Zombie-dem

by James J. Stubbs

  Chapter 11

  Borrow another man's wheels

  Lizzie was elated almost to the point of it being physical that they were finally getting back on the road. Logan had taken a bad turn after the events with the cannibals. He told her everything of course. There really was no need for secrets in this world.

  He felt terrible. Understandably so. Logan wanted to move away from a world of killing, a world where a human life could be both a tool and a bargaining chip. That was why he retired from the military. That was why he travelled alone around the globe, trying to forget, or at least trying to run. But that same desire for something good in the world, was what brought him back. He came back to save people. Not kill them.

  He took no pleasure by walking past the burnt out church in the cold light of day. The cinders had long since died down but the smell remained. Charred and burnt corpses of both the living and the dead were skewed into the rubble.

  Some of them had even turned. Some of the bodies hadn't been completely burned by the fire he had started himself, or at least one he had fuelled. But they were immobile. Either melted into the floor or into one another. To the point where it was hard to see where one zombie started and the other ended. He took no pleasure in it. Not that he struggled with the morality too much.

  'What you did?' Lizzie took him by the hand. He resisted at first but she just clasped harder as they slowly strolled under the belting heat of the midday sun. 'You saved that girl.' She pointed to the car where he had told her he bent the door back to gain access. It was open and thankfully deserted. 'You saved her dad too.' She kept pleading with him, almost trying to coax a smile from his face. But nothing. Not even a conciliatory one. He just sighed and quickened his pace slightly.

  'It doesn't make it right.' He finally said once the church was out of view. They were slowly following a winding tarmac road that led out of the valley they had taken so much shelter in for what felt like a very long time. A rain cloud was forming in the distance, but the cold water would be welcome in the pleasant but at times over powering heat. She could hardly disagree with him. But it was on her to make him feel better.

  The trees slowly disappeared into the distance and the road reached a climax by a burned out school and a bus stop. The stop was made in the same dry stone wall fashion as most of the dividing walls between farms around here. Some of it had crumbled. Maybe a car had crashed into it.

  'Which way?' Lizzie asked and smiled at him. She was determined to bring something out of him.

  'If we turn right, that town on the lake is that way.' He scratched his ever growing silver stubble and rubbed the ball of his hand over his chiseled jaw in thought. 'Might be some transport links out that way.' He just kept walking, almost leisurely, down the center of the road. Not like he was expecting any traffic.

  'When we were in that subway car in New York...' She prompted him but got no response as she expected. 'And I said we should head for a desert island somewhere...' he half smiled. Some progress. And nodded to her so she could continue. 'Sounding better every day.' She laughed but took no thought about how he would take it.

  'You remember what I said back to you?' He was a bit more light hearted but his serious tone, that one she admired so much but would never say, was still present on the back of every word. 'It still stands.' He had told her, all those months ago, that they couldn't possibly take the easy option and run away. They had a job to do. That made it a responsibility. And that made it theirs. Simply because they were still standing when no one else was.

  Logan had a way to cure the zombie outbreak. Even though it was hard and the ending was unsure, he had to try. He had spent long enough running.

  'I know.' She smiled again, growing impatient with him. She struggled to see what was hurting him so much. Yes he had killed some very bad people, and he had helped another kill some other very bad people. But there was good in what he did. He had saved her, saved them all. She would have never hesitated to do the same had it been the other way around. Neither would Jack. Neither would Jace even for thinking about it.

  'So they really never knew you were there?' She half chuckled. Surely there was humor in that. He truly had come out of the darkness like a wraith, like their worst nightmares. Who knows how long they had been doing that, or how many people were carved up in those bags he had mentioned in their store room. He shook his head, and half smiled again, just with the other corner of his mouth that time. 'I always knew there was more to you... not just a desk General then... back in the day?' She was pulling at his teeth almost just to get a response. But still he offered her nothing.

  They kept walking a while, him enjoying the silence, her irritated by it. The sun had set behind the rain cloud but the humidity ensured that they didn't stop sweating.

  'I would have done the same.' She finally stopped him from going any further. She jogged a few steps ahead of him and just stood in his way, her hands pressed against his chest. 'It really is okay, so snap out of it!' That was brave. Shouting at him like that. He had never raised his voice to her. His deep southern calmness prevented him from doing so. She had seen him angry, seen him frustrated, but never quite like this.

  'But it really isn't.' He entertained her finally. 'Nothing good can ever come from doing something bad. Just because the end result was "good", that is to say you and I, that girl and her dad, they're still alive. That's good, and I get that. But I killed four people and lit a match so someone else could kill more.' He grew more angry as his speech went on. Not at her, but at himself.

  'They would have carved us up, and eaten us piece by piece in that demonic church of theirs!' She argued with him for the sake of either getting it over with or just getting it all out in the open. 'And all you did was give that poor man a chance for him to take revenge on the people who killed his wife.' She breathed hard and started hitting his chest with the backs of her fists.

  'Do you know how many murders I've seen? More than thirty! I see their families, the lucky ones who get to see the people who killed their relatives, sitting there in court itching to see them dead! I wish sometimes, that I could have given just one of them my gun, just to see them happy, that they killed the one who had caused them so much pain!' He understood it, he really did. But none of it made it right.

  'Adding more pain into the world just makes more people hurt. That's all you would have done, and that's all I have done.' He stayed calm with her the whole time. 'That's why I gave him the match. Because I didn't want more bodies on my shoulders. And now all he has to do is carry them when it should have been me.' He spoke very clearly, as always. In a way that made any resistance to his argument either difficult or at worst impossible.

  'I gave him the match so he could do it, just because I didn't want to. What does that make me? A coward? Or a good person because I didn't take any more lives?' He challenged her for an answer but grasped his thick hands around hers, not to move them from atop his chest, but to focus his eyes deeply on hers.

  'Nothing can ever make you a coward.' She said and started to tear up. 'You're angry at yourself because you killed people... that just makes you a human. For once. I... don't know what else to say?' She grew closer to him and tried to cuddle him. He resisted as always.

  'The worst part is...' He started to open up. 'The worst of it is that I enjoyed it. Not the killing. But the absolution. What they were doing was wrong. And I stopped them because of that. I enjoyed it because I got to play god again... Like when I was a General, and the decisions I made could either spell life or death. And that's why I'm angry. I thought I left that monster inside of me behind.' He pulled away and scanned the near distance. Not that he had heard anything. Just because it was habit.

  'Maybe this world we live in... maybe it needs that monster back?' She tried to lighten the tone by smiling and forcing a chuckle. He lightly shook his head.

  'You sound like Cygan...' He laughed with her. One thing was certain. They didn't have the time, in this new world they found the
mselves living in, to debate the morality of their every move.

  'Don't say that.' She complained, remembering the carnage that one man had brought to the city of New York. And then she finally noticed they were gone. The stars from the shoulder pads of his old leather jacket. She had no idea when he had ripped them off. But they were gone for certain. She was going to bring it up.

  'Do you like bikes? Motorbikes?'

  That little personality trait of his hadn't come out in a while. Changing the subject whenever something got too intense for him. Maybe he had seen her eyes lock with his shoulders, where his stars used to be. She just shook her head and knew better than to argue with him over it. But she was shaking her head, not at him, but perhaps subconsciously because the answer was "no", she really didn't have much of a soft spot for bikes. At least not anymore.

  'No...' She finally replied and jogged back to his side. He had strolled a little further up the road, to the entrance of a very large and rather grand looking English hotel. It was in classic style and its features tried to copy those of a castle, albeit a small one. At very first glance she could see that most of the curtains were drawn, which was neither surprising or expected.

  A calm shudder flowed down her spine at the passing thought of what must be behind most of those curtains. Logan had his eyes firmly on a large looking bike. She knew nothing about them, not even how to tell what kind it was, who made it, or how fast it might be. But Logan was smiling for the first time in rather a while, so she just went with it.

  'What's not to like?' He asked and bent down to inspect it further. She rather instinctively didn't want to tell him the truth, but decided she had kept enough from him.

  'Jace...' She finally stuttered through his name. 'Jace loved them. He had this grand plan that when he retired from the force, he was going to buy one. A big one I think. I think he might have said it was a BMW or something.' She battled through the lump in her throat. 'He had this plan to work through things that he had been running from. Jace was like that.' Logan could tell she was struggling, but, not to be distant or cold but rather to tease it out of her, he just kept looking at the bike and didn't intervene, even though his full attention was on her.

  'He used to run from things you see.' She sobbed a little but still Logan didn't seem to batter an eyelid. 'In his head. He never grieved or even took a damn thing seriously...' She emphasized the word "damn" part in frustration and part in grief. 'A lot of people thought he was heartless, or arrogant for it. But it hit him hard, every case he couldn't solve, everyone he couldn't save. But he just took it on the chin and just kept running to try and forget it all.' She was really fighting back the tears by that point. It would have been cruel of him to let her keep talking.

  'And he thought...' Logan stood up from his crouched position and ran his hand across the perfectly finished black paint of the bike he had been pretending to study in such great detail. 'He thought he could buy his dream bike, give up his gun and his life based on violence, corruption and crime, put his visor down, and ride of into the distant sun?' He was half smiling while he said it, but it was almost like he wasn't just saying it. He was feeling it too.

  Lizzie just nodded and dried the odd tear away with the backs of her fingers. At least she was clean from her long bath in the stream.

  'But it wasn't like he would be trying to forget... because he never could. He thought it would take the weight off his shoulders but it wouldn't have. But at least... if he rode for long enough. He could try to make sense of it all.'

  Lizzie immediately realized that she barely knew the man, indeed her friend, stood right there in front of her. She knew patches. She knew he was retired and recalled by the military. But never once had she really asked why, or delved for a deeper answer.

  'You could talk for your country James Logan but you never say anything!' She shouted at him but laughed through her drying tears. He just smiled. He probably liked his man of mystery image, and might have liked the idea that she was finally realizing he had his hidden depths and deeper running motives.

  'I think Jace and I would have been good buddies.' She turned back to the bike to try and ignore him for the sake of crying some more. 'I might have even let him date you.' He shoved her gently with the back of his hand and she just laughed through what looked like a painful, grieving turn of the stomach. 'I got as far as Istanbul before they caught me.' He just smiled away, then realized how little of his own problems he had managed to sort through for himself, when he went running just as Jace had been planning to.

  'So, what are you thinking?' Lizzie calmed herself and leaned against the bike, which was neatly propped up on its stand. He had never even told her what his long term plan might be upon leaving what they thought to be the safety of their camp.

  'Russia.' He said simply and left the bike to start examining the hotel. If he was going to borrow another man's wheels, he at least needed the key. It would be one thing to smash the ignition box or jack the lock, but he really had taken a liking to it so wanted to keep it intact.

  'On that?' She demanded, not realizing how much shock she had let show in her voice. Logan just shrugged and pushed the door of the hotel open. It was a large, old, wooden thing with some glass left in the middle of each of the two large wooden pieces. Oddly not boarded up. Oddly not smashed in. He turned his cheeks upside down with the odd thought that maybe the place was abandoned.

  He had counted only four cars in the car park, which was just adjoined to and followed parallel with the road. Then there was the bike. Maybe that was what was left of the guests. He was about to say something like "no prizes for guessing what will be in the hotel" when he was met on the other side of the door immediately with a shotgun behind his ear. He hadn't been paying attention, and certainly hadn't seen that coming.