by R. J. Spears
Kilgore found the whole scene hard to get over. The zombies had fought and killed his men, fearlessly and without remorse. He had watched as his men trembled and even cried in terror when facing down a horde of the undead. That this hunched over man-beast could bend them to its will was almost mind blowing, but he didn’t have time to admire the Harley-thing’s handiwork. It was time to get in position.
He took one last look as the herd of zombies pushed through a set of shrubs and into the backyard of a house, moving along like a flow of lava, slow, but unstoppable. They started to amble in one direction, but the Harley-thing corrected the flow, and it passed between a gap in the houses and disappeared. One zombie started to wander away from the pack, but like a little lost sheep, the Harley-thing was on it, emitting barks and grunts, turning it back into the herd.
Ten minutes later, Kilgore was positioned at the front corner of a house diagonal to the one he hoped Jason Carter was in. The thin layer of mist that had been covering the ground was starting to break up, and the dawn light was filling the air in a diffuse spray of yellow and orange, painting the few clouds that were in the sky. The creatures of the night had retired and a few birds were flitting about, chirping away, unaware and oblivious of what was happening on the ground below.
Soto was at the corner of another house, peeking out, barely visible. He looked in Kilgore’s direction and nodded his head. Kilgore nodded back, and Soto pulled back out of view. Miller and Beltran were out of sight, which meant they were in position and ready. It was just a waiting game. The Harley-thing’s troops were on the way, but they were slow moving.
It took ten minutes more before he saw the first zombie in the distance, breaking the last of the morning mist. It was followed by five more, shambling toward the back of the house where the man lounged in the rocker.
Things were about to get hot.
Chapter 32
Wrecked
There was low and there was lower. Things among my crew were at an all-time low.
Linda alternated between being so withdrawn that it borderlined on catatonia and bursting into bouts of manic anger. Most of the anger was directed at me, and I knew I deserved it, but who could have seen Brent’s kidnapping coming?
Of course, I should have. Whatever she heaped on me, I gave myself double.
“We should go after him,” Kara said, sitting up in her bed. Some of the color was back in her cheeks, but she still looked weak and drawn.
“You’re in no condition to do anything,” I said, “and besides, we have no idea where they are. You need to rest.”
“Joel, don’t tell me what to do,” she said through teeth clenched.
I didn’t want to get into a spat, so I left her response alone. There was nothing more I wanted to do than to get out there and find Brent. I wanted to burn every bit of ground between us and him. A scorched earth practice would have been my way, if only I had known what direction to start the fire.
Brother Ed appeared in the doorway looking just about as forlorn as I was. “Joel, I want to go look for Brent.”
“I do, too, but they could be anywhere. Kilgore is on his way and could arrive at any time, but I don’t know how we can leave without Brent.”
Jason joined Brother Ed in the doorway and immediately started scribbling away on his notebook. A moment later, he handed a note to Brother Ed.
Whatever it said, it was clear that it didn’t make Brother Ed very happy, but still he read the note. “We leave because we have a bigger mission.”
“We have been through this before,” I said.
But Jason was writing before I finished my sentence. He slammed the note into Brother Ed’s hand.
Brother Ed read it reluctantly, “And look how that turned out.”
Ouch. That really hurt. If only it weren’t true.
That didn’t keep me from wanting to defend myself. “Kara needed some time to recover.”
Jason went at it again, and Brother Ed read the note, “She could have been left here. She would have been in good hands with Brent.”
The more truth he spoke, the more it hurt. Had we left, then maybe Jenelle’s group would have never made a move on Brent.
Brother Ed saved the day when he said, “This isn’t getting us anywhere. We are where we are, and they still have Brent.”
Leave it to Brother Ed to cut through it.
I looked to Jason and said, “What do we do, Jason? Leaving without Brent...it will kill my soul, and I don’t know how I can live with myself if we leave without even looking for him.”
Jason scribbled again and handed the new note over to Brother Ed. “What about Kilgore?”
He was bringing out the big guns.
“I know Kilgore is on his way,” I said. “I saw him in my vision, but we don’t know when.”
I felt like I was reaching.
Jason started to scratch away at his notepad when we heard the first shots in the distance. It seems like our collective minds were made up for us then. The war was on, and the enemy had taken the first shot.
Chapter 33
A Brief Intermission Before Driving
Zombies usually are very predictable. Then there are the obstinate ones.
Molly, Calvin, Mrs. Hatcher, and a small crew of others were doing their best to draw the zombies out of the parking lot, clanging kitchen pots and pans and yelling, to the back of the school, but a few just didn’t get the message. What Henry didn’t know was that some zombies were deaf in life as well as in death.
Two of those zombies stood between Henry and Ellen and the truck they were headed to, and that was a dilemma. Ellen had a rifle and a pistol, and Henry had a .45 automatic, but both knew doing any shooting would probably trump any of the noises being made by the crew at the back of the school. And any noise that attracted the attention of the mass of the zombies moving toward the back of the school was a very bad idea. So, that meant hand weapons.
Henry had a baseball bat, and Ellen had a heavy piece of lead pipe she had found in the school’s janitor’s closet. One of the zombies seemed spryer than the other and was on a collision course for Henry and Ellen. Henry took the lead, bringing back his baseball bat, and readied it for a swing as he closed on the zombie. Instead of being conventional, Henry ducked down at the last moment and swung hard at the zombie’s legs. The bat took the zombie’s legs right out from under it, and it fell like a downed tree, backward onto the hard pavement of the parking lot. Henry swiveled with some flourish and brought the bat down onto the zombie’s forehead, caving in its skull.
“Don’t show off,” Ellen said as she swished past Henry. “Just take them out of commission as fast as you can.”
The second zombie was a short one and looked to have been male before the Outbreak, but the apocalypse had not been kind to it. Its face had been badly mauled, and its dark long sleeve shirt was in tatters, pieces of it dangling down to its waist. Due to the damage to its face, it looked like one eye was completely missing, and the other one wasn’t in much better condition. Ellen forged ahead right straight at it.
The creature didn’t really notice her until she was right in front of it, and that was too late. Just as it started to raise its arm, she was bringing down her piece of pipe onto its head. The pipe had a lot of momentum behind it due to its weight, and it crushed deeply into the zombie’s head. It fell like a robot whose power supply had been cut.
“Let’s get to the truck,” she said, holding back from vomiting. Ellen had made some kills in the past, but it had been with a rifle and never close-up. This was a new and nauseating experience for her, but she had to keep her son alive along with all the others. There was no time for puking.
They split apart with her heading toward the driver’s side of the vehicle and him for the passenger side. She made it to the truck first, flung her door open, and was up and into the vehicle in a single fluid movement. Henry opened his door, put one foot on the running board, and readied himself to push up and into the passenger seat
when a pair of strong hands grabbed his ankle and yanked hard.
He screamed in pain as the thing wrenched his ankle to the left. Where the ankle goes, the rest of the leg follows, and he fell back to the pavement, his head hitting it hard. A series of lights went off in his head on impact and then his vision swam with a murky darkness for a few seconds. The only thing that kept him from falling fully under the waters of unconsciousness was the unrelenting pain in his leg. It felt as if someone were about to twist it off.
“Henry, move!” Ellen yelled as she leaned out the door of the truck, her upper body stretched fully out, her pistol in hand. She tried to aim at whatever had Henry’s leg, but his leg and whatever it was, was under the truck.
“Roll, Henry!” she screamed. “Let me see it.”
Henry gained enough of his senses to look down his body, and he saw a badly used zombie. Its face looked like a massive and total outbreak of road rash. Hundreds of abrasions covered its head and chunks of skin hung loose from its head, some of it hung over the thing’s eyes. The synapses fired enough in Henry’s brain to let him know that the only reason the thing hadn’t taken a bite out of him was that it couldn’t fully see him.
He was only able to get the briefest of glances down the zombie’s body, but what he saw down there didn’t look good. It seemed as if something had turned its legs completely around at its hips, and its legs looked mangled. What was left of the legs wasn’t pretty. Shards of bone stuck through the raw and ruptured meat on its legs. No wonder it was crawling.
“Twist it out into the open,” Ellen said, her voice hoarse from screaming. She moved her aim to get a shot, but she only saw a hand on Henry’s leg. Shooting the hand meant shooting Henry, and that wouldn’t do any good, but she feared if she didn’t do something, he was going to get bitten, and they all knew what they meant. There was no Jason Carter around to stave off the virus this time.
She was caught in a terrible place. At the moment, she hung out of the side of the truck, trying to take aim on something she could barely see. She knew she could push herself out of the truck, but that meant taking her aim off whatever she could see of the zombie. Those few seconds that she was jumping out could mean the difference between Henry living and dying.
Out of nowhere, a thought came to her. She looked over her shoulder and saw the truck was still in gear. She also noted that the truck was parked on a slight incline. She took another look back then kicked out with her leg. It hit the big gear shift and knocked the truck out of gear.
Meanwhile, Henry had put his free leg to use and was punishing the zombie’s already abused face. He slammed the bottom of his boot against the thing’s forehead, again and again. Each time it raised its head and opened its mouth and prepared itself to descend for a delicious bite of Henry’s calf, he would batter it with the sole of his boot. It was just enough to keep it at bay, but he knew the gambit wouldn’t last long. The thing was making progress despite being battered in the face repeatedly. He knew if it paused enough to use its other arm to lurch onto his body, it was all over. That would be when it would take a big bite of his thigh.
With the truck out of gear, Ellen expected something to happen fast, but instead it happened in ultra-slow motion. The incline was very slight, but she felt the smallest of movement as the big truck started to roll backward.
“Henry, keep doing what you’re doing,” Ellen shouted as she continued to aim fruitlessly, moving her aim from spot-to-spot but finding not one worth pulling the trigger for. “I’ve kicked the truck out of gear, and it’s starting to roll backward. I’m hoping the tires roll over the zombie.”
Henry didn’t like that word, “hope.” He wanted to hear that the truck was going to run the damn thing over and squish it flat. He kept kicking away at the zombie but took a moment to look forward, and he saw the truck moving at a glacial pace backwards. It looked as if it might reach the zombie by sometime in the next century.
Ellen knew it was time to make a desperate move and lurched out of the truck head first, fearing that, as she took the time to get her body in the right position to jump out safely, it would be the few seconds Henry needed to survive.
Again, her plan was “hopeful.” She had hoped to make it out so that she might be able to roll with the impact and come up shooting. Instead of a graceful exit, she plopped out of the truck on her face-first with her hands barely bracing the blow. On impact with the ground, her gun slipped out of her hand and skittered across the pavement.
She cursed her naivete and jumped for her gun, not even looking back at Henry and his zombie attacker. Get the gun, get the gun, get the damn gun replayed through her mind. She scuttled forward and grabbed the gun, twisted her body and rolled around in such a way that she was facing back toward the truck and Henry’s zombie assailant.
It worked, as she had a near perfect aim at the zombie, free and clear from any of Henry’s body parts, but it turned out that her first plan was all she needed.
As was with the laws of nature and science, things rolling downhill tend to pick up speed. It doesn’t matter how small that hill is.
The truck tire rolled into the zombie’s body, high on its torso. One might think that the zombie’s body might have stopped the truck’s momentum, but the truck weighed too much to be stopped by one measly zombie. No, that truck kept on trucking.
The sheer weight of the truck and the way the tire rolled over the zombie made the thing’s body curl up like a leaf in a fire. Blackish gray goo oozed out of its mouth like the world’s grossest toothpaste.
It released its hold on Henry’s leg as its shoulders were crushed flat, and all the nerve fibers in that area if its body went irrevocably dead.
Ellen dropped her gun, this time on purpose, and scrambled forward, grabbing Henry at the armpits and yanking as hard as she could.
The truck’s wheel rolled over the place where Henry’s foot had been a second earlier.
Zombies are resilient creatures. Even though its torso had been mashed flat, its head still rotated on its shoulders, its mouth snapping at the air in hopes of getting that bite it never would get.
Henry and Ellen lay on their backs in the parking lot for nearly half a minute, panting like dogs, the exertion and stress nearly wiping out all their energy reserves. They both knew how close Henry had come and thanked God for avoiding that fate.
The truck rolled another twenty feet before it slowly came to a stop.
“How’s the leg?” Ellen asked.
Henry lifted it, pulled it in, and extended it, only wincing a little. “Not as bad as I thought it would be. I’m good enough to go.”
Ellen took a moment to spy across the parking lot to assess the small horde of zombies congregating at the back of the school then said, “I guess I have some driving to do.”
Chapter 34
Spoils of War
Del raised a medium-sized olive drab duffle bag out of the back of the jeep. He took a moment to open the bag and peeked in. What he saw made him whistle loudly. It was one of those “wow-wee” whistles that said, Look what I found.
“What is it?” Jo asked from just a few feet away. She was doing everything she could not to look at the bodies of the soldiers, but it was almost unavoidable. Jones had pulled the one named Suarez out of the way and laid him in the thick weeds. Droplets of blood speckled the side of the jeep and the weeds.
Del held up a hand grenade. “I got a boom-boom ball.” He couldn’t help but smile. “There’s six of them.”
“This is no time for fucking jokes,” Jones bellowed, his eyes slightly bulging. He stood off in the knee high weeds along the dirt road. After he had dragged Suarez out the jeep, he had seemed unable to move, standing over the dead soldier’s body, as if held there by an invisible force.
“He didn’t mean anything by it,” Jo said in a calming tone.
“Like hell he didn’t,” Jones said.
Del stuffed the grenade back into the duffle bag and tried not to make eye contact with Jones.
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“Hey, we’re all tense here,” Jo said. “No one wanted to shoot those men. It just didn’t go down that way. When they fired their guns, we were left with no choice.”
“Everything you people do just seems to take away the choices of my men,” Jones responded.
Jo let that hang in the air. She knew he was upset by the actions of the last few minutes. They all were.
There was no denying that Jones still had a deep connection with the soldiers he had been forced to leave behind. His reaction was making her doubt if Jones could really be trusted when the chips were down. If it came down to the soldiers he had served with and her people, which way would Jones go? It seemed like he had passed a point of no return during their rebellion, but who knew? He was a formidable ally, but Jo didn’t want to be on his enemies list.
There had to be a way to calm him down. Jo stood in a state of indecision, waiting for some inspiration.
Del continued looking through the contents of the jeep, but he did it with a silent focus now, not looking up to catch any more of Jones’ anger. He didn’t find any more hand grenades but found more ammunition, which was always a good thing.
Reaching down for some courage, Jo took two steps toward Sergeant Jones. His back was to her, and she tentatively put out a hand. It only went so far and hung in the air like an unspoken word. She chided herself for being so cautious and went forward with her movement.
The hand landed gently on his back, and his body went stiff.
She said as quietly as she could, “We’re...I’m sorry about your men. I really am. Please know that we are on your side. Also, know that we know what it took for you to side with us.”
