by R. J. Spears
I could see the logic of their choice. I couldn’t tell in the dim light just how old he was, but being elderly in the new undead world was a hard road to travel. Better to make your own path to the world beyond.
I stepped back out of the room and pulled the door closed, envying their choice. Kara and I had come so close to making and fulfilling that choice back at Marlow’s compound. Surrounded by the undead with only enough bullets to make our own suicidal choice, we had run out of options. That was when Brother Ed showed up in the truck and spirited us away.
I was saved only to get to watch Kara being ravaged by infection. Hooray.
The bathroom turned out to be a treasure trove of over-the-counter medicines. These were healthy old folks. I guess my stereotype for elderly folks was that they had craploads of pills just sitting around. One to keep down the cholesterol. One for high blood pressure. Maybe even one of those little blue boner pills, but none were to be had there. (I didn’t want or need any of the latter.)
I went down the hall, discovered that the other door was a guest room, and shook a pillow out of its case, then returned to fill it with Tylenol, cough medicine, sinus pills, and anti-diarrhea medicine. None of it would help Kara, but it could come to some use.
I headed out of the house. A dark silhouette appeared in the front door, and I nearly screamed.
It turned out to be Brother Ed. I had exceeded the five-minute check-in time, and he had made his way to me.
“You nearly scared the shit out of me, Brother Ed,” I said, my heart pounding hard in my chest.
“You scare too easy, boy,” he replied.
I have always hated when he called me boy, but never let him knew it bothered me. Never let them see you sweat, right?
“Did you find anything?” I asked.
“No antibiotics, but I found some heavy duty pain medicines,” he replied. “Tramadol. Oxycodone. Plus some over-the-counter stuff.”
“No prescriptions here but plenty of the over-the-counter meds,” I said. “Let’s move onto the next set of houses.”
Chapter 5
A Different Kind of Desperation
Kilgore spied out the second-floor bedroom window. As the sun dipped down under the horizon, his fear grew. The Night Visitor hadn’t come the night of the battle at Marlow’s compound, primarily because the battle had lasted all night. Kilgore had no idea what the rules were on how and when it visited, but there had been no visit, and for that, he was grateful.
Kilgore and his soldiers, along with their faithful companion, Harley, had taken up quarters in a house close to the highway. It was an expansive two-story white house with black shutters and a slate roof. It was mostly intact. Whoever had lived there had done a good job of securing the place when they headed for the hills. Looters had attempted to get in. Several windows were broken, but heavy metal bars on the outside of the windows prevented any further access. Kilgore guessed the looters just moved on to softer targets.
Those looters didn’t have a .30 caliber machine gun. Kilgore’s crew did, and it became the universal key as one of the gunners blasted their way inside.
Something about the house attracted Kilgore’s attention. Maybe it was intuition. Maybe it was the question as to why someone would go to extreme measures to protect their home. This wasn’t the ghettos of Chicago. It was a small, almost rural city.
There had to be a reason for the extra protective measures, but that wasn’t what was front and center in Kilgore’s mind. As darkness fell, it was fear.
Kilgore hated the nights. He had good reason.
At night was when he came. If you could call the entity that visited a ‘he’. Kilgore thought maybe the Night Visitor had been human centuries ago, but he wasn’t sure. He could have been something more than human or something substantially less. What the Night Visitor was didn’t really matter to Kilgore. What he did to Kilgore was what made all the difference, and that difference was never pleasant.
The search for Jason Carter had gone as dry as a desert. And there was no calling in reinforcements. While there had been no human casualties of their emergency crash landing, Private Soto had discovered on his trip back to the helicopter that the radio was knocked out of commission. The only person qualified to fix it, Private Meinke, had taken a bullet to the head in their firefight with Marlow’s men.
The choice was to return to the Manor, drive to their true home base at Wright-Patterson Air Base, or start from where they were. The men petitioned hard for a return to the Airbase, but Kilgore would have none of it. There was only one direction, and that was forward.
Driven by a manic energy, Kilgore marshaled the men to set up a base of operation and then to start their search. He smacked Harley around, browbeat the men, and got the initial search underway, but it was all to no avail.
Even when Kilgore had threatened to shoot Harley or cut off one of his fingers, the biker hadn’t been able to guide Kilgore or his soldiers in any direction that got them closer to finding Jason Carter. And Kilgore really tried to incentivize Harley.
“Harley,” he said, “you want to keep all your fingers, you find Jason Carter.”
After the first night and no sign of Jason Carter, Harley was sans the pinkie on his left hand.
It didn’t matter that Harley had no idea where Jason Carter was. Kilgore would continue to take pieces and parts of Harley. Harley wasn’t a super tracker and didn’t have any magical ability to locate people. In fact, he was a rather dull man without too much of an imagination.
Kilgore was just desperate.
The men, while not cheerful about Kilgore’s demand to continue the search for Jason Carter, were rewarded with a treasure trove of items once they entered the house. Whoever had owned the house before the Outbreak had obviously been a prepper.
The basement of the house was stocked floor-to-ceiling with ready-to-eat meals, rice, beans, and other long-term survival items, along with what made the soldiers the happiest - booze. After Kilgore had retired to his room on the second floor, they drank themselves into oblivion, passing out on couches, chairs, and even on the floor.
Poor Harley got to sample none of these delights as he was shackled to a metal support beam in a back room in the basement. All the while the men cavorted, getting drunker and drunker, he sat nursing his wounded hand with nothing more than two bottles of water and the consensus pick for the worst MRE ever made - veggie omelet. Nicknamed the “vomlet,” it was universally despised by soldiers and preppers alike. And Harley hated vegetarian food and vegetarians. Any man who refused to eat meat was either limp-wristed or wasn’t a man. Despite his misgivings, he choked it down because he was desperate. Not eating for a day and a half lowered the bar on what you would eat.
Kilgore sat in a straight-back chair beside the window in his bedroom and watched as the sky changed shades from orange-pinkish to light blue then indigo blue and finally inky black. Bats replaced birds in the sky, and the night insects swarmed the skies.
He willed himself to stay awake, hoping like a child that the monster wouldn’t come as long as you left your eyes open and kept your body covered with the blanket. He knew those were the rules of childhood, but he needed something to hold on to.
He knew all his “magic tactics” were childish as his fearful anticipation rose. The minutes ticked by, and it seemed his anxiety increased with each revolution of the hand on the clock. An hour passed, and he watched with sleepy eyes as a small pack of zombies shuffled down the street. One of the undead tripped over debris in the street and fell hard into a car window, smashing it in. The creature found its head stuck in the shattered safety glass, while its undead brethren paid it no heed and continued down the street, oblivious to their colleague’s plight. The thing pushed and pushed at the window, but the safety glass was like an ant trap, enveloping the thing’s head. After five minutes, the zombie freed itself but left copious amounts of flesh and blood in the jagged opening.
Unfazed, it wandered off into the night.
> Despite the ever-growing fear, Kilgore found his eyelids growing heavier and heavier. The sting of fatigue burned in his eyes, and his head began to droop down to his chest. He fought the drowsiness, jerking his head up several times. After several more of these droops, exhaustion won the battle, and Kilgore drifted off into a restless sleep.
The Night Visitor arrived thirty minutes later, and it was not happy.
Chapter 6
Holding Pattern
Kilgore wasn’t the only one watching and waiting. Roughly fifty miles south of where he was sitting, the Manor folks sat in a holding pattern. As the noise of helicopters flying in the night skies sounded overhead, carried by the damp night air, they found themselves pinned down for the second night in a row.
Jo and Sergeant Jones decided to camp out in a large barn on a farm in the hills of Southern Ohio just west of Jackson. They had spotted the barn the previous day after hearing a chopper coming dangerously close. Desperate to get out of sight, they sped off the small two-lane country road they were on and into the tight confines of the barn. It had taken some maneuvering, specifically for Jones, who had to use his transport truck to push a small tractor out the back doors of the barn, giving them just enough room to accommodate the three trucks.
They had no idea they would be trapped there for a day and a half. To make matters worse, they had limited food, and the only access to water was a hand-pumped well beside the barn. Each trip to get water exposed them all to risk of being seen by the choppers in the sky.
“It looks like they really mean business,” Russell said to Jones.
Jones sat swiveled in the cab of the truck, his legs dangling out the side with Del peering up at him from the floor of the barn. Few of the group had spoken with Jones, as he was an unknown commodity. For some, he was too dangerous. For others, he was frightening. Jones knew a six-foot-two-inch black man with a shaved head had that effect on people, but he wasn’t in the place to counter those perceptions and wasn’t sure he wanted to.
“Yes,” Jones responded. “I thought that they’d just let us go, but it looks like they might want some payback.”
Del wasn’t sure how to respond. He was less ambivalent about Jones than the rest of the people because they had worked together as a two-man strike team on the soldiers during their little rebellion. Besides, he was just trying to be nice since everyone else was treating Jones like he had the plague.
What he did know was that he didn’t like the idea of the soldiers wanting to get revenge. In a way, he couldn’t blame them, but the soldiers had forced their hand. They had treated the people at the Manor like mortal enemies when all the living and breathing humans should have been on the same side against the dead. But from Del’s experience, that was nothing new.
“Do you think they’ll stop looking for us in time?” Del asked.
“I’m not sure. Maybe Kilgore returned. If that’s the case, then all bets are off.”
Del ran a hand through his close-cropped hair and exhaled loudly. He had his son and girlfriend trapped in this barn. They hadn’t hardly had anything to eat, and his boy was complaining about being hungry. It had started as a whine, and now, it was a resounding chorus from the young and old alike.
“Well, what the hell should we do?” Del finally asked.
Jones put his hands into the air. “I am not your leader. I don’t think half the people here trust or even like me. In fact, there are more than a few that hate me.”
“Well, I trust you. You came through for us.”
Jones had been a part of the counter-attack that had freed their people when Corporal Lodwick held them hostage.
“Tell them,” Jones said, waving his hand in the air to encompass the people in the barn.
Jo saw the two men talking and made her way across the mass of people in the barn. Some people stayed in the trucks, while other sprawled out across the floor, trying any way they could to get comfortable.
The barn wasn’t one of the old-time types with a pitched ceiling with rustic wood beams but used more modern construction methods with a cement floor and a high-pitched roof. So, there was no idyllic hayloft or anything like that, but there were plenty of places to put things like farm implements, two walled-off areas for seeds, one for chemicals, along with a small bay for repairs, stocked with tools. Whoever had maintained the barn must have been anal retentive, because there were only the slightest of grease stains on the tools or the floor. It wasn’t clean enough to eat off of, but it was pretty damn clean.
“What are you two talking about?” Jo asked, keeping her volume low.
Del replied, “About what the hell we are going to do. People are getting hungry. And they’re scared shitless that one of those whirlybirds is going to find and kill us.”
Jo surveyed the people in the barn, taking note of each one. They had thought they were safe when they ended up at The Manor after all the horrors before. They all felt that way, but there was thing was safe -- not anymore. Not with the dead walking the earth and madmen intent on killing them in pursuit. Being forced to hide in a confined space as small as this barn was fraying nerves and raising tempers.
As if on cue, Mrs. Hatcher and a sour looking man with wrinkled, dry skin, who made Jones think of a sea captain who had spent too many years on the water, started on a direct line across the barn toward Jo, Del, and Jones. The man’s face was weather-worn with deep creases and terminal worry lines. Other people in the barn gave way, knowing that catching Mrs. Hatcher’s ire was something to be avoided.
“Speaking of the mob,” Jones said, keeping his voice low.
Del glanced over his shoulder and said, “Oh shit.”
Mrs. Hatcher had been an irritant for those in leadership at the Manor for a long time. She also had the habit of attracting malcontents like metal filings to a magnet. Although, she had been on good behavior for almost twenty-four hours after the breakout from the Manor, it looked like her days of sunshine and smiles were over.
“Jo, what are you doing to get us out of this place?” Mrs. Hatcher asked, her face pinched in frustration.
Her dour companion said, “It’s damn hot in here, and people are getting hungry.”
Jo took a moment to compose her thoughts, then said, “We’re here until we think it’s safe to leave.”
“And when will that be?” Mrs. Hatcher asked, placing her hands on her hips.
“As soon as the helicopters stop flying overhead.”
“I don’t hear any now,” Mrs. Hatcher said.
Jones decided he should enter the conversation. “They can cover a lot of ground in a short period of time. Not hearing them now doesn’t mean that they can’t be on top of us in minutes.”
Mrs. Hatcher decided that she liked being alive, but she wanted their living condition improved. “What about getting more food for us?”
“We’ve taken every spare morsel of food we could find in the house,” Jo said. “Going out on any expeditions is a risk. I think the next house is a quarter of a mile away. We could try to get there, but we’d have to go at night. And getting there is no guarantee that there will be anything there.”
“Well, this isn’t going to work for that much longer,” Mrs. Hatcher said. “And you better find some answers. I know more than a few people here are thinking of striking out on their own.”
Jo could feel her internal temperature start to rise, but she counted to five inside her head before answering. “We know food is an issue. This is a farm, and there are some seeds in here. What about them? Can we eat them?” She directed her question to Del because he was their resident farmer.
“You can eat just about anything, but that doesn’t mean it tastes good,” he said, grimacing at the idea. “And what good it will do, I’m not sure.”
“I, for one, don’t relish the idea of eating seeds,” Mrs. Hatcher said. “You need to do something.” With that, she and her wrinkly companion stormed away. She barely made it fifty feet away before she grabbed the attention of a cou
ple of older men and started bending their ears while glancing back several times at Jo and her companions.
Jones exhaled loudly, then said, “I don’t mean to pile on, but we can’t stay here much longer no matter what. If their helicopters have thermal imaging, this place will light up like a Christmas tree.”
Jo’s eyes went wide, “Do you think they’ll go to that much trouble?”
“They’ve had choppers in the air a lot,” Jones said. “It can’t be just for transporting reinforcements back and forth. That’s costing them fuel. It has to be for a purpose. If you ask me, they’re looking for something, and that is probably us.”
“How can we hide from something like that?” she asked.
“Get as far away as we can,” Jones responded.
“You know we can’t do that,” Del said. “The trucks are running low on fuel.”
Jones pondered what to do for a half a minute, but no real brilliance came to light.
“We have a narrow set of options then. We can separate and spread out and take our chances on foot.”
Jo cut in, “We can’t do that. Half these people are either elderly or just kids.”
“We can’t rule that out because we may have no other choice. Our other option is for some of us to create a really big ass distraction to draw their attention away, allowing the others to get away to a safe location.”
Del said, “And who in the hell would do that?”
Jo looked at him and asked, “Any volunteers?”
Chapter 7
Losing It
I could hear them in the bedroom, groaning and moaning.
No, don’t go there. No one in there was having a “good time,” as they say. It was just a bunch of deaders that someone had locked inside the room.
Brother Ed and I had moved on to our third set of houses. The second set netted me a bottle of stool softeners. (Go crazy, right?) Brother Ed found more prescription strength painkillers in the house he searched, making me wonder if we had a problem with them in Ohio before the fall of man, because prescription strength painkillers seemed way too common in our past searches. Of course, the one thing we didn’t find was antibiotics.
