“I think Luke must have said or done something. She seems put out by him in particular.” Dallas cocked her head. “Find out what’s going on, will you? I don’t want any discord before we make the move. We need a united front before we leave.”
Roper cast a wary glance out at the passing countryside. Everywhere she looked, there were dead bodies, rust, and decay. “Will do.”
As they drove along, she reached over and laid her hand on Dallas’s arm. “Take that right, will you? I want to check something out.”
Dallas did so. “What are you thinking?”
“The gator farm. I just wonder––”
A slow smile crept across Dallas’s face. “I like how you’re thinking, baby.”
Roper kissed the back of Dallas’s hand. “I just want to take a look. It might be a really good first stop for us. Come here and train. Take a day or two to collect any more survivors before we set out for Angola. If the gators are all still there, then there won’t be any eaters around for miles.”
As they drove, Churchill shared some of his growing-up-gay stories with Hole, who was transfixed and seemed to relax the further away they got from his buddies…and the truth.
“It’s gonna be okay, Hole, really. What isn’t okay is living a lie. We’ve got precious energy left after surviving to spend it uselessly hiding who we are. Think on it.”
Roper directed Dallas to the gator farm, where they saw dozens of zombies pawing at the cyclone fencing. That could only mean one thing: survivors.
Dallas stopped the Fuchs. “Well, that’s a good sign.” They looked at each other and busted out laughing.
“What’s going on?” Churchill asked, looking out the window. “Oh. Well, that’s good to see.” He checked the straps of his sheaths and extracted one of his machetes. “Where there are man eaters, there are men.”
“We’ve got live ones,” Roper announced, checking her gear. “Hot zone, so everyone stay frosty.”
“What’s your pleasure?” Churchill asked, holding out a bat and a crowbar to Hole.
Hole stared down at the offered weapons. “You’re kidding, right? You guys said I’d have a rifle. I’m not going out there with just a bat.”
“That was before we knew you weren’t ZB. We’re not wasting ammo when cold, brute force is reliable and ammo free.”
Hole reluctantly took the crowbar. “And these things really won’t attack me?”
Churchill nodded. “They really won’t. We’ll be able to walk right up to them and crush they heads in.”
“But that doesn’t mean you act carelessly or recklessly. You come up behind them and smash their skulls like tin cans. Take some of your homo frustrations out on the undead,” Roper said.
And that was precisely what they did. Thirty-four dead zombies later, the four stopped to rest and catch their breath.
“Did anyone see any ZBs?” Dallas asked as she climbed the cyclone fence.
Hole pointed to the tree house nestled between two trees. “Up there.”
Roper gazed up at the tree house then down at the half dozen gators basking on the banks. They were all in excess of fifteen feet. “Smart.”
“We could use a few smart ones,” Dallas added.
Hole stood next to them, his shirt and jeans splattered with blood. “What are you saying?”
Dallas and Roper chuckled.
“It’s safe to come down!” Dallas shouted up to the people that she saw peering from the relative safety of the tree house.
The alligators near the bottom of the tree slid off into the water.
“I’ve got it,” Roper said, pulling Hole with her to the dead zombies. “We need to chuck a few of these into the water, then we don’t have to worry about them for a bit.”
After throwing four zombies into the roiling water, Roper and Hole joined the other two.
“Well?”
“They’re up there, but we aren’t risking going up after them. They’ll either come down or we’re outta here.”
They waited another five minutes before turning to leave.
“Wait! Please wait!” a voice cried out.
Roper raised her rifle, but Dallas shook her head. The person coming down from the tree house was a young man of about twenty two or twenty three.
“Stay right there.” Dallas ordered. “How many of you are there?”
The man froze, slowly raising his hands as if he was being arrested. He had blond hair and wore overalls that were three sizes too big. “Beggin’ your pardon, ma’am, but you barged into our place here waving weapons in our faces and you’re asking us questions? Don’t seem right to me.”
Dallas ignored him. “You’ve been here how long?”
He glanced over his shoulder at the tree house. “Here in the farm? Two months, maybe? Most of us are from Arizona.”
“You got a name?”
“Bobbie Sullivan, but my friends call me Sully.” Sully glanced up at the tree house once more. He was making Dallas nervous, and like a well-oiled machine, Churchill slid around to the side of Sully, his rifle aimed up at the tree.
“Well, Sully, coming to the gator farm was a wise idea. They’ve probably kept you guys safe, huh?”
“Yeah. We moved from zoos to farms all along the way. It was pretty cool at first, but then we hooked up with more people and ended up here. We haven’t left because we don’t know where else to go.”
Dallas’s eyes scoured the grounds. This felt like a stall of some sort, and she didn’t like it. “You must be traveling with some smart people.”
Sully shrugged. “Smart, maybe, but we got nothing on you for fightin’. You guys kicked butt out here. We are impressed.”
“We?”
An older gentleman climbed down from the tree and joined Sully.
“Name’s Benjamin. I’m sort of the unofficial commander of this group.”
Dallas explained who they were and what they were doing. As she finished, ever so slowly, the others came down from the tree house. They stood their ground beneath the tree while Dallas’s people remained just inside the fence line.
After the introductions, Dallas gave Benjamin and Sully time to go back to the group to decide if they wanted to join them.
“I don’t have a good feeling about them,” Roper whispered. “If he was the leader, why didn’t he come down instead of sending a boy to do a man’s job?”
“We don’t have to like them, Rope.”
“Well that’s good because there’s something…off about their leader. Not Sully. The other guy. Something about him rubs me wrong.”
“I’m with Roper,” Churchill said. “I think we need to stay on our toes here.”
When the two men returned from discussing it with their group, they had a counter-offer. “We would like to offer a suggestion to your group,” Benjamin said. He was an awkward man with glasses that looked like they had taken a beating. He was tall and angular, and his skin appeared as if he’d not eaten well. It was pasty white and hung off his face as if he had no facial muscles. Dallas figured him to be in his fifties, maybe ex-marine.
“You said commander. Are you ex-military?”
“Nope. Just the lead guy for the time being.”
“Then why send Sully down? Why not come down yourself?” Roper asked.
Benjamin ignored her. “We’ve managed this long here with the gators. They have proven to be the greatest deterrent. We’ve watched them eat hundreds of those things over the course of four months. We’re not likely to leave without knowing that where we’re going and who we’re going with is worth the risk. I’m sure you understand.”
Dallas was impressed with their hesitation, but didn’t get a good feeling from this guy, either. These were the kind of people they needed––smart, yet cautious; willing, yet deliberate.
“Actually, I do. Tell you what––when we’re on the move, we’ll swing by here. If you want to join us then, we can stay here and train. If not, we’ll continue on our merry way.”
“Stay here? How many did you say you have?”
“Almost forty.”
He looked at his group. They deferred to him.
“Ma’am, if you can bring forty people overland, we’ll take you. We are pretty captivated with how ya’ll dispatched those creatures. Don’t quite know how you did it, though, with two gals and all.”
The inference was obvious to everyone listening.
“Well…” Dallas began, “we know the secret to killing them.” She proceeded to explain what they knew about the genetic issues. The entire time, Sully’s eyes never left her face.
When she finished, he looked down, tears forming in his eyes. He stepped forward, his head still bowed slightly. “Ma’am, if what you’re saying is true, then me and my guy, Alonzo over there, are on board. We would be proud to fight alongside you all.”
Dallas put her hand on his shoulder. “It’s true, Sully. But you stay here with your people. We’ll bring the party to you. In the meantime, if you know others––”
“We sure do. There are small enclaves all over. People who have figured out how to move around un––” Then he stopped, realizing why they had gone unnoticed. “Oh, I see now.”
Roper jumped in. “If you could gather as many survivors as you can, then our chances of reaching Angola and making it into a fortress from which to engage in a war would rise dramatically. These small groups are eventually going to run out of food and potable water. In Angola, we can grow crops, raise cattle, and begin to fight back. We can fish. We can sleep safely at night. In short, we can start to get our lives back.”
“When can we start looking for you?”
“Day after tomorrow? Three days, tops.”
Sully extended his hand. “Then I’ll look forward to seeing you.”
When they climbed back into the Fuchs, Roper turned to Dallas and said, “Those two are the exact kind of people we need, but I don’t know about the rest of them.”
Dallas held her hand. “I agree, but that’s a chance we’re going to have to take. It’s not just the four of us anymore. We have a greater responsibility now.”
Kissing the back of Dallas’s hand, Roper smiled softly. “Well, my love, let the games begin.”
Dallas’s Log
Looks like we’re all packed up and ready to go. The Joneses can’t be persuaded to leave. I wasn’t expecting them to change their minds about coming. Moving around in our country takes courage these days. So much can go wrong so quickly. I don’t really blame them, but I can’t see them surviving long out here without the rest of us.
Once we took inventory, I realized how low we are on ammo. We’ll have to make a few stops and see what we can collect. All the guns in the world can’t help if we don’t have ammo.
All of the smoked meat is going with us as well. In preparation for this, Luke and Butcher hauled in one of our precious gators and smoked the whole thing.
We’ve become incredibly resourceful here. Resourceful and organized. I never realized how organized you have to be to make a group function properly and well. Working at the fire station in my old life, we all knew our roles, but I had never applied that work ethic anywhere else in my life.
Until now.
So, with the survivors on our yacht loaded with supplies, we’ll put all our best ZB shooters on it. Above water is one of the safest places to be in a zombie-filled world. They can’t swim, but they can stand at the bottom of water looking up until their flesh rots or they are picked clean by bottom feeders. On the boat, the ZBs will be safe from the zombies and can protect our cache from outlaws.
The rest of us will carve a path through NOLA until we can meet up with those people at the gator farm. It is a solid plan, and I am feeling pretty good about it.
Only here do I feel safe admitting that I am scared to death. Not of them. Not even of death…well…not my own. When all this went down, I had just received my walking papers from a woman who was probably a man eater by now. God knows she was a woman eater when she was alive. She ate my heart as easily as these eaters eat flesh.
Anyway, I was alone for a nanosecond before our world was turned upside down. Next thing I knew, I was with Einstein and Roper. The next thing I knew after that, I was in love with her. Really, fully, completely in love with her in a way I have never experienced before.
That’s what scares me.
Having someone so dear to me always being at risk, always walking the razor’s edge scares the shit out of me. What in the hell would I do if anything happened to her? How would I function? How would I go on? Or would I?
Somehow, I doubt it. I think I would just lie down and never get back up. I would turn to dust.
I shudder now at the thought. It breaks my heart…so I have a plan. I haven’t shared it with her or anyone else. Angola is just the start, but there’s something else, someplace else I think we need to go.
When the time is right, I’ll tell her. I can only hope she sees the rationale behind such a bold move.
I live on hope these days, consuming it like food, storing it and rationing it out when necessary.
I guess that’s what hope does for you. You start believing in possibilities—and right now I am beginning to believe we can pull this off.
With a little luck and a lot of grit and determination, we’ll take our nation back.
As Dallas checked her inventory list on The Survivor, she heard that easily distinguishable sound everyone recognized the second they heard it: someone was vomiting.
Coming around the corner, Dallas saw Butcher retching over the side of the boat.
“You okay?” she asked, her mind beginning to fit pieces together like the squares on a Rubik’s cube. “Oh shit. You’re––”
Butcher held up a hand as she finished expelling her breakfast into the murky water below.
Dallas reached into the cabin and grabbed a small washcloth. “Here,” she said, pushing the cloth into Butcher’s trembling hand.
“Thanks.” The sour odor of vomit hung between them.
Dallas waited for Butcher to finish wiping her mouth before saying, “You’re pregnant.” It wasn’t a question. She knew.
Butcher’s eyes welled up and she laid her face in her hands. “Yes…God damnit…yes, I am.”
Dallas came up behind her, laid her hands on her shoulders, and massaged the knots in them. It all made perfect sense to her now. “Butcher, why are you crying? That’s fantastic news! Life can still happen even in all this darkness.”
Butcher cried into her hands and shook her head. “No, no, no. It’s not supposed to be like this. This is all fucked up.”
“It’s going to be okay.” Dallas rubbed her shoulders before pulling Butcher to her and holding her tightly from behind.
“Is it?” Butcher looked up from her hands and turned around, the sour smell of her vomit still lingering in the air. “Is it, Dallas? Can you even imagine trying to raise a child in this messed up, fucked up world? It’s a cruel and inhumane thing to do to bring a child into this shit hole.”
Dallas folded her arms around Butcher and stroked her back. “I won’t lie to you. It will be really, really hard, but I can promise you, you’ll never have to do it alone.”
Pulling away, Butcher impatiently wiped her face on her sleeve. In the year since they’d met, Dallas had never seen her cry. Not once. And there had been plenty of reasons to, to be sure. “Thank you for that, Dallas, but can you even imagine dragging a child through all this shit? It’s not fair.”
“Life’s not fair, with or without zombies.” Dallas tilted Butcher’s chin up. “Does Luke know?”
More tears sprang to her eyes. “He…he doesn’t know, and I don’t want him to know.”
Dallas blinked. “You haven’t told him?” The pieces started locking into place.
Wiping her eyes, Butcher shook her head. “I…can’t. Not now. Not yet.”
“Oh, Butcher––”
“I know. I know I should tell him. This should be a happy time, but it�
�it will change everything and I am not ready to have everything change. There’s been too much change already.”
“You’re right. It will, and that’s a good thing, isn’t it? Change is good, especially when things suck so badly.”
“Sucks is an understatement, Dallas. Once I have a baby, my priorities change. Suddenly, the group is less important in my eyes. I make poorer decisions because I can only think of how a choice will affect my son or daughter. I don’t want to be that person. I can’t be that person.”
“You won’t be. I won’t let you.”
“No, but he will. Men are stupid about babies.”
“Luke will be thrilled.”
“Yes, he will. Then he’ll kick into ultra-protective daddy mode, and I couldn’t handle that. I don’t need a man hovering or looking at me out of the corner of his eye if he thinks I shouldn’t be lifting something or fighting. Uh uh. That’s not for me. We have a solid game plan, and just because I’m pregnant doesn’t mean I am no longer fit to play my role in it.”
Dallas cocked her head. “And just what role is that? Zombie ass-kicker? Zombie head crusher? Zombie mangler? ”
Butcher locked eyes with Dallas, who managed a smile.
“Something like that, yeah. You’re pregnant, not unwell.”
Butcher narrowed her eyes. “You’re not going to start treating me with kid gloves, then, right?”
“As much as I’d like to be the sensitive, caring type and pull you off the front lines, I can’t. We need you. I have no intention of benching you because you’re a little thicker around the waist. Besides, it’s not Luke’s call. You have my word that when you do tell him, I’ll make sure he understands that, and if he acts like an ass, then I’ll kick him off the front line. You have my word.”
Butcher wiped at her nose with the back of her hand again. “Promise?”
“Absolutely. As long as I am leading, that’s my call to make. I’ll follow your instincts unless and until I think they’ve been compromised by hormones or stubbornness. Deal?”
Butcher sniffed and nodded.
“Good. Butcher, this is something we ought to be celebrating. It could really have a positive effect on our morale.”
Riders of the Apocalypse (Book 2): Burning Rubber Page 7
