Was it wishful thinking to hope it was a big shopping spree? Yeah, I thought so.
“Come on, then,” said the guard who had been doing all the talking when he’d stopped giggling like a moron. “You want to know where you’re going? Then let’s get to it. You’ll see soon enough.”
Clearly there was no point in arguing anymore; even Dave saw that. With a collective sigh, we all fell into line and followed directions.
Nicole went first, trailing along behind the talker and her boyfriend. Dave slipped up beside me and we followed, with the third guy right behind us. Occasionally the barrel of his gun poked my back, like he was trying to remind us who was boss. Um, I got it. I was not boss.
I gave Dave a side-glance. “You okay?”
He nodded, his mouth a grim line.
I looked at him again. “Are you sure? That hit looked pretty hard.”
He shrugged. “It was, but it didn’t hurt that much.”
“But—”
His warning glare cut me off. “Sarah, I’m fine. Don’t worry about me, just keep an eye out. We’re going to need to know the lay of the land when we get out of this mess.”
I bit back whatever other comments I had about his health and nodded. He was right. There would be plenty of time later to ask him why a shotgun butt to the stomach hadn’t elicited any more from him than an aggravated expression.
At least, I hoped there would be time.
We weaved our way through the camp, down side “streets” and past worn-out tents and burned-out campfires. There was a pervasive smell of sweat and, um, other bodily odors; when they mixed together in the air, it was pretty sour. Hygiene didn’t seem to be a top priority here in Freak Town (it’s like Funky Town, but not as catchy).
People lined the little lanes, all dressed the same way as the girl who had given us our antibiotic ointment the night before. Sort of a cross between a hobo and a caveman seemed to be the style of the day. Weird since there were malls and houses so close by.
Even if these people were totally terrified of the zombies (which seemed pretty unlikely considering how well armed they were), it would have been easy to send a big party out to scavenge whatever they needed. There was no reason to be so raggedy. And that made their choice to dress like this, look like this, even creepier.
And their blank, empty looks as we passed by? Yeah, also pretty fucked up. Evidently they’d seen this march before because it didn’t seem to faze any of them one iota.
Ahead of us, Nicole yelled at them in a cracking voice that revealed her fear despite her surprisingly admirable bravado. “We didn’t do anything wrong! You have to see that punishment with no crime is tyranny! You could be next!”
Her words meant nothing to them. One by one, they either fell into step behind us to see the show or went back into their messy tents. My heart began to throb, double time, triple time, hard enough that it hurt and felt like it could burst past my rib cage at any moment. With every step that brought us closer to this mysterious Pit punishment, my fear increased.
And I hated that. I’d sort of gotten good at the fear-mastering thing. This was a setback, for sure.
And then Dave slipped his hand into mine and that gentle touch calmed me. I glanced over at him and he was giving me a look, the look that said, “It’s all going to be okay, babe.”
And I guess after all this time I believed him. He had never let me down before.
We turned one last corner and down a long, empty stretch of land. I glanced around the still-protesting Nicole and past our entourage of guards and saw a group of people, probably at least a hundred and fifty, maybe even two hundred, gathered around… something. As we approached, they parted like the Red Sea and I saw what that something was.
The empty shell of a deep swimming pool, dirty and moldy, dark with blood and sludge smears that dragged up the high sides. There was a set of stairs that led into the pool, but a big kind of wooden gate had been set up in front of them in the pool so that they were rendered useless.
“Oh shit, this must be The Pit,” I muttered.
And inside The Pit, waiting for whoever was going to be chosen from the three of us to be the example and take the punishment?
Of course it would be zombies. Somewhere around thirty drooling, sludge-vomiting zombies.
Try something new. Hint: Not sacrificing yourself to the zombies.
Dave gripped my hand even tighter, tight enough that my fingers squished together, but I hardly felt the sting. I was too busy watching our good, old buddy Lex step through the crowd. As he moved, some people reached out to touch him, while others stepped back in deference to whatever position of power the asshole had. It was like he was a cross between Jesus and the president.
Across the pool he climbed a short ladder that lead out over the diving board. The zombies below milled about hopelessly. They must have been in there for a while, because they didn’t move toward the steps that were blocked by the gate. I guess they’d already figured out that they couldn’t get out that way.
But the moment Lex came into view, they woke up from their zombie fog. In a frenzy, they ran to Lex’s side of the Pit, jumping and clawing and moaning as they tried to reach him on his precarious perch.
But Lex didn’t seem to care. He was cool as a cucumber as he stared out over his zombie captives, past his fellow townspeople and toward us, standing like lemmings at the edge of the pool, ready to go over the cliff and into certain doom.
“A society must have rules,” he said in a big, booming voice that cut any light chatter from the crowd. Even the zombies growled a little softer, it seemed. I guess they recognized the boss just as much as the townspeople did. “Otherwise it falls into chaos.”
“What do you call this, asshat?” I screamed out.
The crowd gave a collective gasp and a couple hundred faces swung toward me in disbelief.
What? Had no other “prisoner” ever dared to question Superman’s arch villain? I guess not, because Lex glared at me with a look that could have killed. And I gave one right back and wished like hell that my superpower was being able to burn a hole in someone with my eyes.
Unfortunately, my strength was killing houseplants, which wasn’t so helpful either prezombie or post.
“Our rules are simple,” he continued as if I had said nothing. “No outsiders. We’ve learned they only bring plague, heartbreak, and villainy. These outsiders have broken our rules and now they must be made an example.”
“What is this, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome?” I asked, once again yelling my thoughts out loud enough so that Lex could hear me.
And it seemed Nicole was inspired by my outbursts. She added, “Bust a deal, spin the wheel!”
“Nice reference,” I said with a nod in her direction. Quoting the movie definitely raised her value in my mind.
Dave was curiously silent during the Sarah and Nicole Comedy Hour. He just kept his slow and steady stare on Lex.
“I won’t do the Gulog! I’ve heard the mask is bad for the skin,” I said, to which Nicole elbowed me and snorted out an appreciative laugh.
Lex smiled, too, but it wasn’t filled with humor. More like menace. “As punishment for trespass, the man, David, will go into The Pit for five minutes.”
The laughter Nicole and I had been sharing came to a screeching halt as Lex’s order echoed in the valley. The crowd around us let out a half-hearted cheer, but I didn’t hear any of it anymore. Instead I looked at David. His jaw was set and he hadn’t even flinched at the handing down of what amounted to a death sentence.
Sure, I still had a vial of serum around my neck that had saved his ass once before, but if he got into that Pit, the zombies would tear him apart. There wouldn’t be enough of him to scrape together for burial, let alone “cure.”
“No!” I cried out and started toward him, as if touching him or something would fix this situation.
Just as in the tent when Ryan swatted him with the gun, one of our guards grabbed me. But this time I
was far more determined to reach my husband. I pulled against the other man’s arms and was almost free when a second, maybe even a third,—person grabbed me.
I didn’t exactly see them. I only saw David. But he wasn’t looking at me. He was staring at Lex.
“I’ve been told that if one of us does this ‘Pit’ thing with the zombies that you’ll set the other two free,” he called out. “Is that true?”
Lex stared across the expanse at him and I swear there was surprise on his face. “Yes. That’s true. The women will go free after the punishment has been served.” He glared first at Nicole, then at me. “And they’ll tell anyone they come in contact with that this camp is not to be bothered and our borders are not to be crossed.”
“We’ll all tell them together if that’s what you want. We’ll leave right now and start spreading the word far and wide. There’s no reason to hurt David!” Nicole insisted.
I didn’t look at her, I couldn’t bear to take my eyes off David, but in her voice I heard her fear. And also her empathy, though whether for me or for my husband, I didn’t know. Probably both.
“It’s the law,” Lex said, as flat as if he was a cop issuing us a parking ticket that we couldn’t talk our way out of.
“But you make the law, you could change it!” I insisted.
“Do you give me your word in front of all your people that you’ll let Sarah and Nicole go unharmed once this punishment has been meted out?” David asked, ignoring our attempts to reason with Lex. I think he must have seen the writing on the wall that reason wasn’t this guy’s strong suit.
Lex tilted his head, and I saw a grudging respect on his face. It didn’t make me like him anymore, of course.
“Yes,” he called out after a long pause. “The women will be released unharmed. We’ll even return some weapons and a vehicle to them once we deliver them to our border.”
David hesitated and then, to my utter shock and horror, he nodded. “Then I’ll take your punishment.”
“David!” I screamed in utter disbelief, and next to me I heard someone else wail. I realized later it was Nicole, but in that moment I couldn’t understand anything that was happening in this fucked-up situation.
What had happened to “some crazy thing will get us out of this”? What had happened to us fighting our way to Illinois and something resembling normalcy together?
He finally looked at me. Really looked at me. Like he was trying to memorize my face or something.
“Babe,” he whispered, “this is the only way for you to get out.”
“No,” I said, shaking my head hard enough that my neck was starting to hurt. “Fuck no. We go together. If you die, I die.”
He tilted his head. “And what about our duty? What about what we promised to do?”
“I don’t care about that!” I snapped, blinking at tears. “If I get in the pool with you, we can fight—”
“I’ve counted twenty-eight zombies in there, Sarah, and we don’t have any weapons,” Dave interrupted. “I have a lot of faith in you… in us, but I don’t think we could take more than maybe ten of them before we get ripped to shreds.”
I shook my head even though I knew everything he was saying was gospel truth. “I don’t want to do this without you,” I whispered.
He looked at me with this weird, peaceful, accepting smile and suddenly I felt like a child. Not like he was condescending, but more like he saw the situation with a clarity I couldn’t yet achieve.
“Sarah, we have things to do. Important things. Are you just going to forget about all that so you can die in a rusted-out pool with me?”
His words and his look shook me and I looked down. The vial of cure was lightly outlined under my T-shirt. It looked like a necklace so the guards hadn’t checked it out or confiscated it.
“Everything we’ve done in the last month will be in vain if you jump into the pool with me,” he continued. “But not if you turn around and get into the car these people give you and keep on heading east. Nicole will help you, won’t you, Nicole?”
I had all but forgotten our reporter friend, but now I blinked as I looked at her. She was staring at our exchange with a mixture of confusion and a touch of heartache. I found myself wondering who she had lost that made her eyes look like she understood what I was going through.
“Y-Yes,” she finally whispered with half a nod. “I’ll help Sarah any way I can… if she’ll let me.”
“Good.” Dave smiled.
“Enough,” Lex said.
Honestly, I was surprised he’d let us go on so long, but there had been something almost mesmerizing about what Dave said and how he said it. Everyone around us was staring; people were blinking like they understood what was happening in their world for the first time.
And when I looked at Lex, I realized he saw that, too. And he had to nip it in the bud. He didn’t want these people to wake up from their fog of shock and fear. He needed them to stay like… well, mindless zombies (without the brain eating) if he wanted to keep his power and isolate them from everything else. And maybe he meant well. Maybe he really thought he could protect them this way.
It didn’t really matter. I hated the guy and I wanted him dead for his order that would take Dave from me. His order that would change my life even more permanently than even zombies and apocalypse had done.
“Put him in The Pit,” Lex snapped.
The guards who had been holding me shoved me aside and took a step toward Dave, but before they could reach him, he lifted a hand.
“I’ll get in on my own, thanks,” he said as he edged toward the pool.
“I love you,” I shouted.
He looked at me evenly and then he smiled. “I know.”
I blinked and for a moment the tension faded. “Are you quoting Empire Strikes Back? At a time like this you’re geeking out on me! Seriously?”
He smiled and then in one swift movement he spun around, sat down on the edge of the pool, and jumped in.
Set boundaries. It’s the only way the zombies and the crazy people will learn.
I couldn’t hold back a scream as Dave’s head disappeared from view below the edge of the pool, and this time when I ran forward no one tried to stop me. Or maybe they did, but I didn’t feel it. The fact was, at that moment I didn’t feel anything but pure, unadulterated terror.
I stared down into The Pit and there Dave stood, looking out across the dirty pool at the zombies who were still gathered underneath Lex’s diving board.
Dave was panting, his skin pale and his eyes focused yet still filled with the fear he’d been trying not to show me earlier. I wanted to grab him and pull him out, but I couldn’t reach him and I knew damn well even if I could, he wouldn’t let me. He’d decided to make some kind of fucking noble sacrifice like we were in a romance novel or something. Only there wasn’t going to be a happily-ever-after ending because the zombies were coming.
Well, they should have been coming. Only, as my initial fear and focus on Dave faded, I realized something remarkable and totally inexplicable.
They weren’t.
For some reason, the zombies remained on the other side of the pool. They continued to mill about below Lex’s diving board, moaning and reaching for him. They hadn’t even noticed Dave, or at least it didn’t seem like they had.
“Shit, do I have to do everything?” Dave muttered as he edged further into the middle of the pool toward them. His face was lined with intense concentration and anticipation of what was about to happen.
And yet, still, nothing did. Even as he moved closer and closer, a tantalizing morsel of a man being dangled right in their reach, the zombies stayed focused on the leader of this fucked- up band of Not-So-Merry-Men (and women, since he was an equal opportunity douche bag).
It seemed the refugees were starting to see the same thing I was, too. Around me people started muttering, the sound of which grew louder as Dave moved closer. Yet the zombies completely ignored him.
“What the hell is go
ing on?” Nicole whispered, right next to my ear.
I jumped. I hadn’t even noticed her move toward me, I was so focused on my husband.
“I don’t know,” I said back, leaning forward as though somehow I could get closer to him, somehow I would understand what was happening, er, not happening below us.
The whispers and mutters around us were getting louder and louder and occasionally I heard them clearly. “Does he have a power?” asked a male voice.
“Why don’t they see him?” This time it was a little girl who spoke, and the fact that she was here to witness an execution troubled me as much as her question did.
“Maybe they don’t want to eat us anymore?” a woman said, her voice laced with hope and hysteria.
“Don’t be stupid,” a man answered-. “They’re still trying to reach Lex.”
Yes, that was true. The zombies still clawed and moaned as they made every effort to get a hold of the man high above them, balanced on a precarious piece of bouncy wood. They were ravenous and drooled sludge in a pool beneath him. Nothing was different about their behavior.
They just didn’t seem to want David.
Now you’d think any normal person would just wipe their brow and say, “Phew!” and take the gift they were being offered. But I could still see Dave’s expression pretty clearly and rather than being happy or relieved that he was not, thus far, zombie shish kebab, he looked… annoyed. Worried. Confused.
And then he did something really stupid.
“Hey!” he shouted, waving his arms at the big group of zombies.
“David!” I yelled. “Stop that! Don’t encourage them.”
He ignored me and kept waving his arms around. “Hey, drooly!”
I froze as his yelling and gesturing finally seemed to connect with the zombies just feet away from him. A few turned away from the main crowd and looked at him. Well, toward him. Zombies don’t really look at anything. They aren’t so much focused.
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