out of him that he’d done it the day before, so it had gone without any treatment at all for more than twenty-four hours. He’d washed it with fresh water, but that had been the extent of it. He led them to his first-aid kit and rubbed the wound down with alcohol and pine oil. Pure pine oil was something that his parents had sworn by for treating minor wounds and bruises, and he knew that it was effective. The bite zone didn’t look bad—there was nothing more than bruising and some minor reddening around the breaks in the skin, but you never knew.
He went to the edge of the waist-high wall and looked down the dozen floors to the streets. There weren’t many dead around. They were like that, at times. Some days they filled the streets and other days you’d hardly know they were there at all, hiding in shadows or reclining in moist rooms just waiting for whatever crazy signal sent them out to kill. Ron cleared his throat and spat.
What have you gotten yourself into? He had to ask himself that. It had been almost two years since he’d done anything this stupid. You’ve taken in two people. That’s two other lives you have to look out for. That’s three times the risk of just watching out for yourself. What the Hell was he thinking?
The image of Jean’s nude form came immediately to his mind. Well, that was something he didn’t have to wonder about. He’d gone without sexual companionship for a very long time, and she was easily the most physically desirable woman he’d seen in years. Hell—in the old world he wouldn’t have thought twice about pursuing a woman who looked like her. Way the heck out of his league. But what did he know about her other than she fucked like a cat and could shoot a zombie through the eye at 100 yards with a Saturday Night Special? She could leave in the middle of the night. She could vanish the first time he turned his back. For that matter, she could stick a shank in his ribs and take his crib.
Don’t think like that. You think like that and you’re fucked. You’ve made your decision. Now figure out a way to live with it.
Peering down the street, he could see a few of the walking dead tottering around, wandering aimlessly in the streets, devoid now of the giant visitors who had padded so effortlessly through town only an hour before. With elephants in the neighborhood, Ron had to wonder what else was creeping around the town. Maybe tigers, lions, or grizzly bears. Who knows what some zookeeper had cut loose in the final days before the world stopped punching the time clocks?
Shit. As if watching for hordes of murderous undead wasn’t bad enough, now he had to worry about going toe to toe with giant predators. For all he knew, there was a herd of angry rhinos stomping around waiting for him to show his ass.
Well, there wasn’t much else to do but take a walk around the rooftop. Sometimes when he was cooped up there, walking the perimeter was soothing—something to do to keep his mind off the situation of worrying about not getting eaten. So he did that, pacing slowly, his .220 Swift on his shoulder, a cap pulled down tight over his brow now that the sun was edging down out of the sky and a nice breeze was blowing. He could stand out there, stroll, and look for anything suspicious without dying of a heat stroke.
It was on the eastern side of the roof that he caught the first tendril of smoke. “Goddamn,” he said o
ut loud, although no one was there to hear him. Off in the distance, maybe a mile and a half from the city center, a greasy line of smoke was reaching up toward the clouds. It had already probed for the heights before reaching a temperature inversion and pointing suddenly northward, as if some unseen antagonist had snapped a finger in a fit of anger. Within the hour, Ron knew that bit of smoke would grow to a vast, fat column, as neighborhoods went to flame and the houses out there went up as dried kindling.
What the heck was going on? These were not random accidents. This wasn’t lightning strikes or spontaneous combustion caused by rotting trash. Someone was carefully and systematically burning the residential neighborhoods that ringed downtown Charlotte. Why was that? What were they up to? Who would do such a thing?
From the looks, he was going to lose a couple of more safe houses. As he watched, that single finger of smoke was—as he had known—joined by several more greasy digits that scrabbled at the blue sky like claws. Then he heard the door to his blockhouse open up, shut soundly, and a pair of footsteps was marching across the pale gravel toward him. He turned, a hard smile on his face, the sun backlighting the pair, Goddamn, he thought, I have a fucking family again.
“What are you looking at?” Jean came up close to him and put a reassuring hand on his shoulder. The pressure of her fingers felt good to him, it felt normal. He wanted her there and he wanted her to stay.
“Smoke.” He pointed. “Someone is burning the old houses down all around the city. I’ve been calling him the Fire Bug.” Ron shrugged. “Don’t know what else to call him.”
“I watched a whole street burn up once,” Oliver said, speaking up. His face was only slightly red; mainly around his nose. You could hardly tell he’d been crying. His arm was well bandaged and Ron could even smell the good scent of pine oil coming from the bone-pale bandages. “Some people came around the houses while I was watching. They were in a hurry, carrying their sh…their stuff.” Oliver’s eyes flicked toward Jean who looked down and smiled at him.
“Anyone you knew?” Ron asked.
“No,” he said. “Well, except for that guy…the English guy. The Colonel. You know.”
“What was he doing?” Ron sat down on the wall and rested there, peering at Oliver who seemed now to be somehow more solid, more whole than he had at any time since he’d met the child.
“Aw, he was just helping some of the people with their stuff. He was carrying things. And talking.”
“Talking. What did he say? Could you hear him?”
“Yeah, he was telling the people he was with where they could hole up for a while. He was telling them where they could be safe.” Oliver went to the wall and leaned out a bit, his eyes squinting at the growing tentacles of smoke that were, it was apparent, going to build into that column Ron was waiting for. One could even see little tongues of orange flame licking at the walls far away.
Jean edged up to Ron and pressed her body close to his. He could feel the curves of her against his hard shoulders, a softness against his hip. “Who is this guy?” she asked.
“Colonel Dale,” Ron told her. “You’ll meet him. He wants to run the place. I haven’t figured him out, yet. Either he’s a saint or…”
“Or what?” she asked.
“Hell, I don’t know. The guy seems to be genuinely concerned about us.” He paused. “The living. The ones who are holding out here in town trying to survive until…well, until things get better.”
“You think he’s for real?” Jean sighed almost silently, and Ron felt the urge for her rising in him. He was stuck. With her. On her. She had gotten under his skin in a way and with a speed he’d never have figured. Could he hang onto her?
“Like I said, I haven’t figured him out. He wants me to help him.”
“Help him? Do what?”
“Shit. I don’t know.” He turned and took her shoulders in his hands. He peered into those eyes of hers, trying to ignore the fact that she was absolutely beautiful, totally alluring, driving his every thought. “I’ve spent the past year—since I first encountered him—avoiding whatever message he has. He wants to set up…I don’t know…something like a society. He can’t do it alone, he says. And for some reason, he thinks that I can help him. I always figured he says that to everyone. Like someone trying to make you feel special to get something out of you.” He smiled at her, his mouth turning up in a crooked grin he couldn’t help.
“Hell, Jean. I was a salesman before, before all this. I know how the game works. You butter someone up and hope to get what you need. But there’s always been something else there with Colonel Dale. I think he might be on the level...” he hesitated.
“But you just don’t know,” Jean finished the thought for him.
“Yeah. That’s right. I’m just not sure. I’m not sure about him, and I’m not sure about anything much, these days.”
“Well,” Jean put her arms around Ron’s waist and drew her own body into his, hugging him. “You can be sure about me. I won’t leave you guys.” Turning her head, she looked down at Oliver and winked at him.
Oliver smiled back at her, looking for the first time like what he was—a little boy. The stress and the pain seemed to have peeled from him like dead skin.
**
There were people crying. And not just crying, but wailing.
What the fuck are they doing? He almost said it out loud, but kept it in his thoughts. They’ll draw deaders like sea gulls to a loaf of bread. Someone was screaming, but not in pain. It was the kind of scream he’d heard a thousand times over the two years since the zombies had come into the world. This was the sound that people made when they were enraged and infused with fear and drenched in sorrow. Ron supposed it was the kind of sound people made when bombs had rained down on their homes in wars past, when napalm had soaked the skin of their children, when bullets had riddled the bodies of their loved ones. Before, such things had been footage on television news shows or grainy video in documentaries, but now it was real, and these days, it was familiar mental turf.
Before, Ron would have heard those screams of mindless rage and gone in the opposite direction, but two weeks with Jean and Oliver had done something to him. The mere presence of the two had awakened compassion in his heart and although he still felt it was a weakness, he couldn’t resist the urge to help. Not anymore.
Instead of going the way he’d intended, down streets he’d planned to traverse, he found himself drawn toward the screams and wailing. There was no way the dead scum had not also heard those same screams, and so he knew that he’d have to fight when he got to where he was being drawn. It was as if he was caught tight in a net and couldn’t get loose. Is that what humanity did to you?
Cutter was a good four blocks from his home when he heard the screams. They’d started soon after he’d felt the chatter of automatic gunfire. He had to assume that someone had been accidentally shot, or bullets hadn’t stopped the advance of the dead, or two parties of the living were at one another’s throats. They were out there, he knew: people who would prey on other humans. There didn’t seem to be many of them, but just as in the days before the collapse, such people walked the Earth. He had to assume the worst, and so he moved carefully and more furtively as he got closer to that cry of human anguish.
At the corner of Rankin Avenue and Bass Parkway, he stopped and crouched behind an old, blue postal box. It had been pried open for some time and weeds were growing out of it. That was okay for him, because it offered him some extra cover and broke up the lines of his body against the granite backdrop of the looted bank tower behind him. Across the street from his location there was the unmistakable plodding of zombies. True to what he’d feared, the screams had pulled them out of the recesses of overhangs and doorways and into the streets. They were headed for a bloody feast and soon their numbers would swell.
Better he should have blocked out the screams and gone where he had intended. He needed lead to make new bullets, and he had spotted a barrel packed with balancing w
eights in a garage less than a mile from his place. All he would have had to do was carefully make his way there, load about fifteen pounds of the soft metal into his pack, and go back to safety and to Jean and Oliver. He squatted there at the corner, beside the ruined mailbox and argued with himself, the smart Ron trying to convince the stupid Ron to break off this silly adventure and do what he’d left to do.
And suddenly a new scream tore into the summer wind. It was a woman. There was not just terror in her voice, but a bloody, pathetic sorrow.
“You dumbass,” he said to himself as he stood and bolted from one hiding place to another, heading toward the yelling voice, ready to help.
At least there had been no more gunshots. Along the way, darting from one waterlogged auto with doors standing permanently wide, to abandoned shipping crates that had been shoved off of flatbeds, to piles of trash dumped by garbage trucks driven by men anxious to save the weight to drive a few miles more, Cutter made his way closer and closer. Within less than a minute, he could see people. There were four people in the center of the street. A year and a half before, they would have been in the middle of an intersection in full light. But now, with Mother Nature having run rampant for almost two years, the streets were filled with tall grass and small shrubs. Who could have figured she’d reclaim her territory from us so quickly?
Now, to make his task more difficult, the shamblers were building up in groups and pods, as they aimed their white eyes toward the wailing and lifted dead feet to shuffle mindlessly on. Within a few minutes, there would be hundreds of the hateful goddamned things converging on this spot. Ron would have to make sure that they were not there when those few minutes were done.
Knowing that he would be better served to make his presence known to the people he could see, he stood out from concealment and called out to them.
“Hello! My name is Ron! I’m Ron Cutter and I’m coming to help you!” He wanted to remind them not to shoot, but he’d already drawn more than enough attention to himself. A dead thing that he hadn’t seen lifted itself out of a patch of sumac sprouting from beneath a faded Escalade and reached for him. Ron unfettered his trusty ball peen hammer and smashed its ugly cranium, splashing his calves with the pale and runny contents of its skull.
The Coalition: Part II The Lord Of The Living (COALITON OF THE LIVING Book 2) Page 1
