The clergyman getting out of the car holds a gun on me. More robed figures pile out of the vehicle. Their robes are the color of the blood. They don’t look friendly at all, faces wrinkled and haggard — faces of the apocalypse. One man, a younger one, has a tattoo on his forehead. Not the type of priest I’d like to spend Sunday mass with. “Remember us?” one of them says.
How could I forget?
That muffled voice again, “I’m not dead. Surprise, Timothy. But you will be.”
Carmen moans. “Jack? Abby?”
I get this horrible image in my head of her smashed beneath one of the PT Cruiser’s tires, her legs broken, losing blood and life while I stare down these crazy bastards.
“Kill them all,” the muffled voice says.
I raise my hands. I don’t want to die. No one does. But I’m weaponless and I think this is my best bet.
“Jack?” Carmen moans.
I hear the clicking of guns.
“I-I can’t bel — ” Tim says.
Then, gunfire.
58
Now I have to turn away from the clergymen. I don’t want to, but I have to.
And what I see before I drop down to my haunches and try to find some cover lifts a great weight off of my chest. It’s a row of people from the park. They have their guns and they blast at the cars. Bullets whine off of the metal, sparks fly. Tim and Norm drop and roll out of the way. Abby dives for cover behind a large hunk of scorched fence.
Meanwhile, I stand there and watch all of this unfold, blissfully unaware of the fact that I most likely will take a bullet to the gut if I stand here much longer.
“Shit,” one of the clergymen say.
“Hold your ground,” the muffled voice says.
He doesn’t move, either. I see him now. He looks almost as bad as a zombie. His posture is hunched. He doesn’t wear the red robes. He’s shirtless with a pair of camouflaged pants below the waist. On his back is what looks like a backpack. I’m reminded of senior citizens wheeling around their oxygen tanks because that’s what’s in the pack, not schoolbooks or weapons or food — but an oxygen tank with a tube going from the tank to his mouth. Over his mouth is a mask, which explains why everything he says is muffled. He doesn’t have much hair. He turns and faces me. We catch eyes for what seems like an eternity.
This man is a ghost. This man is evil incarnate. I see it in his eyes.
Somewhere in my head a voice says, He Who Has Risen.
59
“Retreat!” one of the men yell.
Bullets rain down on us while this man and I stare at each other. I’m reminded of Eve’s story of the dictator who ran this camp before us, how she’d shot him in the heart and how he’d disappeared but she was sure he was dead. I see the scars the bullet has left in his chest.
Turns out he’s not.
He Who Has Risen.
He’s alive and he’s staring at me with evil eyes filled with hate. All of my post-apocalyptic life I’ve been able to hold my own and never waver, but now — now, I feel like shrinking or falling to the ground, laying amongst the rubble and torn up bodies, and curling up into the fetal position. This man is the devil.
His face droops to one side. He looks young and ancient at the same time.
“RETREAT!” another voice.
More shots pop off.
This man, who is the ghost of Walter Rockman, raises his weapon at me. My eyes search for a way out, for something to buy me some time. I see nothing.
“Jack! JACK!” Norm yells.
I hear all of this from the bottom of a pool. It barely registers; it’s just Walter and me. I wish to God I’d had my gun.
“Let’s go, boss! Let’s go!” gruff voices say.
Beneath, the oxygen mask, he smiles.
A shot lands between us. His eyes go from me to the road, then to where the shots came. Hands grab at him and pull him clear of the crossfire. I don’t think I can move, but I have to — and I do, diving out of the way of the influx of bullets.
Robed figures stream by me in a blur. Car doors shut while bullets bounce off of them and break their windows. A man is cut down, he falls holding his stomach. I see a white flash of his spinal cord poking through the gore.
“We’ll meet again,” the dead man says.
Is he speaking to me or the camp?
I hold my ground, watch him go as the bullets rip through the air. No more shots come close to clipping him.
Then he says, as cooly and calmly as ever, “Grab the girl.”
The bullets ricochet off the convertible’s hood. More sparks fly, but it peels out, kicking up blood and bits of charred wood. Then the Jeep goes, leaving only the PT Cruiser.
Screaming. “JACK!”
Oh, God. It’s Carmen.
60
I run toward the sound of her voice. She’s on the other side of the PT Cruiser. One of the clergymen, the fellow with his tattooed face, spins on me with a gun. He lets off a shot and I see my life flash before my eyes. It’s not a long flash because the only image that comes to me is Darlene. She is my whole life, and I think to myself how stupid I am for getting into another situation like this and how I hope she’s all right, and how I hope she’ll be all right without me.
But the shot misses.
Just as he’s about to let off another shot, this time with no chance of missing because I’ve closed the gap a few more yards, a bullet tears into his face, evaporating that tattoo. The scene plays out in slow motion, almost as if God is laughing at me from above. I’ll be honest, I don’t want to see this. I don’t want to watch this man’s face morph into a bloody mess, nor do I want to see his teeth fly into the air and come down on the concrete like little balls of human hail. I don’t want to see this guy’s brains (or what little he has of them) sprayed out in every direction, either; I see enough brains everyday from the zombies. I don’t want to see any of this. And I don’t want to feel it. The feeling of the gunshot’s loud vibration in my chest, the man’s dying scream echoing in my eardrums. I take no pride in witnessing this because I don’t care. I can’t revel in his death because I have to get to Carmen. But one positive thing I have going for me — besides surviving…for now — is that somehow I know Norm shot this man. I know he’s behind me smiling because he’s saved my life yet again.
No time.
I catch a glimpse of Carmen’s fiery red hair. It’s in another one of the clergyman’s hands. She’s bucking and kicking, putting up a good fight, but the man raises his weapon and strikes her in the head. She goes limp fast.
Jesus Christ. I reach the car as they throw her in the back on the other side. The windows are protected by that wire mesh. I can’t break them and get through. The glass beneath has been broken, though. I know this because I can smell the inside of the cabin — it smells like body odor and stale cigarettes — and I can hear the laughter from the driver, this chubby bastard in a red robe.
The car lurches forward, the tires shrieking against the asphalt. I’m in one of those modes where I’m not thinking at all; I’m acting on pure animalistic instinct, one step away from being a living dead nightmare. And because of me not thinking, I find my hands full of metal as I latch on to the back spoiler of the PT Cruiser.
“Shoot him!” the driver yells.
Frantically, I pull myself up. The car jerks back and forth.
“I can’t shoot if you’re gonna drive like a drunken jackass!” another man answers.
The wind whips at my face, stings my eyes.
God, what would Darlene think if she saw me right now? She’d shit her pants. But then again, she’d chew me out if she knew I had a chance at saving her baby sister and didn’t take it. Rock and a hard place.
A shot goes off. The wire grating on the back windshield explodes outward, but that’s all, thank God. They’ve missed.
We are going up the hill. Bullets chase after us. I hear them thumping the concrete we’ve left behind. They’re aiming for the tires. I know that. It’s at lea
st one comforting thought. Then again, one slight miscalculation and I’ve got a bullet in my back.
I manage to pull myself up, still holding on to the spoiler. The Cruiser rocks back and forth, back and forth, tires screeching and squealing. My hands are slick with sweat. My chest is knotted with fear.
“Shoot him! Shoot him!”
Shots ripple from inside the confines of the car. Three bullet holes explode through the roof, smoking. One is so close I can feel the heat of the scorched metal on my face.
We are almost at the hill’s crest, now. The zombies haven’t stopped coming. When we arrived in the Bay Area it seemed all the zombies were dead, but now I realize they were hiding, just biding their time until the time for eating was ripe. Unfortunately, now is that time.
Or maybe interrupting the red robe’s ritual really screwed us — No, Jack. Don’t believe in superstitious bullcrap.
I’ve still got the spoiler in hand when the next barrage of shots comes through the roof. Again, they’re much too close. One has struck the spoiler. It’s a real cheap job some smart-ass had put on after they bought the car, I’m assuming, and the metal twangs and pops off. I see screws roll by me in slow motion. As I look down, the spoiler is still in the same spot — just not attached. Then the wheel jerks and it goes — me with it.
“Fuck,” I wheeze as I’m whipped off of the PT Cruiser’s roof. I hit the blacktop hard. And I mean, hard.
All the breath whooshes out of me. I start coughing, hacking. The sky is pretty, that’s one thing I notice, I don’t know why. It doesn’t matter much. Somehow, I force my head up and see the PT Cruiser with Darlene’s sister in the back get smaller and smaller as it goes down the abandoned roads, led by the dead man and his robed followers.
Damn it. I’ve failed.
A few zombies turn. I’ve been dropped off like Meals-On-Wheels. And for a second, I have no feeling in my legs. I think I’m paralyzed.
They shamble toward me, their heads cocked, yellow eyes curious. I’m weaponless and immobile.
“Come on, Jack,” I say to myself and punch my legs until I get feeling in them.
I’m shaky, but I’m up, and I waste no time running back to the camp. But what the hell am I going to tell Darlene?
61
“You all right, little bro?” Norm asks me.
I can hardly talk so I nod my head. It’s a lie. I’m far from all right, but I need to get away from this chaos and get back to Darlene.
“You see how that shot ripped that douchebag’s face off?” Norm asks. He laughs and Tim and Abby both hit him at the same time. I’m glad to see their faces. They’re both a little bloody and banged up, but they’re here, that’s all that matters.
“Jack,” Abby says. She sounds more womanly every day, almost like a worried mother. “Jack, where’s Carmen?”
I stop, look her right in the eyes, and shake my head. She brings her one hand up to her open mouth.
“Dead?” Tim asks.
“No, they took her. That man Eve told me about took her,” I say.
Soldiers stream by us. Part of me thinks, Where the hell were you guys earlier? Where were you when Carmen was getting yanked by her hair and thrown into a car?
I almost jerk around and scream at them, but the movement sends a fresh ripple of fire up my back. I landed on the road pretty hard. My ribs and tailbone will be sore for the foreseeable future. No sense in having the pain flare up for nothing. Carmen’s gone. Taken. Not much I can do. Yelling gets us nowhere.
The sound of intermittent gunfire pops off behind me as the soldiers put an end to the last of the zombies.
“Jack! Wait up!” it’s Abby. I hear her footsteps slapping the beaten dirt path as I head up toward Eve’s place.
I don’t stop. I know if I stop there’s a pretty good chance that I’ll pass out. My vision is already getting fuzzy and the pain in my ribs has cranked up to almost unbearable. I know it’s not going to hurt as bad as when I tell Darlene and Eve that Carmen is gone and it’s my fault, it’s not going to hurt as bad as seeing them cry or scream.
“How are you gonna tell Darlene?” Abby asks.
I exhale loudly, blowing strands of hair off of my forehead. “I don’t know. I think I’m just gonna tell her. You know, the rip off the Band-Aid fast instead of the slow and drawn out approach?”
Abby nods. “Good idea. I’ll be there to help you,” she says.
I reach out, despite my ribs feeling like broken glass, and clap her on the shoulder. “Thanks, Ab,” I say.
She nods.
We head to Eve’s place.
62
Darlene must’ve seen me coming from a window because she bursts out of the large wooden door and runs down the path at me. She’s coming in hot. I clench up and put a hand out to stop her. But there’s no stopping her. She jumps into my arms and I yell. She covers me in kisses, her blonde hair dampening my vision, tickling my nose, and getting stuck in my mouth.
“Easy,” I say, grimacing.
“Jack! Oh, my God! I thought I lost you. I just felt it,” Darlene says.
“Where’s everyone else?” Eve asks. The two other female members of the council are with her, Olive and Tabby. Tabby has tears in their eyes.
Abby answers while Darlene hugs me tight. “They’re all right. They’re down there cleaning up the rest of the zombies.”
“Who was it?” Eve asks. Her voice is harsh, almost scary.
“The robed men,” Abby says. I feel a surge of anger — no, fury — take over. Robes. Red robes. Red. Blood. Carmen’s red hair.
I’m going to kill them all.
“No,” Eve says.
“Oh boy,” Olive says. “This is not good. This is an act of war.”
No shit. We can’t let them push us around. We have to retaliate.
Darlene’s squeezing me so tight I can hardly breathe. I gently push her off of me. We part. I must have this terrible look on my face because Darlene looks frightened despite seeing me, knowing I’m okay. “What?” she asks. “What is it, Jack?”
Now comes the hard part. The anger melts into a deep sadness.
Abby shifts uncomfortably. I can feel all of their eyes boring into me. “There’s something else,” I say.
“What?” Darlene says quietly. Tears spill down her cheeks.
“They took Carmen,” I say.
Silence. Deathly silence.
“She’s alive, though,” I say.
“How do you know?” Darlene snaps at me. “How do you know?”
Very carefully, I speak. “I know because the men who took her were led by the same man who once led this place.”
Silence again. Deafening.
Then Olive says, “Impossible. He’s dead…right, Eve? Walter’s dead.”
Eve looks as if she’s been stabbed. Her mouth hangs open, her face has gone pale.
I shake my head. “He’s not dead. I saw him. Abby saw him. We all saw him. He’s in bad shape and he probably should be dead, but he’s not.”
Eve reaches out and grabs Darlene’s shoulder. Her legs quiver as if she’s about to collapse right there on the small garden in the front of the building. Darlene snags her before she can. We all rush to her aid, and ease her down onto the steps of the porch.
But who’s going to catch Darlene? I wonder.
“I shot him. I shot him and I watched him bleed,” Eve says to no one but herself. “I always knew there was a chance — ” She gasps. Stifles a sob. “Oh, God, how could I be so stupid?”
“We’re gonna get her back,” I say and I speak with fervor because I mean it. We are going to get Carmen back and we are going to make that Darth Vader-sounding asshole pay for what he did to this place. I’ve been around long enough to know the only sure way to stop a bully is to cut them down. It was true before the world went to shit and it’s still true today.
Now, I think the weight of the situation really hits Darlene. Her sister is gone. Taken by a madman. She is shaking. With anger? Rage? Sadness?
She looks like she’s about to blow.
But she doesn’t.
She puts her head in her hands, sitting next to her mother, and she cries softly for Carmen.
“We’ll get her back, I promise,” I say.
“How do you know?” Darlene asks, voice muffled by her fingers. “How do you know, Jack?”
I take a deep breath. “I haven’t failed yet, have I?”
63
Norm and Tim walk up the road.
“Did the rest of the council survive?” Eve asks me as we watch Tim and Norm wind there way to the stronghold, their guns resting on their shoulders. I can see how dirty they are, the streaks of soot from the fire and the blood on their shirts.
A few moments have passed. The surprise and shock has turned to deep sadness, as if a black cloud of depression settled over us all.
Did they survive?
I don’t want to be the one to answer this question, but I have to. The rest of the council is as dead as the fifty-odd other people who were near that fence. I saw Zack torn apart and Ken pounced on by zombies. But how the hell can I say this? How can I put it gently, in a way where everyone — everyone whose hearts are already heavy — will be okay with hearing?
I can’t.
And I don’t.
I turn, face them, and shake my head.
Eve, who stands now, puts a hand over her chest. Then she wavers and stumbles like she’s about to pass out again. Darlene’s quick to her side and steadies her. Abby goes to her other hip.
Tabby says, “Eve, are you all right?”
I almost want to ask what kind of dumbass question is that? Of course she’s not all right. None of us are, her least of all.
“I-I think I should go sit down,” Eve says.
“Mom?” Darlene answers. “Mom, what about Carmen?”
Olive takes Darlene’s spot and puts Eve’s arm around her shoulder. “We’ll talk later,” Olive assures us.
“I’m all right, Olive, I’m all right,” Eve says. Tabby follows them. She’s not all right. None of us are.
Jack Zombie (Book 5): Dead End Page 14
