by mike Evans
Aslin screamed into his radio, “Clary, Clary, you two let up for a minute. I want to see what’s left. You guys took everything down so fast that I don’t know if we got everyone.”
Clary who had a front row seat to the action said, “Are you fucking kidding me, did we get everyone? Of course we got everyone, there’s no way in hell that anyone could possibly be left out there!”
Aslin said, “Then you won’t be offended if you wait a minute before pulling that trigger again. I promise if we see anyone or anything still moving you have my humble appreciation, and permission, to fuck them up.”
The team sat there for a minute to catch their breath. The adrenaline dump from the short fire fight felt like it would last for hours. Shaun never removed his eye from the scope. He looked around systematically watching what was happening. He did not fire at the dead but instead used them to track the living. They walked near the houses and when they found a smell that was to their liking ripped the fencing down and dove in. He hit his radio, “Clary, watch the dead, they’re finding the cowards trying to hide from us.”
Clary came back and said, “I don’t know if you can call someone a coward for being inside of a safe zone, or as safe as they can get, when there is a fucking tank coming their way, Shaun.”
Shaun couldn’t disagree with him but said nothing about it. “Well, go ahead and fire one off into that house. Drop the house on his ass, would you?”
Clary responded with a shot. It hit the house dead on, exploding the hell out of it and sending pieces of it in every direction. When the dust settled again the dead were moving to other homes. After twenty minutes of this they were confident that there was nothing left to worry about. Clary had done a lap with the tank following the dead. Once they realized that there was no one else to take out was when the team started picking off the dead.
McQuaig came over the radio, “I think we’re done here. I don’t think that there is going to be a lot of use in us going and trying to get any supplies, what do you say?”
Aslin said, “No way in hell, if we go down there it's only going to be a waste of time. They don’t have anything that we can use at this point. I’m perfectly fine too because I don’t want anything from these bastards, not that they would be able to do anything about it if we did take it.”
Shaun was still watching his scope and thinking that if they would have done this before they decided to try and get more people that there would be more living right now. None from their group he thought but that was something that he was perfectly capable of dealing with.
Chapter 27
They rode back to the base silent and victorious because they had gotten retribution for those they loved. The adrenaline dump had started wearing off and everyone was quiet as they absorbed what had just gone down. When they pulled onto the base Lou saw the lights and at first wondered if something had gone horribly wrong. He could not have been more pleased to know that the man who sent the killers of his daughters was now dead. Clary pulled the tank up followed by the Humvees. They had made lap after lap in the dark clearing out the dead and making sure that there was no one trying to hide from them. Shaun pulled to a stop, got out and when they had all disembarked they all cheered in victory.
Shaun said, “We shoot first if we aren’t sure. If someone gives us reason to fight, then we will drop their homes on them over and over again.”
Greg climbed out of the tank leaning in to give the long gun a kiss, but stopped when he saw the smoke coming out of it realizing how hot it was going to be and stopped. The taste of gun powder still filled his mouth.
Clary whispered, “Before you climbed out and acted like you were going to kiss that barrel you kind of looked like a badass. That moment has since passed, now you look like a tool…do kids still say tool?”
“No, nowadays they’d just say I look like an asshat, or an asshole, or-”
“Yeah, I get it, Greg, thanks. I think tool sounds a little less rude.”
Greg shrugged, “Are you kidding me? I’m the son of a cop and a product of public schools; I can take just about anything. Just don’t forget that I can dish it out too. Thanks again for letting me ride along in that tank with you, it was eye opening. I’d love to learn how to drive one of those. Maybe you should teach Aslin how to do that, too. I figure it can go through anything and the more things he can hit, the better the chances are he will be able to make it back safely.”
Aslin walked across the grounds. “Hey, I heard you, Greg. There is nothing wrong with my driving. If you want to start bringing up old memories, I remember someone being the reason that we have one lesser Humvee on base.”
Greg said, “Yeah, but didn’t you get trained by like a driver instructor in school, and then on the farm you grew up on, and the Navy? How many teachers does it…”
“Greg, did I ever show you any of those moves that will literally make you shit yourself upon being implemented?”
Greg clapped Aslin on the shoulder. “No, no you didn’t but don’t worry I’m sure if we both know how to drive one of these we’re going to have all kinds of extra cars and Hummers sitting around for use.”
Greg smiled, ducking down and hopping out of his reach quickly. Clary climbed up on the tank and yelled, “We were lucky tonight. If we would have been ready this afternoon there would have been less loss. If we wouldn’t have made people quit carrying openly on base, then outsiders would have seen us as a bigger threat. I take full blame for that, it won’t happen again, I assure you. You carry it everywhere, you sleep with it and you are ready to kill whoever is ignorant enough to enter these gates. If anyone has an issue with that, you know where the gates are, we need to rebuild, we need to secure everything and we need to fight. There aren’t any options that we can afford to waste here. We will find people who are going to want what we have. They will be looking out for themselves only. Those people are fine but they’d better not fuck with us because I will drop hell upon them, I assure you.”
Aliyah raised her hand and Clary nodded. “If we aren’t looking out for ourselves then what is our long term goal here, sir?
“We are here to give back the land to those who still have a beating heart in their chest. We’re going to take care of the dead. We’re going to use Fox’s idea for the blood, we will start as soon, and I mean as soon as we are back to a secure facility. There will be at least two of you on the gates until we don’t think that there are any threats out there leftover from today. I’m up for celebrating tonight but we still don’t know what we’re looking at as far as survivors from their group. They could have been hiding where nothing and no one could find them. We will have to be extra careful because we know that there is going to be retaliation for the beating that we put on them today, if anyone made it.”
They heard a knocking coming from the distance. They all looked over to see Joey at the window. He was banging on the window and Shaun was pretty sure of what was going to happen before it did. He tried to fight the smile creeping over his face when he saw the glistening of the bat come over Joey’s shoulder smashing into the window. It shattered quickly, falling into the bushes below. He screamed, “Sorry about your window, Lou! You guys all came back; you guys okay?”
Shaun yelled that they were all okay and Joey screamed in excitement from the window trying to keep away from the uneven jagged shards sticking out of the frame. Aslin said, “Well, if he’s going to be in the hospital for a few days I think maybe we ought to have a few kids bunk in there. He isn’t going to want to stay there by himself. That kid keeps an eye on everyone while they sleep; they don't know what kind of watch dog they got going for them.”
Clary yelled, “Hey, Joey, do you mind if some of us bunk with you tonight? We don’t want to stay in the bunkhouse if we don’t have to.”
Joey said, “Yeah, come on, there’s room for everyone in here. But we need to fix this window before we go to bed. There are all kinds of sounds at night, and I don’t want to hear none of them. They got coyotes a
round here somewhere and they creep me out.”
The crew went in for a pick of MRE’s for dinner. They’d been out for too long that day and had their fill of the stresses of the environment around them. They were thankful to be alive and exhausted after the adrenaline dump. Shaun looked at the small group, thinking how it was bigger than they’d started with almost a year ago but that the worst thing was that they would have no easier day tomorrow when it came time to bury those they’d lost.
Ellie noticed how quiet he was, “You okay, Shaun, you’ve got a weird look on your face, probably ought to stop because you look creepy.”
Shaun winked, shaking himself out of it. “Nah, I’m okay, it’s just the day catching up with me and my adrenaline is finally trying to settle down. This MRE tastes like shit.”
“Isn’t much worse than Aslin’s cooking, is it?”
Aslin growled in mock dismay, “I heard that, damn it. I hear everything. It looks like I'll be in charge of the stove again after today anyways. You guys feel free to hop right alongside me. We can’t eat MRE’s forever, at least it would be stupid to while we still have all this food frozen in here.”
“I’m going to go make myself a bunk near the front door. You kids get to sleep; it is going to be a helluva long day tomorrow. Hopefully after we bury we can rebuild and start building happier memories again. This was a painful lesson but a good one.”
Shaun looked at him questioningly unsure what to ask, “Sorry, how was this a good lesson?”
“Good probably was not the best term. What I meant was…are you going to trust a stranger right away? Are you still going to assume that all life is precious if they haven’t earned it?”
“No way in hell will I be trusting anyone if it isn't earned, and I mean that wholeheartedly.” Shaun said. “My dad told me the same thing, and while we didn’t agree on many things that is one thing I couldn’t be more confident of, now.”
*****
Ellie took Shaun by the hand and led him to the bunk next to Joey’s, stripping off their fatigue jackets and each of them set their rifle on the side of the bed with their pistol belts hanging from it. Joey sat smiling, signing sinner with his hands. “You guys don’t go kissing all night or I’m gonna have to tell Aslin or Clary.”
Ellie said, “I don’t think Hot Lips has a chance tonight. It looks like Aslin and Clary are out for the count though. Last time I passed him he was out cold, just down the hall on a cot by the front door. He gave Clary the night off and Lou was in the break room, I’m not sure how he is doing though. I would say bad if I had to guess.”
Shaun said, “It is expected though. Look at what he lost and then with the exception of Clary and Joey there was no one to save.”
Ellie said, “Try to turn it off and sleep, Shaun. Like Aslin said earlier, tomorrow is going to suck, getting a few hours of sleep isn’t going to hurt anything.”
*****
The next day
They spent most of the day taking turns between mending the hole in the fence, as well as fortifying the front entrance. There had been ample supplies for fixing it already on base in the storage warehouse but the tasks were not easy ones with the limited hands available to complete the labor intensive jobs.
When there were no worries that if someone came to them they’d be able to walk in without so much as making a noise they began digging graves for the deceased. Aslin and Greg had gone to the Johnston Funeral Home and taken their delivery truck packing it with as many as coffins as they could fit. Lou had put Karen and Teresa together in one so that they would not need to be alone forever. Patrick had his neck bandaged properly and cleaned. The rest were laid in the caskets and they had spent the rest of the day lowering the dead to their eternal resting places.
Chapter 28
One Month Later, anniversary of day 1
Shaun woke up early as he usually did. Ellie lay beside him still asleep. The rest of the group was still resting in the hospital beds. They had not moved out of the infirmary yet. When they had gone to clean up the barracks they decided to get what they needed and to leave it as it was. There would be no way to heal the pain that came from that day and those memories.
Shaun gripped his rifle and gear and walked out to the main hallway to exit the building. Aslin, who had made his room the hallway by the door, looked like he was out for the count still. When Shaun tried walking past him slowly he said, “Fox, make coffee, make really strong coffee.”
“How’d you know it was me, Aslin?”
“Because it is always you, Fox. I think you are the only one out there who sleeps less than I do, and I didn’t think that was possible. Do a sweep around the fence if you can, after the coffee. I think today is the day we start righting the wrong.”
Shaun thought about the day as he had been keeping track since it started. He said, “It is fitting that we start today, I guess.”
Aslin removed the ball cap that had been covering his face. “Damn it! I just wanted coffee and then you have to start me thinking. What are you talking about, Fox?”
“This is the one year anniversary of everything, of when it all started. A year and a day and is when we met. I still remember everything like yesterday and it is a memory that I wish I could forget.”
“Did you want to go visit your dad today, Shaun?”
The thought had never occurred to him that it would even be a possibility. He thought of how many people he’d known who would not have had the privilege of a burial. He said, “When we don’t have the work to do then I’d like to go see him. I can already see him yelling at me from the grave telling me there is more important shit to do than to come up and cry over a mound of dirt. He was never one to be a slacker, and to tell you the truth he’s probably the hardest working guy I’ve ever met. You guys probably rank up there pretty high too.”
Aslin said, “You know what, you go do your rounds. I’ll get the coffee going myself. We can see if McQuaig wants to tag along with us. I’d say with three shooters we’re going to have a pretty high dead count if the baiting is good.”
Shaun felt a bit excited about finally getting to go out and make a dent in the dead. He had taken out more in one day than they probably had since the entire thing started as a group. The thought that there would be three of them was intoxicating. He was already running scenarios through his head of having an entire city safe from the dead. One that they could come in and out of as they pleased.
He was thankful for the miles between cities in Des Moines and the farmland that was more precious now than ever. He knew if it had been just one housing development after another that it would be almost impossible to clear.
Shaun made his way around the base checking the fence line with his scope. None of them got closer than two hundred yards to it now after knowing how easily they could hide on the outside. They had spent an entire week with a bulldozer going across and knocking as many trees down as they could, going back about twenty feet from the fence line. The cover of the trees would only be there until they got that close. Shaun thought it was almost the same concept they would have used at Andy’s if they’d stayed there.
He saw McQuaig on duty walking a half-mile ahead and ran to catch up. “Hey, McQuaig, you want to go out today?”
“I don’t know. I think Greg might have a problem with you dating his girl,” McQuaig said. “Besides isn’t Ellie going to be upset if you start seeing me?”
Shaun’s face immediately blushed red. He said, “No, that isn’t what…”
She laughed and punched him in the shoulder. She said, “Wow, you really are gullible, I figured Greg was just being…well, just being Greg.”
Shaun said, “I can’t help myself sometimes. I try not to but there isn’t much I can do about it. I think that I just trust all of you so much that it is hard to not just assume, that you are telling the truth. I’ll have to make a mental note that you are staying around Greg way too much for your own good. That is a shame too because you seem like good people.”
“Oh, Shaun, awesome! Alright, Fox. What did you want to talk about or were you just out pouting that you weren’t on watch all effing night long?”
“I wanted to throw out an idea to you, and see if you were interested in tagging along?”
“You are talking like we’re actually going to leave. What’s up?”
“Well, when I went past Aslin this morning, he said, that today seemed like a damn good day to start moving forward again and to start taking back from the dead. He wants to take charge and start doing the blood bag trick. From what I’ve seen of it so far it is a no fail plan. We’ve kicked some serious ass using blood to bait those things. The only thing we have to do is make sure that there are no alpha dead around. I haven’t a clue how many of those things there are anymore. Every time I see one Shaun is going to kill them.”
She smiled and said, “Yeah, Shaun, I am so up for getting off base for a few hours and if the reason is to take care of some of the dead then I couldn’t be happier. What time did we want to leave?”
Shaun shrugged, “I don’t know. I’ll head over to the kitchen hall and see what Aslin is thinking. I’m down for doing this all day long if the time allows it. I don’t think that we’re going to run out of them anytime soon. Not that Shaun is going to complain if we do.”
McQuaig looked down at her belt and said, “Let me run to the armory, I want to load up on high power rounds. I’ve got plenty for the machine gun, regardless though if we take Aslin’s normal Humvee we will have all the machine gun that you can use as well as bullets to fill them with.”
Shaun said, “I’ll radio you in a bit with final details.
Shaun already had all of the necessary gear on him and never walked around with anything less than an obscene amount in his pack. He headed straight for the mess hall and found Aslin sitting up against the counter waiting impatiently for the coffee maker to produce the bile that Shaun could only assume was what kept him going in the morning. Shaun said, “Hey, Aslin…”
