Ran (Book 1): Apocalyptica

by Joshua Guess

  A woman peeked her head out from a hallway. She had a haunted look in her eyes—but then, who didn’t—and a constellation of bruises spanning the distance from the hair line on the right of her face down to the side of her neck. Our eyes met, and though she didn’t even mouth words at me, a dark certainty filled my chest.

  The gunman noticed my eyes flick to the side. He reacted the way most people do when danger and instinct converge; he turned his head to see what I saw. Had he thought about it, had the training to make him think about it, it wouldn’t have happened.

  When his head whipped around to glance behind, his body twisted with it. The business end of a gun is an effective threat as long as it’s pointed where it should be. Move it outside the narrow wedge of arc degrees where a person is, and it becomes a decoration capable of making noise.

  It helped that when his head moved, drawing neck and shoulders and arms with it, I went the other way to put myself further from that arc of fire. I launched myself forward at a diagonal, gripping the barrel of the gun with my armored glove and wrenched it up and away from people.

  The shotgun went off. Of course it went off. They always do. I didn’t have time to process the heat from the barrel through my glove because I was too busy bringing my left arm around in a hard elbow strike to the shooter’s jaw. My ears were ringing, the world a muted audio haze, so I didn’t actually hear it break even though I felt it crunch.

  In the space of two seconds the shooter was disarmed and on the ground. I spun the shotgun around and pumped a new shell into the chamber, backing up to create distance between me and the writhing man on the floor.

  “Robert, please pick up my pistol and hand it to me,” I said calmly. I looked over at the woman, now standing fully visible at the far end of the kitchen. “Ma’am, are you okay?”

  She looked down at the man, who was cradling his jaw with both hands and looking at me with murderous fury in his eyes.

  The woman stepped forward, extending a hand and drawing it back as she stopped. “Please don’t hurt me,” she said. Her voice was smooth, like that of a trained singer or actor. It caught me off guard; maybe I expected to hear terror in it. Or the quavery notes of vocal cords strained too often by screams.

  “We aren’t going to,” I said, trying to reassure her. “Are you okay? Your face is bruised.”

  When I said it, her eyes automatically tracked to the man. Suspicion confirmed, as far as I was concerned.

  “Did he do that to you?” Robert asked over my shoulder as he slid the Springfield back into its holster on my leg. The menace in his deep voice was thick.

  The woman hesitated, fear flashing across her face in an understandable reaction. Her brain, used to being forced to keep silent, was at war with the reality in front of her. It took a few seconds for the lag to process, but when the gray matter got the signal that her abuser was on the floor bleeding and in no position to hurt her, she nodded.

  “Yeah. My boyfriend. We just moved here and things were good and then everything happened. When the monsters started showing up one of them came to the window and startled me. I screamed. Roger,” she said, gesturing at the supine man, “hit me and told me to be quiet. That I’d get us killed. Like the dead guy in the window didn’t already see me.”

  She went quiet. I broke the silence that followed.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Elizabeth,” the woman said. “I go by Liz.”

  “Okay, Liz,” I said, trying to sound as calm as possible. “Did he do this to you before everything happened? Some of those bruises on your face look old, some new. I’m just trying to get all the facts.”

  “No, never,” Liz said. “Since things went wrong we’ve been stuck here. Rationing food because we can’t go out and buy any more. We’ve both been stressed and upset, but he’s…taken it out on me a couple times. I would have fought back, but—”

  “Don’t do that,” I interrupted. “Don’t rationalize or blame yourself. You survived. That’s what matters. You don’t fight psychos with guns, not if you want to live. Whatever you did or didn’t do, it kept you going until we showed up.”

  “You can come with us, if you want,” Robert said. “We have a safe place.”

  “Not him, though,” I said, tilting my head at Roger.

  Liz looked down at Roger, between whose fingers I could see flashes of white amid the red. Bone sticking out, or just broken teeth?

  “He’ll come looking for me,” Liz said. “He’ll kill me.”

  “He won’t,” I assured her.

  Liz looked at me, and something passed between us. It was a question unasked about how I could possibly make such a promise.

  “Do you honestly believe he’d hunt you down and murder you for leaving?” I asked her. “Truly?”

  Liz met my eyes. “A month ago I’d have said no, of course not. But he’s so angry all the time. So frustrated. Anything I do that upsets him or annoys him makes him scream at least. At worst, well, you can see my face.”

  “How about it, Roger?” I asked him. “Would you try to find Liz and kill her if she came with us?”

  He didn’t answer, though it made sense because a broken jaw is no fucking joke. His head neither shook nor nodded, remaining still as those hateful eyes blazed at me.

  “I think you’d try,” I said. “But you’re not answering me. How about a thumbs-up for yes, down for no. You planning on hurting anyone else?”

  Slowly, laboriously, Roger peeled a hand away from his face and raised a middle finger.

  “Yeah,” I said. “That’s kind of what I thought.”

  I pulled the trigger and put a load of buckshot through Roger’s knee.

  23

  I’m willing to bet only a handful of people in the world have ever seen what happens when a man with a badly broken jaw gets his knee blown to shreds. The result is something out of a Cronenberg movie. Misshapen jaw flapping wildly, blood spraying as he tries screams from two different agonies trying to outdo each other. Roger’s hands did a fast little dance from jaw to knee and back again.

  “What the fuck?!” Robert shouted. Everyone, even Gregory who stood outside the door, said some variation of this.

  “I don’t think he’ll be following us,” I said.

  Liz, who looked more shocked than horrified, raised a hand to her mouth. “What did you do?”

  “Killing him in cold blood seemed too far,” I said. “He’s a woman-beating shit stain. I’m making sure he can’t follow.”

  Robert moved to one side, training my own pistol on me. “So you think shooting him in the leg is somehow better? He’ll still die.”

  I glared up at him. “Different world, Robert. Different rules. Should I leave him free to do whatever he wants, hurt whoever he wants? What if he’d been raping someone when we came in here? Would you be fine with letting a rapist walk around, or would you want to put a bullet through his dick and call it a day?”

  Robert said nothing, though I could see the hesitation on his face.

  “The difference here is that I’m stopping this guy from hurting people from now on. I didn’t shoot him because I enjoy it. I’m preventing the damage he’ll do down the road. There aren’t so many people left that we can afford to turn a blind eye to people like this and let them get away with slaps on the wrist.”

  A bead of sweat rolled down Robert’s face. “You can’t just go around shooting people like this, Ran.”

  I couldn’t help the belly laugh that slipped out. “Funny thing to say while you’re pointing my gun at me. You have five seconds to lower it or fire before I take it from you and make you eat it.”

  Robert glanced at the bleeding—and probably dying—man on the expensive granite tile, and lowered the gun.

  “Guys, we have a problem out here,” Gregory said. I heard the soft whoosh of the bowstring cutting the air. “A zombie must have been walking through the woods nearby and heard the gunshots. I can see a couple of them making their way here.”

&n
bsp; A horrible chain of thoughts unfolded in a split second. Zombies would of course be listening for sounds of prey, because that’s what good predators did. A pair of shotgun blasts were basically dinner bells. Everywhere within earshot, which was really goddamn far since there was no longer any noise pollution from civilization, zombies would perk up and turn this direction.

  The Reavers, also being good predators, would certainly notice that behavior. Zombies changing direction and heading this way was a giant flashing neon arrow pointing to us.

  “We have to go. Right now.” I said the words as authoritatively as possible.

  Liz shook her head and ran toward the front of the house at warp speed. Before I could even work out what was happening, the door was slamming behind her.

  “Fuck it,” Robert said. “Let’s go. If we see her on the road we’ll offer her a ride somewhere.”

  We piled into the Jeep and took off without so much as a backward glance. I scanned the area as we left but saw no sign of Liz. Wherever she’d gone, it was somewhere she didn’t want to be seen. I probably would have run and hid in the woods, too, if I was anyone but myself.

  Gregory did an admirable job of balancing speed without killing all of us. All thought for stealth was gone, opting instead for raw power and enough luck to let us get onto open road before having to deal with Reavers.

  It honestly wasn’t Gregory’s fault when we crashed a few minutes later. In fact, I think his solid reaction time was part of what saved our lives. When the tire blew—probably a gunshot—the Jeep dipped heavily toward the driver’s side and caught the edge of the road. Gregory fought the wheel and tapped the brake in a delicate pattern just right for minimizing the impact when we hit the tree.

  The speed was low enough that no one was knocked stupid from the force of it. I was a little dazed from the adrenaline, but wasted no time unbuckling myself and getting the others moving.

  “I need the bow,” Gregory said, trying to untangle the thing where it was wedged beneath buckled seats.

  “No time,” I told him gently but firmly. “They’re here.”

  They were. The giant pickup was tearing down the road toward us from whatever spot they’d sniped us from, rooster tails of debris and dust spinning into the sky behind them. It was a small observation, but one that drove another nail into the coffin of what we’d lost. Without normal traffic acting as a constant low grind, leaves and broken twigs and other pieces of mother nature’s garbage didn’t get crushed to dust or thrown off by the jet wash of vehicles. It just piled up. Sooner or later, roads would be covered in an ever-thickening layer of the stuff.

  “Out, out!” I shouted. “Move your asses! Into the woods,” I said, actually singing the last part. My stressed-out brain has always had wildly inappropriate wiring, which is the only explanation I can give for why it chose that life-or-death moment to override my speech with musical theater.

  We made it out of the Jeep and between the trees just before the truck swerved into a power slide and halted, buying ourselves a little more life. Overall I was happy about this, but I’d be lying if I said a small part of me even then didn’t take a measure of solace that I hadn’t been shot to death right after belting out something by Sondheim. Honestly, if you’re going to die with song on your lips, at least class it up with some Andrew Lloyd Webber.

  We ran for a solid two minutes, darting through the trees, before I realized we weren’t being followed. Or at least not quickly. I spun the possible reasons for this through my head and settled on the most probable, which was the fact that Len and his people probably hunted these woods. They would have no problem tracking us, and it seemed likely they would know the lay of the land.

  It might have been true, but we almost ran smack into one concrete reason—zombies.

  “What the fuck?” Gregory breathed, his voice shaky.

  Robert grabbed the both of us by the wrist to pull us to a stop. His chest heaved from the run, but the wide wildness in his eyes was pure terror. It wasn’t hard to understand the source.

  What stood in front of us, nestled in a hollow depression twenty feet across, was a mass of zombies. I immediately christened it a deadfall, because these people were dead and, well, they weren’t standing up.

  The zombies rested in a haphazard pile like a group of lost hikers sharing body heat or the worst orgy in recorded history. These were not true corpses; they moved. Like the blindly waving tentacles of sea anemones, their limbs swayed. Fingers twitched. Eyes fluttered. I wondered if the dead could dream.

  Even as we stood frozen, the zombies became aware of our presence. Those on the edges of the mass began rising jerkily, their attention laser-focused on us.

  “Come on,” I said, shaking my wrist loose. “We gotta run.”

  We ran.

  The weird thing? I didn’t feel all that pumped up. Maybe it was the weeks spent inside, slowly watching the black veins on my neck fade between bouts of Shivers. Possibly my tolerance for dealing with ridiculous, lethal shit was increased by the certain knowledge of oncoming seizures. The human mind is a big, complicated mess. Reactions and shifts in perspective are informed by a lot of things, rationality not often among them. I don’t know what changed, exactly. I just knew it had.

  We dashed away but slid to a halt fifty yards south. The tree line came to an abrupt end. So did the ground.

  Robert stared out over the empty gap where land should have been, eyes scanning the other side of the chasm cut out by a meandering creek whose name I couldn’t recall. The far side was easily ten feet lower than where we stood, with similarly sheer walls dropping down toward the water.

  “What do we do now?” Gregory asked in a calm voice. “Fight?”

  “I fight,” I said. “You two can follow the creek west. That’s the direction my place is in.”

  Robert put a hand on my shoulder. “We all fight.”

  I shook my head. “I’m not planning some noble last stand. I’m smaller and faster. I can distract while you two slip away. Besides, if I’m in charge of our little group, it’s my responsibility to make sure you’re safe.”

  Zombies began appearing in the distance. I drew my knife. “Whatever you do, don’t shoot. Don’t want to draw attention.”

  “Here,” Gregory said, pushing something into my hands. His knife. “Just in case you need a spare.”

  I smiled and waved it away. “I always carry two.”

  I’m no soldier. I’m not an expert at any given thing. No matter how much I want to see myself as some invincible badass, I know it isn’t true. Nonetheless, the surge of energy as I ran toward the fight came close. The deep down fear was still there, mostly smothered by adrenaline.

  I crashed into the first zombie, keeping my knife hand above my head as I twisted to hip check the dead man into a tree. Knife in a reverse grip, I stabbed into the neck. Once, twice, three times in quick succession, feeling the heavy blade skitter between vertebrae.

  As he fell, his hand clawed at my face. A few hot lines burst into existence as his nails scratched my check and trailed down my jaw. My first enemy and I was already getting hit. There was no way I could win against every one of them.

  But as I looked around, I realized the number of zombies was much less than the population of the deadfall. There were only a couple in view.

  Someone swore loudly in the direction of the Jeep. Sounds of struggle wafted through the trees. Len and his gang must have gotten the attention of the rest of the zombies. I smirked.

  Filled with a renewed hope, I cut loose as I launched myself at the next zombie. This one was more crafty, managing to tangle a hand in the shoulder strap of my armor. His grip was solid, too, with enough leverage to yank me to one side easily.

  I responded by defending with my left hand and getting all kinds of surgical with my right. I bent at the waist to make it harder for him to move me, and put the edge of the knife into the back of his leg just above the knee. The first cut was a slash, enough to open him up. The second was
more deliberate and measured.

  “Ha!” I shouted as the leg went out, pulling us to the ground. I straightened as we toppled, keeping my balance and putting tension on his trapped hand. I let him fall and put a boot on his jaw, grabbed the wrist, and pushed with the first while pulling on the second.

  I felt the zombie’s shoulder dislocate and his neck crumble beneath my heel. The fight didn’t go out of him at once, so I knew I hadn’t severed the spine, but his urge to fuck with me was definitely ebbing. I stomped my heel a couple times to make sure it was fully dead.

  Then someone jumped on my back and tried to bite me in the fucking neck.

  Tried, because I’m not an idiot. While I didn’t wear a helmet, the limited damage a bite could do to my face didn’t scare me. Not as much as what having a solid chunk of my throat ripped out did. I could live with a missing part of my cheek. Carotid artery, not so much.

  The zombie’s teeth met the aluminum mesh gorget I’d made during my illness. Sandwiched between two layers of fabric, it was enough to prevent my skin from being broken. Looked like a scarf, and was flexible.

  Which sucked a lot, because it meant the bite still hurt like a bastard. The skin on my neck turned to fire instantly as the dead person riding me like a rodeo horse clamped down with punishing strength.

  It took a lot of willpower not to scream, but I managed it. Bit my tongue in the process, releasing a sickeningly warm flow of blood in my mouth.

  I twisted around and grabbed it by the hair, trying to throw the zombie over my shoulder. It didn’t work. The little leech wouldn’t let go. I changed tactics and pulled its head as far back as I could and rammed my knife into its face with my other hand. I got lucky and put the blade right through its eye.

  When it fell, the gorget went along for the ride. Reaching down to tug it free, I froze.

  It was a kid. Maybe thirteen. The glassy eyes and pale skin were a stark contrast to the black veins in her neck. A gaping wound in her chest told me that yes, she was a zombie. I hadn’t just killed a child with the Shivers. It still hit me like a physical blow.