by Brant, Jason
Eifort ran over with Brown and Cass in tow. She wore a pair of boy shorts and a tank top. Her hair was disheveled from sleep, her face slightly puffy. The M4 she always carried was tucked against her shoulder. She’d given Lance a small lecture when he’d referred to it as an M16 a few weeks before. He’d almost been punched when he called a magazine a clip.
Cass had her axe, looking medieval as she ran across the field with it. Her matted hair looked less ridiculous than the mohawk she’d styled it in recently.
“Did you make that shot from the cabin?” Lance asked Eifort as she stopped beside him. “Nice work. Saved my ass. Again.”
“Barely. I stepped out of the back door right when you cleared the trees.” She looked down at the body. “What the hell were you doing in the woods?”
“Being a dumbass, no doubt.” Cass glared at him. “You’re supposed to be on patrol around the perimeter, not going for a moonlight stroll.”
“Straight to the dumbass stuff? No, ‘glad you’re safe, Lance?’” He put the pistol back in its holster.
Doc Brown, shirtless and red-faced, stopped beside them. He peered around the area. “Where’s Billy?”
Lance frowned. “They got him.”
Brown closed his eyes and took a deep breath. When he opened them, he turned to Joe. “Get a handful of men and double up on the guards around the perimeter. Tell everyone to go back to sleep. We’ll hold a meeting in the morning and tell everyone what happened.”
“What, exactly, did happen?” Cass asked. “Why did that thing chase you this far into the light?”
Brown held up a hand. “Wait until we’re inside the cabin. We don’t need to get everyone all worked up until we can figure out exactly what happened.”
“You want me to tell everyone to go back inside?” Joe asked. “They aren’t gonna like that too much.”
“You’re right,” Brown said. “I’ll tell them myself. Go get those men and keep them posted until morning.”
“Got it.” Joe jogged toward a group of people standing in front of a cluster of RVs.
The doc turned to Lance. “Are you all right?”
“It hit me in the back, but I’m fine.” Lance looked at Cass out of the corner of his eye and mumbled, “At least someone asked.”
“Wait for me in the kitchen. Megan, would you get him a glass of my Scotch?”
Eifort nodded. “Sure. We could all use one after this.”
Brown walked over to the waiting crowd, quieting them with his hands.
Eifort led Lance and Cass back to the cabin. She ruffled her hair and exhaled loudly. “That’s not something you want to wake up to.”
“I’m just glad you’re a hell of a shot.” Lance tried to count how many times she’d saved him with that rifle. He didn’t know how she’d been as a soldier before it all fell apart, but she’d been as good an ally as anyone could have asked for since.
Cass socked him in the ribs. The blow hurt. She was small, but she packed a punch. “Did you go into the woods to find Billy? By yourself?”
“Yeah.”
“Why the hell didn’t you wait?”
“There was blood everywhere. I was afraid he might bleed out while I was trying to get help.”
“You get me knocked up, then go and do stupid shit like this. And you wonder why I go straight to the dumbass stuff.”
They walked through the back door of the cabin and meandered their way to the kitchen. Eifort disappeared into the bedroom she shared with Doc Brown and came back a moment later with three glasses and a bottle of single malt. She’d put on basketball shorts, her modesty returning now that the threat had passed.
Cass filled a cup with water and sat at the table.
Eifort poured three fingers worth into Lance’s glass and handed it to him.
He took a seat beside Cass and pretended to savor the smell of the alcohol. “Jealous?”
“Hilarious.” She rolled her eyes. “Being pregnant sucks.”
Brown came in a minute later and sat down, rubbing his balding head. He took a sip of the scotch and settled in. “They’re restless out there. Not having an attack like that for almost two weeks had them feeling comfortable, for a change.”
“Me too.” Lance had felt relatively safe since they’d taken the compound from Ralph. After the death of the prepper from Hell, things had quieted down.
As much as they could when you were surrounded by mutated monsters, anyway.
Lance ran his tongue over his teeth, thinking about where to start. “You aren’t going to like what just happened.”
“Of course we aren’t,” Brown said. “A boy died.”
“I think we might be in some deep shit here.” Lance looked over at Cass, thinking about the child they would have in a few months. How could he protect them if what he thought had just happened was true?
“What is it?” Cass asked.
“When I was walking the perimeter, I noticed that there weren’t any shrieks coming from the trees.”
Eifort leaned forward. “None?”
“Not a single one. I could actually hear crickets.” Lance had grown accustomed to the bleating beasts and had learned to sleep through the night. Cass still struggled with the racket sometimes, but she’d been doing better over the past week or so. “Then I noticed that Billy wasn’t at his station. I found his rifle and spotlight by the empty chair. A trail of blood led into the woods.”
“Poor kid.” Brown threw back the rest of his scotch in one go.
“As I was standing there with Joe, we saw something move further into the trees. I was afraid it might be Billy, so I went in to check it out. Joe stayed back and kept his light trained on me.” Lance’s nose wrinkled as he remembered the stench that hit him. “I followed the blood trail until I found Billy’s body wedged up in a tree.”
Cass held a hand up. “Hold on. They jumped into the light, grabbed the kid, dragged him into the woods, killed him, and then stashed his body in a tree?”
Lance nodded. “They set a trap. Three of them attacked me at once, one in front and two at my sides. They sat and waited for someone to come in after him.”
“They set a trap?” Eifort asked. “How? They’re fucking animals.”
Brown poured another glass of booze. He stared at the table.
“I’m with Eifort,” Cass said. “They’re mindless brutes. They can’t stop fighting each other long enough to eat. Remember how they were in the subway? They just kill, eat, and shit. They aren’t capable of problem solving.”
“Listen to me.” Lance locked his gaze on hers. “They lured me out there. All of them stayed quiet until I was right in front of them. It was a trap.” He jabbed his index finger against the table. “And they picked the youngest, weakest person on watch to kill.”
Guilt washed over Lance. He never should have given Billy a shift. The boy’s family had died during the first few days of the outbreak, and he’d somehow worked his way to the compound by himself. He didn’t have a parent watching over him. Lance should have assumed part of that responsibility. At least, enough to tell the kid no when it needed said.
They all looked to Brown, the oldest and wisest of them. He’d become the unofficial leader of the compound. People looked to him for guidance. The stress showed in the lines on his face, the bags under his eyes.
But he never complained.
“You’re sure of the details?” he asked Lance, finally.
“One hundred percent. They were waiting for me.”
“Perhaps the mutation isn’t quite finished.” Brown slouched in his seat, hands still cradling his glass. “We assumed their transformation had ended because their bodies quit distorting, but maybe we were wrong.”
“What are you saying?” Cass asked. “That their ability to think is coming back? Their memories?”
“I have no way of answering that. But if Lance is correct, and they set a trap for him, then they’ve regained some kind of rudimentary intelligence.”
“If that�
�s true, we’re screwed,” Eifort said. “It’s not like we have an overly complex method of surviving the night. With their speed and strength, a little bit of smarts will go a long way.”
Lance wanted to punch the wall. They were struggling to get by as it was. If the horrors of the night were becoming more than mindless beasts, then things were about to get a lot worse.
“Let’s not shit our pants just yet,” Cass said. “This was one experience out of the norm. Listen to them now, they’re out there screaming like banshees. Maybe it’s just a freak occurrence.”
“Maybe.” Brown finished his scotch and stood, leaving the glass on the table. “We’ll discuss it more tomorrow. I’m exhausted and need more rest.”
Lance peered through the window above the sink, spotting the faint glow of the coming sunrise. He knew that sleep wouldn’t come to him for a long time. “What about Billy’s body?”
“We’ll get it first thing in the morning. We don’t need to put anyone else in danger tonight.”
They said their good nights and plodded to their respective bedrooms. Cass flopped onto the bed, lying on her side. Lance sat beside her, rolling his shoulders to work out the stiffness in his back.
All traces of Ralph had been removed from the room long ago. Potted plants sat in the windows, saplings sprouting from the soil. Weapons of all sorts leaned against walls and filled the closets.
A crib sat in the far corner, opposite the bed. Lance had found it while scavenging through a small community of townhomes outside of the Westmoreland mall. They wouldn’t need it for quite a while, but he’d brought it back to put a smile on Cass’ face.
She’d given him a raft of shit over it at first, but he’d caught her standing beside it one night, running her hands over the rails. For the first few weeks, Cass had been pissed off over the pregnancy, but she’d come to accept it, even look forward to the day their little amigo would be born.
“I don’t like this, Cassie.”
She touched the scar on his back from Ralph’s knife. “I don’t either. It feels wrong.”
“Like we’ve been whistling past a graveyard, oblivious to the death closing in.” Lance closed his eyes, doing his best to focus on her warm touch.
The howling outside died down a few minutes later as the Vladdies retreated from the approaching morning.
Chapter 3
Three men retrieved Billy’s body from the trees and carried him to the pile of gas-soaked wood.
They placed the boy atop the pyre.
Others surrounded it, watching as flames consumed the mound a moment later.
Cremation was the method of disposing of the dead at the compound. If they buried the bodies outside of the fence, the Vladdies dug them up and dragged them away. The space inside of the compound was limited and didn’t allow for a cemetery.
Some of the more religious among them had complained at first, but they’d stopped arguing when the bodies of their loved ones were scavenged by the monstrosities roaming the night.
So, they were burned. A Viking funeral—quick and efficient. A pastor, who had wandered into the camp two weeks earlier, gave a small service at each of the cremations.
Lance watched the fire for several minutes, grinding his teeth.
He walked around the cabin then, hands stuffed in his pockets.
Packed earth formed paths around the home, worn down by thousands of weary steps. Grass, flattened and dying, trailed toward the rows of makeshift homes. Lance followed one of the paths, his gaze glossing over the cracks in the dry dirt as he made his way to the shed behind the cabin.
Inside, he grabbed an axe, the wood handle wrapped in dirty, torn tape. The heft felt good in his hands, giving him something to grind his anger and frustration into.
As he walked along the path leading to the pit he’d once fought a man to the death in, chainsaws revved. Men cut up fallen trees, clearing swaths of the forest.
Room had rapidly become the scarcest resource in the compound. New people filed in daily, seeking sanctuary. No one was ever turned away.
But that came with a price. Soon, there wouldn’t be enough space for new RVs or mobile homes. Some people had set up tents, but Brown balked at the idea of that being permanent. Anything that could be destroyed by a strong storm wasn’t viable in the long term.
They’d begun cutting down the trees separating the fields a few weeks ago. It was a slow, difficult process. No one living there had ever been a logger or landscaper, so removing the stumps and brush had proven painstaking and time consuming.
Lance hadn’t helped them too often—he’d been too busy lying around, bellyaching about the pain in his back. When he’d felt healthy enough, he grabbed an axe rather than a chainsaw.
The quick, explosive chopping motions helped him rehab his atrophied muscles. Despite the recent stabbing, his conditioning felt as good as, or better than, it had been in years.
And the mindlessness of it allowed him to focus on the problems their little pocket of the world faced. As he settled in front of a fallen tree, Billy’s death shoved its way to the forefront of his thoughts.
He brought the axe down, sending chips of bark into the air.
The Vladdies came into the light, ignoring the pain of their searing flesh.
Another chop, cutting into the meat of the log.
The creatures had stayed silent, something no one had witnessed before. They’d kept their emotions in check.
Sweat beaded on Lance’s forehead as he chopped his way through the tree. He wiped at it with the back of his forearm.
Working in a pack, the Vladdies had waited for someone to come searching for the boy. They’d failed to kill Lance, but the intent was clear. The beasts could think, however rudimentary.
His breathing ragged, Lance took a break when he was a quarter of the way through the trunk. His arms burned from the exertion, a sensation he’d learned to relish. Gone was the flabby body he’d created from years in a chair, working on computers.
Lance didn’t have the conditioning of Cass yet, but he wasn’t as far behind as he’d once been.
He walked to the edge of the trees, axe draped over his shoulder, and looked to the ever-growing gardens in the rear field. Dew clung to the grass, glistening.
Cass kneeled in a row of tomato plants, plucking weeds. She spent most of her mornings in there, getting her hands dirty, her back and shoulders tan. Gardening provided the same level of relaxing monotony to her as the tree chopping did to Lance.
She paid little attention to the man beside her as he stole glances at her exposed lower back. Her hands plucked and tossed, plucked and tossed.
Lance watched her, marveling, as he did every single day, at the woman he’d grown to love. The depression, the fog, that had clouded his previous life, was gone, evaporated by the brightness of his relationship with Cass.
Cass from the arts.
Lance from IT.
The odd couple, if ever there was one.
His face fell as he thought of the child she carried. He felt overwhelming joy at the idea of having a baby to care for, to raise and cherish. Dread filled him when he considered the danger that child would forever live in.
What kind of character would a person develop if they were raised in the hollow shell of a perished society? What values would they hold? Everything that had molded previous generations was lost, ravaged by an onslaught of abominations. Morality, like everything else, now lived in a gray area.
With last night’s revelation, could Lance even keep the child safe?
The rules of this new world were ever changing.
So far, Lance and Cass had managed to land on their feet, to keep living when so many others had succumbed. But how long could they maintain this new life? He needed to discuss the Vladdies’ behavior with Brown, Eifort, and Cass some more.
Cass stood, arching her back and stretching, letting the sun wash over her face. She gazed over the field of growing corn, onions, and broccoli. Her eyes fell on Lance
, and she smiled.
She pointed at him and then herself before grabbing her breasts.
Lance shook his head, grinning. The woman was insatiable.
That suited him just fine.
It took him another half hour to cut through the tree. The sweet odor of freshly chopped wood soothed him. Sweat soaked his entire body, cooling his skin as a slight breeze blew through the woods.
The rush of endorphins had him feeling better.
“Lance?”
“Yeah?” Lance turned around, searching for the man who’d called his name. He spotted Adam, one of the men he and Cass had saved in Pittsburgh.
They’d found him living in a bank vault and followed him into the sewers, where they’d found a nest of Vladdies. The other man they’d found was a fool named Greg, who called everyone ‘bro’.
Adam walked toward him, hands in his pockets. He was an ordinary man of normal height and build, but he was a good thinker and quick on his feet. “You used to work with computers, right?”
“Unfortunately, yes. Why?” Lance let the axe hang by his side. He understood why Cass liked hers so much. It gave him a sense of power, of confidence.
“Doc Brown is trying to get a computer up and running in the cabin, and he says it needs a new motherboard. I didn’t know what that was, but then I remembered someone saying you used to work on those damn things. I figured I’d see if you’d go on a scavenge run with me.”
“A computer? What for?”
Adam shrugged. “Something about the generator. I’m just a grunt. Want to come along? Otherwise, I’m just going to bring a truckload of computers back and hope one of them works.”
“Sure. I could use a little time away. Did you grab the list from Eifort?”
One of Eifort’s primary jobs, beyond keeping Brown safe and helping to run security, was compiling a list of materials the compound needed. She would meet with the engineers daily to see how the natural gas generators were holding up. If one of those broke down in the middle of the night, all hell would break loose.
They supplied the power that the lights needed to keep the fields lit up.
