Ran (Book 1): Apocalyptica

by Joshua Guess

  “If I run across whoever did this,” I said, “I’m going to shoot them in the face.”

  “Goddamn right you will,” Carla said. “I had no idea it was this bad out here.”

  I could see Jem’s knuckles go white on the wheel. “Neither did we.”

  Our path wended through town, featuring the random turns and byzantine detours quickly becoming the norm. No small part of what ate up our time was avoiding zombies, or else stopping to deal with them. On the one hand, they mostly seemed to give up after a while, maybe in a dim recognition that moving metal boxes containing people were a harder and less reliable source of food than hunkering down and waiting for pedestrians.

  “Oh, shit,” I said, leaning into the front and sticking out a hand. “We have to stop there.”

  “Where?” Jem said. “The bank? I don’t see anything special.”

  I grinned. “Oh, Jem my son. You have much to learn about our little berg. Trust me on this. I’ll show you where to park.”

  Five minutes and one broken lock later, we moved cautiously through a small store whose only entrance was in an alley between the bank and a church.

  “Welcome to Yoder’s Artisanal,” I said, sweeping my flashlight around the dark store. “This is a gold mine.”

  Carla, in the relatively safe spot between me and Jem, raised an eyebrow at me. “Is this place run by Amish hipsters?”

  “Eh,” I said. “More like hipsters stole the whole artisanal thing from the Amish. When you make everything by hand, everything qualifies.”

  I loved the place for a host of reasons, quality being a major one. I’d bought one of the cured hams hanging over the register and it was the best meat I had ever eaten. But I would be lying if I said that a large part of the appeal, overcoming my base setting to buy everything as cheaply as possible, wasn’t from the fact that this place catered to people with tastes that were deliberately out of the norm.

  I wasn’t about to admit I paid five times the going rate for tomato seeds simply because they were unusual heirloom varieties, though.

  “I’m mostly thinking food, but I want to grab seeds and maybe a few basic tools, too.”

  Carla glanced at Jem, who looked mildly upset. “I’m not sure how I feel about looting this place. It looked like Randall was killed by looters.”

  “I get that,” I said. “The difference is we’re not hurting anyone. If the owners were here, I’d leave empty-handed. My guess is they’re giving this place up as a loss, considering how risky it would be to come here when they have way more of this stuff out on their farm. I’m not willing to leave resources laying around if we can take them with us.”

  Jem walked over to a wall of preserves resting on hand-made wooden shelves. He picked up a jar and examined it in the dim light. “I do love strawberry jam...”

  Twenty minutes later we set off again, this time with a cargo area full of pilfered Amish goods. There was far too much useful stuff in the place to fit even a tenth of it in the Jeep, so I’d taken the time to remove some choice items and hide them in several places. I doubted looters would be cracking open air vents to look for supplies.

  Next on our list was Tony Williams. His apartment wasn’t quite in the middle of town, but neither was it very far off. “The Meadows,” Jem said when I asked him where we were heading. “Really? Isn’t that place super expensive?”

  Jem smiled. “It is, but when you buy the lots and build the place yourself, you can afford to live a little better. Tony got into the construction business after he shredded his rotator cuff.”

  “What did he do before?”

  Jem chuckled. “Two years of pro baseball. He wasn’t anything special—even he’ll tell you that—but he saved all his money and started a business. Don’t worry, if Tony’s alive he’ll tell you about it in extreme detail every chance he gets.”

  Carla stuck her chest out an spoke in a deep voice. “Spent all my high school years building houses with my dad. Promised myself I’d never have to do it again.”

  “Your Tony impression needs work,” Jem said.

  The Meadows apartment complex didn’t live up to the name. To be fair, I hadn’t seen very many that did. Except for River View apartments, the place I moved into when I became a legal adult, which did indeed have a view of a river.

  Taking up a full block, Meadows was interesting. The whole property looked like an unbroken wall of brick from the street, with a tall arch in the middle leading inside. There wasn’t a gate to keep people out, but not many ignored the private property signs.

  We ignored them. The apocalypse hath its privileges.

  The interior was a narrow road styled into a rough circle with a large patch of grass dotted with a few trees in the center. A small playground sat nestled to one side, while on the other side of the road sat the apartments. Each had their own two-car garage at the bottom, the apartments themselves stacked atop them.

  No one was in sight, living or dead. I was also surprised by—and mildly suspicious of—the absence of any of the debris and carnage the rest of Wallace was marred by. I might not be a statistician or scientist, but even I knew that something so out of the norm with the rest of the town had to be on one of the extremes. Either it was really bad or really good, and my natural inclination was toward expecting the worst.

  “Weird,” Carla said. Apparently she got the same vibe. “This place is super clean.”

  Jem navigated the narrow road slowly, riding the brake the whole way. “There’s something...ah. I get it.”

  “What?” I asked.

  Jem tilted his head slightly, as if afraid to point. “Something was off, and it took me a few seconds to understand what it was. It’s the windows. None of them have any depth. Look at how the sun hits them. You should be able to see variation in the shadows if there’s a room behind them, or at least curtains. I don’t see any of that. I think someone has painted the windows in these first few apartments black.”

  “Is one of them Tony’s place?” I asked.

  Jem shook his head. “He’s three quarters around the circle.”

  I checked the magazine in my Glock. “Well, let’s not take our time. If people are in those buildings, I don’t want to give them any ideas about us being targets.”

  We slowed to a stop in front of Tony’s place. Carla unbuckled herself, leaving Jem as our wheel man in case we needed to get out in a hurry. I stepped onto the thin strip of pavement between Jeep and curb to act as lookout and to provide cover.

  The tiny hairs on the back of my neck were on end. Something was wrong here, the anxiety made worse by not having the first clue what it might be. I held my pistol low in both hands, ready to snap it up and fire and half worried I’d do it at an innocent person by pure reflex.

  I heard the door handle rattle behind me as Carla tried to go in Tony’s house. Not drawing attention was a solid life plan at that point, so knocking was out of the question.

  To my surprise, the sound of someone running heavily down a flight of steps followed. Tony, or someone in his home, had responded at once. I risked a look over my shoulder when the door opened.

  Tony was a black guy about six feet tall and medium built. He looked more like an accountant than a construction boss, with his wire-rimmed glasses and business shirt. A massive sports duffle bag was slung over his shoulder, the handle of a baseball bat poking out.

  It was the look of shock and anger on his face that made me whip my head back around.

  A handful of people stood on the other side of the circle, every one of them with pistols raised. Without conscious thought, I stepped forward and raised my own, though I kept myself from actually firing. We were far enough away that I’d probably be wasting bullets.

  The enemies, whoever they were, didn’t have my frugal streak. They opened fire with abandon. I ducked low and to the side, trying to find cover behind a tree.

  Over the din of gunfire I heard someone shout in a deep voice.

  “No! Don’t—”

/>   I stepped behind the tree and felt something constrict around my heel. Before I could fully process what was happening, I was yanked off my feet and across the grass for several yards. I saw the rope and reached to pull it loose, but something pulled on it again.

  I was being dragged across the tiny meadow by the enemy. They’d set traps. The kind meant for people. I knew then who I was dealing with; these people killed Randall, a man I had never met but who certainly had not deserved what came to him. Maybe not these specific people, but of the same class.

  Monsters. I’d seen their kind before.

  As I bounced and skidded across the brittle grass, I sucked in the biggest lungful of air I could manage and screamed.

  “Get them out of here!”

  Jem Kurtz, true to his calling as someone who protects and serves, did just that.

  11

  The next thirty minutes were hell. Not an unfamiliar hell, but all the same...

  I fought as best I could with a rope tied around my ankle. I got in a few solid shots—fists, not guns, since I’d lost the Glock when I was pulled off my feet—but whoever had the other end of the rope was paying attention. After a few seconds watching me beat in the faces of his friends, he yanked on the damn thing again and threw me off balance.

  I take a certain pride in the fact that it required four people to tie me up.

  I was thrown into the back seat of a car. Someone put a bag or shirt over my head. I tried to kick out a window and got the barrel of a gun pushed against my cheek.

  “I’d rather not, but if you don’t calm down I will.”

  The words were spoken in an utterly calm, almost bored voice. I stopped fighting back. I wasn’t going to be outright murdered, or they wouldn’t have bothered tying me up. Which meant I could bide my time and look for openings. Weak points.

  During that car ride I asked myself some important questions. Primary among them was why things had devolved so badly in such a short period of time. The world wasn’t even close to being finished with its ending. If human civilization was a tree felled in an old forest, we were maybe halfway through its fall to the ground.

  Organized gangs murdering people, kidnapping, and who knew what else. All of it happening within a day.

  And you know what? All those things happened before the dead decided to stand up and eat the living. Thousands of times a year since Cain decided Abel was a dick and smashed him with a rock. People can be divided into convenient groups when it comes to understanding the world around them. The first and largest group accept what they see, refusing to accept on a conscious level that the horrors they witness on the news are real. Bad things happen, but not here. Not to or around them.

  That’s why those same people, bless them, always grow so distraught when reality steps in and smacks them in the face. Think about it. When a quiet neighborhood gets its first robbery in memory, there is always shock and dismay that it could happen there. As if some magical barrier has been breached, rather than simply recognize that people are shitty everywhere you go without exception.

  Mayberry was never real. The pleasant white picket fences conveniently ignored the Whites Only signs, after all.

  The second group of people envy the first. They are the police officers, the firefighters, the soldiers. They’re poor children forced to sell drugs in order to eat. They’re rape victims, abuse victims, or just people who’ve never had wool over their eyes. I’m one of them, and I hold no anger in my heart for people in the first group. Just the dual feelings that the world would be a better place with more awareness of how things really are, and a vain desire not to see innocence shattered. Mutually exclusive hopes.

  Less generally, I suspected my captors were probably criminals. Call it profiling if you want, but another bedrock truth about the world is that once the rules grow fuzzy or are removed entirely, criminals are most likely to take advantage.

  Wallace is relatively small, Louis County is mostly rural, and neither of those things preclude the possibility of some sincerely bad people existing here. I didn’t keep up with local news in more than a passing sense, but even I knew about the local methamphetamine trade. You couldn’t go a month without hearing of some new bust, this or that ringleader being arrested. Somehow there was always someone else.

  With drug trade comes organization, and if there’s one thing I’m wary of more than any other—aside from zombies—it’s organized groups of people with vested interests and few scruples.

  “Where are you taking me?” I asked after a little while.

  “Be quiet,” came the response.

  I hadn’t expected an answer to the question. I was more interested in how my kidnapper responded. Cutting the flow of information, putting up walls using silence especially, implied this was someone who had experience managing unwilling passengers.

  When the car finally stopped and the door opened, I was hauled out by my feet. It wasn’t rough treatment, all things considered. He held my upper arm to make sure I found my balance and didn’t get handsy. A good thing, because I wasn’t in a great mood for being tolerant. I’d have thrown a wild headbutt and probably get a bullet for my trouble.

  Without the ability to see, I had to focus on other things. The ground beneath my boots was gritty, but not sand or gravel. It crunched slightly, and I guessed it was bare dirt. Someone opened a gate with a long, metallic whine. The barest whiff of manure sneaked into my hood.

  “A farm,” I muttered.

  My vision flashed purple as something hit me in the head, my overly analytical brain deciding I’d been pistol-whipped just before I blacked out.

  What followed was only a dream in the technical sense; it happened while I was asleep, but it was in almost every way a memory. I suppose it qualified as a recurring nightmare.

  It was a lucid dream, but despite knowing what I saw wasn’t real I couldn’t change anything. I was a passenger only, forced to relive that day again.

  I was sixteen. It was, in fact, my sixteenth birthday. The room around me was bare except for a sleeping bag, the white walls and short beige carpet utterly without markings. I had been in this room many times in my short life, an eight-by-four cell I was sure got repainted whenever an occupant left it behind.

  This time was different. This day was different. The corner of the carpet to the right of the door was dog-eared up, untucked from its long residence beneath the edge of the wall. I sat in the middle of the room in lotus, one hand lightly cupping the other.

  I could hear Kevin, the docent on watch, making his rounds. That’s what they called the person in charge of checking the cells: a docent. A guide. As if the cells were vessels on a journey for those held within.

  Well, that was what we were taught. A fundamental tenet, actually. Every experience was a teaching experience, one the person having it must complete with no exceptions. I lost count of the days spent in this room or one of its clones, but I had decided this would be the last. Shoved in here a week before when I’d loudly and stupidly announced my intention to leave on my birthday, I made myself a promise that one way or another I would never come back.

  Kevin opened the door of the cell next to mine. I lifted my wrists and looked at them carefully, waiting for the right moment.

  The heavy oak door swung open in front of me. Kevin, a boy my age with the too-large hands and feet of a puppy with growing yet to do, settled eyes framed by a mane of curly black hair on me. It was an image forever burned into my brain, that face. One of those innocents who believed what they saw, what they were told. Wide blue eyes met mine, and I smiled.

  I jammed the carpet tack into my wrist and drew it along and through my radial artery.

  I woke up before the next part could play out, a small blessing. It only grew less pleasant.

  In accordance with the strange turn my life had recently taken toward being filled with tired movie clichés, I came around to find myself tied to a chair. My head hurt a fucking lot and my wrists felt like I’d spent ten hours playing
ping pong with Forrest Gump. The latter could be blamed on how I was secured to the chair, which put my slumped-forward weight on my wrists while I was knocked out.

  Fact: getting knocked out for longer than a few seconds is much, much worse than movies and TV imply. The human brain is meant to be on, as long as it’s not engaged in sleep. When you’re knocked unconscious, it’s a pretty decent rule of thumb that the longer you’re out, the worse you got hit.

  I still wore my armor, though my holsters were empty and the knife strapped to my chest was gone. No great urge to pee, meaning I probably wasn’t out for hours. I went through my concussion checklist—something every girl with hundreds of hours of fight training should have memorized cold—and decided that if I did have one, it wasn’t bad.

  The relief didn’t do anything to lessen the aching throb in my head. I really wanted to shoot the guy who hit me.

  I was in a basement, that much was obvious. The shitty concrete floor was flaking everywhere, and water stained the walls from long-ignored leaks in the foundation. Overhead pipes and wires nestled between floor joists. Fortunately this didn’t look like a murder basement, but I suppose the best ones never do.

  Rather than panic, which I assure you was on my list of go-to reactions just then, I took deep, calming breaths. An almost subterranean rage suffused my entire body and was at war with the impulse to start shrieking in terror. I knew if I gave in to either I’d have trouble stopping.

  Been there before.

  Not that those reactions were in any way wrong. It’s only insecure assholes who think that being afraid or angry when confronted with something terrifying is something to be ashamed of. For people with even a modicum of self-awareness, it’s easy to identify these as perfectly healthy and normal reactions.

  It’s just that letting either guide me would be bad.