by T. W. Brown
“You can sit in here again and do nothing if you want,” Erin said while giving herself a pat-down. “The people here are good people, and they have a lot of things that we can use if we join up. Their farm and ours are adjacent. Between the two groups, we could ride this out for a good long while.”
She didn’t wait for his response; instead, the woman climbed out of the truck and shut the door. However, she did not move forward towards the house like he expected, and for a moment, Ken lost sight of her. When he found her again, she was at the car behind them with that guy Jason and the Hispanic woman who he could not recall the name of at the moment.
Seconds later, both front doors to the car opened and the pair emerged. Jason had a bat in his hand. The woman hurried to the rear of the car and popped the trunk, she emerged with a tire iron. The trio did a quick huddle and then started for the nearest of the walking dead.
“I’m living a fucking zombie movie,” Ken sighed as he watched the carnage begin.
Of course he’d come to that conclusion a long time ago. However, for whatever reason, it was now becoming real. With a sigh, he reached under his seat and pulled out a case. Setting it down, he watched calmly as the three worked methodically to reach the house. It wasn’t too difficult by the looks of things.
Removing one of his Glocks, Ken inserted the magazine and let the slide slam into place. He considered bringing both, but decided to just scoop up another two magazines and stuff them in his coat pocket. Then he loaded the second and set it on the seat. Never knew if he might have to make a run for it. It would be nice to have this second weapon as a safety net.
Ken climbed out of the car, his nose wrinkling immediately at the stench. He was a step away from the truck when he saw the curtain twitch beside the front door. Maybe it was his cop instincts, or maybe it was just dumb luck, but Ken whipped his pistol up and leveled it at the center of the door frame just as it flew open and a large figure stepped out onto the porch with a street sweeper jammed against one shoulder.
Time slowed down for Ken as he aimed. He could tell instantly that the short, squat figure in that doorway was aiming at Erin. Without giving it another second’s worth of thought, Ken fired three rounds. All three shots slammed into the figure’s center mass. The body toppled backwards and fell back into the house.
There was a moment of silence. In that instant, it seemed as if even the zombies paused in their pitiful moans and groans to see what would happen next. An anguished voice finally shattered that silence.
“YOU MOTHER FUCKERS DONE KILLED MY SISTER!”
That was a girl? was Ken’s last thought before a tall, lanky figure leapt through the open doorway, a street sweeper at his hip—probably the same one that his sister had been holding just moments before—erupting with a mighty roar and a flash of fire.
“What about Hank?”
Randy Reynolds pumped and fired the shotgun. Fortunately for Erin, Jason and Juanita, he was basically firing blind, the barrel swiveling to anything that moved; which, at the moment, were just the zombies.
Ken was relatively safe considering the distance. Shotguns were hellish at close range. This was a point vividly illustrated when a zombie stepped directly into the line of fire and took the full brunt from the twelve-gauge buckshot. Its head erupted, reminding Ken for some reason of the grand finale of watermelon smashing that took place at the end of the Gallagher shows. The body took one more step and then collapsed in a heap. Another round slammed into the chest of a young woman and erupted from her back. This rocked the woman, but she continued on as if she did not notice the fist-sized hole in her body.
Ken did not see where the third shot went as he sighted in on his target and fired. At first, he thought that he had missed, But then, the man took an unsteady step forward and then another before dropping to his knees. A dark stain was visible on his forehead. Ken was actually a bit miffed. He had aimed for the chest. The man had moved at the last second, taking a step down from the porch. In doing so, he had taken the bullet to the head.
Everybody seemed fascinated by Ken’s recent kill; so much so that all of them were paying more attention to the two dead bodies in the doorway and ignoring the zombies moving in on them. He was about to say something when a hand clamped down on his shoulder. Ken spun to see a man about his age. The man had a nasty rip on his throat and a few bites on his arms that looked strangely small.
Shaking his head to snap himself back into action, he shoved his Glock up under the man’s chin and fired. The man dropped like a stone and revealed another several figures headed his way. They were nothing more than black silhouettes in the bright headlights of his pickup directly behind them, but he did not need to see details to know that they were children.
“Jesus on a jet plane,” he muttered.
The first of the children finally closed to a distance where Ken could see him better. The boy was maybe five. He had been ravaged most unpleasantly. In Ken’s mind, he saw the boy pulled to the ground by a pack of those things. That would be the only explanation for how this boy was so ripped up.
Adjusting his aim, Ken was about to fire when something happened that made him pause. It had nothing to do with the fact that this zombie was a child. The moment that he’d accepted the idea of what was happening, he had simply turned off the part of his brain that allowed him to see these things as anything more than a savage animal that needed to be put down. It would be no different if he was out deer hunting and a cougar or a bear tried to attack him. While he had no desire to hunt either of those predatory animals, he would not simply stand there and be mauled. To him, zombies were no different. Man. Woman. Child. A zombie did not care. It simply wanted to eat you for whatever reason.
No, what made Ken pause was the way that the boy suddenly stopped his advance. He tilted his head, first one way, and then the other, as if regarding Ken and determining if he, Ken Simpson, were the threat. To compound his astonishment, the other children halted their advance as well.
“What the fu—” was all he managed to say when a voice from behind shouted.
“I’m coming out! I ain’t armed, but I gots me a hostage. Don’t shoot!”
Ken had to fight every instinct and impulse in his body to keep from turning. He would have to trust that the trio of Erin, Jason, and that woman had his back.
***
Jason swung the bat like he was trying to send one into the cheap seats. His hands were stinging like crazy, but he had no other choice. The only thing he was certain of at the moment was that he would be looking for a different weapon as soon as this was over. It might work in the movies and in the books, but using a bat to crush a skull was much harder than it had ever been portrayed.
The zombie in front of him stumbled, and he brought the bat down on the back of its head. For some reason, this worked much better than when he hit them in front. He had just drove his bat down to end the most recent zombie to cross his path when the door to the house flew open. The figure was short and squat, reminding Jason of a dwarf from those Lord of the Rings movies. However, it was the nasty shotgun that garnered most of his attention. He was a deer in the headlights all the way up to the point when three shots cracked off in quick succession and the body toppled backwards.
The next few seconds were deafening silence. He saw the shadows move inside the doorway and had the sense of mind to duck as a tall man came out screaming about how they’d just killed his sister before firing off that street sweeper and obliterating a nearby zombie from the neck up.
The man had the weapon at his hip, and while that might look cool in the movies and on all the cop shows, it was crap when it came to being able to fire with any accuracy. The next round caught a woman just a dozen or so feet to Jason’s left square in the chest. The zombie rocked a little, but then continued towards the epicenter of noise coming from the front porch as the tall man screamed threats and then fired again. Apparently the man was starting to discern between the living and the undead, because there was
an eruption of bark from the tree just to Jason’s left, a few of the flying splinters stinging his face as the wood found purchase in the flesh of his cheek; one coming dangerously close to his eye.
Self-preservation kicked in and Jason dove to the ground and covered his head with his hands. His rational mind was trying to tell him that this form of defense would not do much to stop a shotgun shell, but the flight instinct had him doing the old duck-and-cover.
He heard three more shots, but these sounded different and came from behind him. Risking the exposure, Jason craned his neck to look behind him and instead was greeted by a pair of legs as a zombie walked up, obviously thinking that somebody had laid out a Jason-flavored picnic. Fortunately, his reflexes were on full alert as adrenaline coursed through his body in ways it had never done back in his old home invasion days.
He swept a leg around and kicked the zombie off its feet. His next move was to pop up and bring his bat around to take down the next closest zombie. It just so happened to be the woman with the fist-sized hole in her chest from having taken a slug of buckshot from that street sweeper just a moment ago. The zombie toppled and Jason started for the open door. A noise directly behind him caused him to hit the ground for the second time. He rolled over, unsure what he would see, and felt his lips curve up in a smile.
Juanita was standing over a downed zombie. She was yanking the pry-bar end of her crowbar out of its face. In a deft movement, she kicked out with one foot and put the woman with the hole in her chest back down on her back and then rammed the tire iron into the head, ending the zombie’s struggles instantly. Just as she reached over to give him a hand up, a voice called from the house.
“I’m coming out! I ain’t armed, but I gots me a hostage. Don’t shoot!”
Jason hopped up and immediately saw Ken just to his right. The man had a pistol out in front of him and was in a crouch, but he was facing away from the house. Jason shot a look that way and was able to make out the silhouettes of several small figures backlit by the headlights of the man’s truck.
It was obvious to him that the man had his hands full. He saw no sign of the woman Erin, but with the scattered floodlights, his night vision was absolute crap. She could be right on the other side of any of the cold, white halos of light that shone from the six different posts around the front yard area as well as the pair of high-powered Halogen lights aimed almost directly at him from the front porch. That meant he would have to have Ken’s back. It was not something he had ever imagined in his life. Jason Edwards backing up one of Portland’s finest? The fellas in the joint would skin him alive.
Well, he was out here in the shit, and he had the feeling he would need every swinging dick…he shot a look at Juanita. Figuratively speaking, he thought as the doorway filled with shadow once again. A man stepped out onto the porch with a woman as a shield. He held a knife to her throat.
“I don’t want any trouble,” the man yelled.
***
Crystal had climbed back to her feet and was coming for Rose with her hands reaching; opening and closing like crab claws. Rose shoved the girl back. Either due to Crystal’s lack of coordination or because she had shoved harder than she realized, the body toppled and the head struck the floor with a solid thud.
For an instant, Rose had reason to hope that perhaps Crystal had been knocked out, or maybe that zombie thing about a blow to the head had some truth to it. However, after only a few seconds, the girl began to squirm and struggle to her feet.
She had taken a step when all hell broke loose in the front of the house. There was yelling, screaming, cursing, and the sounds of gunfire. Rose backed into the corner, her eyes going from the bed holding her sister and nephew, to her niece. For some reason, the child had stopped moving and was cocking its head one way and then the other. First it would fix its rheumy gaze on the door, then her head would twitch slightly and readjust to look at Rose.
A noise like somebody running sounded at the door and it flew open, slamming hard into Rose and causing her to yelp in pain. The door bounced back enough so that Rose could see that whatever spell had kept Crystal in place a second ago had ended. The girl was on the move; but she was not coming at Rose.
“Sorry, kid,” Hank’s voice came with a sigh and the young man stepped forward.
Rose could only watch in stunned horror as he grabbed Crystal by the hair and drove the blade of a large butcher’s knife into the little girl’s temple. He shoved the body back and spun to face Rose.
“Don’t make me kill you,” Hank growled, grabbing her roughly by the arm and jerking her around to where she was in front of him.
“P-p-please—” she started, but he jerked her hard and pressed the edge of the blade against her throat.
“Shut up!” he hissed in her ear. “I said I don’t want to hurt you. I will if you do anything stupid. Otherwise, just be quiet and let me deal with whoever is outside.”
Pushing her ahead of him as he made his way up the hallway, Rose felt Hank’s body press so close that it was becoming a bit uncomfortable on the personal level. Coupled with the knife at her throat, Rose was terrified for her life more than she had been at any point up until this very moment.
“I’m coming out! I ain’t armed, but I gots me a hostage. Don’t shoot!” Hank yelled, his mouth close enough to her ear that she winced.
She could see Missy’s body on the floor just inside the door. A pool of blood had managed to spread out around her and there were three dark stains in the middle of her body. As she and Hank moved around Missy’s body. Rose’s eyes could not look away from the face of the downed Reynolds matriarch. Even in death, her eyes had a look of anger that almost made her feel bad for the woman. To die in such a state must have been a miserable experience. She had the oddest thought that it was doubtful that Missy had ever known a moment of real, true happiness.
As she stepped out onto the porch, her eyes scanned a scene beyond any nightmare she could have envisioned. There were bodies littering the ground, but she skipped over that and locked on the front windshield of her car. There they were, sitting in front with Circe in the driver’s seat and Imp on the passenger’s side. Both dogs’ ears perked up at the sight of her, but neither barked.
“I don’t want any trouble,” Hank yelled. At least this time he’d moved his head a few inches from her ear. It was still loud, but not painfully so like the first time.
She thought that she saw two figures turn their direction and then pause after a step or two. That meant that they were probably not zombies. The next thing that she noticed were the pickup and older car parked just behind hers a little ways on the driveway. It was there that her eyes locked. A man was standing with his back to her and had a pistol out in front of his body with a two-handed grip. She could see a few figures moving around in the headlights of the truck. They looked like—
A series of gunshots made her jump again. She was so startled that it was another few seconds before her mind registered the pain at her throat where the knife had given her a shallow slice. A heartbeat later, there was a heavy thud and she felt Hank sort of tumble against her like he’d just been shoved. She also felt the knife move away from her throat and a second later clatter to the concrete porch.
Jumping away from the man, she almost toppled backwards down the stairs. Another figure was standing there, this one holding a rather impressive looking machete.
“Everything is gonna be okay,” the figure spoke.
It took her brain a few more seconds to wade through everything and come up with the name of the voice’s owner. Recognition came just in time. She was starting to fall backwards down the steps when a hand shot out and grabbed her by the wrist.
“Erin?” Rose managed as she was jerked forward from the precipice. “Erin West?”
***
Now able to see the boy a little better as his eyes adjusted, Ken felt his stomach churn. The little boy’s face was missing a lot of meat from where the lower lip area had been ripped away violen
tly. The tear extended down the chin and to the throat as well as most of the right cheek.
“God forgive me,” Ken whispered.
He adjusted his weapon and fired. The bullet slammed into the boy’s forehead and blew out a good chunk of scalp and brain that seemed to hang in the air and wait as if it wanted to be certain that his eyes got a good look before it fell into the pool of darkness that was the ground at the boy’s feet. A few more deft adjustments and he sent bullets flying as the other child zombies began towards him.
He brought his Glock down after the last of the small figures tumbled to the ground. He felt something deep down that was trying to let him know he had done what was right. Yet, now that he stood over the downed bodies of a group of children, his conscience threatened to burn through and devour his sanity.
“Holy shit,” a voice whispered from beside him, causing Ken to spin suddenly and out of reflex. It was the convict. Ken made no effort to stop his fist as it lashed out.
The punch landed solid on the man’s nose with a satisfying crunch. Ken’s vision reduced to pinpoints. All he saw was this human piece of crap that a sympathetic society had probably let off easy. This was every criminal that had taken a moment of his time that could have been spent caring for his wife in those final days before cancer stole her away. Ken swung again and was surprised when he met nothing but air.
The convict ducked his punch and came up with the barrel of an aluminum baseball bat. It caught Ken flush on the chin and brought with it sweet darkness and a reprieve from the voice in his head screaming that he was a child killer.
