Zombie-dem

by James J. Stubbs

  Chapter 9

  Just eat it

  After only a few small twists and turns in the road, Logan finally caught sight of the man he had been chasing for what must have been a flat out mile of sprinting.

  It didn't look good. The child was on the floor, the man stood heavily and looming above it. He grasped one small arm tightly and kicked the child again and again with a heavy boot. He could hear the crunching carry on the still air.

  Last time he had visited England, he had let someone die for the sake of trying to rekindle his once great marksman's aim. Not again. He drew his right hand Eagle and steadied his heavy chest with a deep breath. Safety off, sight lined up. He fired.

  The man went down with a well placed shot to the head. The child screamed but the echo of the gunshot was far more overpowering. That sound. like the blast from a cannon. It rippled through the whole valley and back again. He used what was left of his energy to jog to the child's side. She was tearful and whimpered at the sight of him.

  'Don't worry. I'm here to help.' What could he say? What could he do? How could he comfort a child that had just seen her mother torn from her at such an age? Raped and killed if what the first man had said was true.

  'Please...' She whimpered in a shiver. 'Save my Daddy.' She raised her tiny hand and pointed to a row of cottages, just barely visible in the cold morning's first light. Beyond that was a church, just a small one, and there was a flickering light coming from inside it. That must have been what she meant. That must be where these people were based.

  'I need to know who they are?' He put on his most comforting tone, and wore his most comforting smile. He couldn't hope for much. Just a little bit of information.

  'They used to be Daddy's friends. Then when the creeping monsters came, they started to eat people, just like the monsters do.' Her voice shook and Logan took her hand. She whimpered a little at first but allowed him to pick her up and carry her stretched over his arms.

  'And because of that, you're dad doesn't want to be their friend anymore?' Logan started walking towards the church. There were a few old cars parked by the cottages. He might be able to leave the girl in one of them to keep her safe.

  'If they try to give you food. You have to eat it!' Logan had no intention of holding down a conversation with any of them. But he humored the girl for the sake of her information and for the sake of just keeping her talking.

  'Why is that honey?' He smiled at her but kept walking at a lofty pace.

  'If you don't want to eat people, you get eaten first.' She started to sob. 'That's their rule.' Her pale white face grew to a concerning color of grey and she started to wail and cry, as if reliving an internal horror. Logan wanted to ask what was the matter. But it would have been truly pointless. He didn't know if she had seen her mother die in such a brutish way, but it was worth guessing.

  He started to run just to calm her and limit the amount of risk they were in given the noise she was making. It would have been a miracle if they hadn't heard the gunshot anyway. The cottages were all painted white, just like the burning farmhouse that he could still hear crackling in the distance. But there were a row of cars parked just outside, after a small stretch of shared lawn space. The girl had stopped crying. He put her down and pushed her to hide behind the middle of five cars.

  'What's your name?' He gave her a corner of his sleeve for her to dry her eyes.

  'My side hurts.' She whimpered. There was no bleeding or swelling that Logan could see on immediate glance, but that didn't mean she was going to be in no pain.

  'I know. What's your name?' He asked again to calm her.

  'Eva.' She cried lightly.

  'That's a nice name.' He dried her last tear with the back of his forefinger. 'Eva, we have these cars in America, where I'm from, but we call them Opel there.' It confused her just enough to distract her from crying. That's all he wanted. He pointed to one of the cars they were hidden by. 'I used to drive one a long time ago.' It was an old looking thing. At least 20 years old at his best guess. They were easy to break into. That much he remembered with a few patchy bad experiences flooding to mind. 'Watch this.'

  He wrapped his fingers tightly behind the driver's door and started to pull on the cold metal frame. After a few short tugs it started to break and snap. The very door itself started to bend in half to the point where he could put his hand down into the crack and pop the lock mechanism with a curled finger.

  He breathed a sigh of relief when no alarm sounded. He opened the door by the handle and picked Eva up to put her inside. Of course he made sure to check for zombies first. There were a few old coats in the back seat. She could hide and stay warm at the same time.

  'You can hide here while I find your dad.' He forcefully bent the panel back into shape and went to close the door.

  'You break into cars?' Eva started to whimper. 'Does that mean you're a bad man?' He smiled at her, but couldn't bring himself to lie by replying. He could never call himself a good guy. He had done to many bad things to be able to think of himself as one of the good guys.

  He closed the door and jogged to the side of the church. He could hear chants coming from the inside. This had every level of fucked up pasted onto it. The building was old, falling to pieces in places, but sturdy enough throughout. The walls were washed in stone pebbles that had been cemented into it as part of its decoration.

  The steeple was no higher than an old house's chimney piece. The drain pipe was cast in metal. It looked strong enough to take his weight. He grasped both bloodied and muddy hands around the tube and pressed his feet against the wall to walk up it. Once he was level with the roof, he slammed one hand onto the cold stone and pulled his legs up behind him.

  The slate on the roof had been coming apart in some areas. He couldn't trust every bit of it, but desperately wanted to see inside of the building. The chants, or whatever it was they were saying, had grown louder in the past few minutes. Partly through having drawn closer, and partly through them reaching some kind of frenzy.

  He crept with a light step over the slate roof, making sure to follow what he could sense were the positions of the wooden beams. He looked down into the cavernous hall below to see a gruesome sight. The pews and benches had been forced against the sides and a large cooking pit had been erected atop a small but raging fire in the center of the room. The floor was cast in old stone. It glowed with a flickering red and dazzling orange light.

  At the head of the room was an erected cross. Which bore the figure of a woman. Crucified there upon it. Her nightclothes were stained in blood and tears. She hung there limp and lifeless, legs and torso all but missing. The water boiled in the cooking pot up to a climax. Only toes were visible through the cascading bubbles.

  Logan held his anger inside him. Every fiber of the ape inside of all men wanted to crash down and beat every one of these people to mush with his bare hands for what they were doing. He couldn't make out what the crowd were saying. His ears were more finely attuned to the creaking of the wood beneath his feet and his heart more concerned with the anger surging through it to focus on it.

  A lone man wept by a long curtain that covered a main door. It swayed in the breeze, allowing Logan short glimpses of a single wooden door that must have led to a back room. That was how he was going to get down.

  The weeping man must have been the girl's father. He was visibly shaking. Crying in a way Logan had never heard. In all of his days as both a General and a Doctor, he had never seen a man watch his wife boiled and hung, knowing well that the cooked meat was meant for hungry animalistic cannibals.

  He moved closer along the wooden slats. A glisten of metal caught in the offensive light of the fire stopped him in his tracks. They were fuel canisters. He glanced around for a noticeably out of place vehicle. There was a jeep parked not too far away. It was caked in fresh mud. They must have been collecting nearby supplies and were trying to hold out here for the end of the world. A plan was forming. Sickening though it was.r />
  He lowered his stance at the sound of another creak from the wood below his feet. He moved the last few paces to the end of the church roof to see an unguarded but well enough lit supply room. The slate was loose in parts but he could make short work of removing enough panels to be able to drop in undetected. He lifted at the slate until it snapped off. He threw it into the grass below so as to not risk another sound.

  After creating a large enough gap, he lowered himself through and dropped like a prowling cat to the creaking wooden floor. The room was square in shape, the same distance in width as it was in length. It was lit by a failing oil lamp and housed bags upon bags in differing colors. Logan took his combat knife and slit one of them open. Blood poured from it to the floor. Thick and coagulated with a rotting smell. The flesh was starting to turn. So was his rage.

  He knelt back to the floor and slid the door open ajar. To his left was the inconsolable man weeping for his wife. Behind him was a door to either the outside or another room. They were both shielded from view of the congregation by the large curtain that separated the large hall into two unequal parts.

  He could sneak past the weeping man with ease. The congregation might be harder. The shadows cast eerily upon the curtain saw them all fall to their knees and silent too. One of them started praying in unforgivable blasphemy. He thanked his god for the meat and for the ability to catch it. Logan, sick of waiting, slid out and past the curtain. The child's father cried deeper and more hoarse. Good. That would cover any sound Logan was about to make. The room had fallen silent to listen to the sickening prayers of an unstable priest. All had their eyes firmly closed. But time was not on his side.

  He moved quickly to the fuel canisters. They numbered three. Logan unscrewed the caps, hiding the noise with each distressed wail, and tipped them to spill onto the floor. The smell hit him right away. But the noses of the congregation of twelve, both men and women, were far more concerned with the smell of the cooking of their victims' appendages to notice. He noticed a pack of cigarettes and lighter on the bench closest to him. He grabbed it without thinking and made his way back to the curtain.

  He slid back inside the store room to avoid detection by sheer chance while he figured his next move. He needed to save the girl's father but couldn't alert him to his presence for fear it would startle the others. If he stopped crying, it would arise some suspicion.

  Logan bravely knocked on the wall to his right to see if it was hollow. It was. As the congregation began to chant again, some nonsense or another, he took the opportunity to slam his combat knife into the wood and break it apart.

  They were starting to eat. He could tell because the man was starting to cry even harder. He punched a big enough hole into the wall and scrambled through into a cold and desolate entrance hall, carved entirely in rotting wood. The main door to the church was wide open and the morning sun was pouring through.

  Logan darted to where the man was lying against the final door that led into the main hall. The wood was cracked and broken throughout, rotten to its very core. Logan could just about see through a small crack. The shadows again gave away what the congregation were doing. They must have been hungry for more flesh as they lingered closer to the cross bearing the woman's half body and began to tear it down.

  Logan used the sound to cover his actions. He ripped through the door and wrapped both of his hands around the screaming, distressed sole. He pulled with all of his might until the shocked and shaking man slid into the entrance way under Logan's sheer weight. He slammed a hand over his mouth and shouted in his ear over the commotion in the hall.

  'Keep crying!' Through fear or shock, sadness or despair, he did as he was told. Logan twisted him around to meet his frozen eyes. 'I'm here to save you.' The man nodded but kept up the half charade of choking on his own tears. 'I have your daughter. She's safe.'

  'Eva...' he whimpered and took Logan's lowering hand to mean he could slowly stop crying as hard. Logan placed a single hand on the man's shoulder and led him to the open door behind them. The fresh breeze hit them like a new morning. Like everything could be clear again after the monsters of the night slowly went away.

  'That hall is soaking as we speak in raw diesel.' Logan's face lowered, his tone sharpened and his brow raised. 'I don't want to kill them.' He handed the as yet unnamed man the lighter, but kept the cigarettes for a rainy day. 'But I won't stop you from killing them.' The man frantically tore a chunk from his shirt, in what was less than noticeable hesitation, and held it to the naked flame. With that burning well enough he walked calmly back inside and held it to the curtain he had been hidden behind all of that time. It lit like a tinder fire to more screams than Logan wanted to focus on.

  'I didn't kill them.' He said upon his return. 'But I did cremate my poor wife.' He sobbed and Logan patted him on the back rather bravely. They slowly moved away from the sickening fire and screams to the row of small cottages where Logan had left the girl. He could see the car had been left untouched as he thought.

  'David.' He held out a soaking wet hand, flushed with his own tears, but Logan shook it anyway.

  'Brigadier General James Logan. United States Air Force.' He sometimes missed saying that. 'Retired.'

  'From the campsite?' Logan's blood ran cold at the mention. He didn't need David to clarify anything. His instincts as a soldier were firing on all cylinders already.

  'They sent a patrol there not long before you got here... they've been watching you for a day now. I heard them talking' His voice started to shake at the thought of any more suffering.

  'Take Eva, get the hell away from here. Far away.' Logan broke into a sprint, following his footsteps from the previous night.

  'I have a place I can go... thank you. Sir.' Logan was far too far away to hear him.