Love and Decay, Volume Eight (Episodes 9-12, Season Three)

by Higginson, Rachel

  “He’s worth it though.”

  She shot me a furious glare. “I never said he wasn’t worth it. I just know that I can be doing more. That I have to do more.”

  Tomás launched into a conversation in Spanish. Since we left Adela back with the rest of the family, we stood idly by and waited for someone to fill us in.

  “Twenty,” Tomás finally told us. “They’ve counted twenty. We will take them all out. Do not leave one survivor.”

  Those were instructions he did not need to give us. We knew this drill well.

  I looked back at Harrison and King. “You guys ready?”

  Harrison flashed a wicked grin, “Ready to murder these bastards.”

  Someone shoved the door open and gray light filtered into our dim sanctuary. I craned my neck out the door to see overcast skies and streaks of lightning.

  Not the best conditions, but hopefully the sky would hold back its oncoming downpour until we were safely back inside.

  I looked down at my new tennis shoes. They were a size and a half too big, but they were clean and functioning. I loathed the idea of getting them wet or walking through mud or caking them in Zombie blood.

  This was why we couldn’t have nice things.

  Tomás shouted something in Spanish that I took to be a war cry of some kind; then we pushed through the narrow door and jumped into a fight right away.

  Tomás had said twenty feeders waited for us, but either he couldn’t count or his English had gotten confused.

  I counted at least sixty right off the bat, with more catching up in the distance.

  And there were twelve of us.

  Clearly, I would use Tomás’s definition of twenty when I told Hendrix about this later.

  The cobblestone street stretched out in front of us in a wide plaza before buildings sprouted close together on the other side. I saw a tourist shop that had once upon a time sold t-shirts and other souvenirs from this magnificent cathedral. A tipped over food stand lay smashed to pieces fifty feet away. Shattered glass littered the streets and sidewalks.

  And Feeders filled every other space.

  This was the definition of the Zombie Apocalypse.

  And wasn’t I lucky to be a part of it?

  We jumped into battle, shooting Feeders and staying out of each other’s way. Harrison, King and Haley stuck close, which was a good thing because I was too busy to keep a close eye on them like I’d promised Hendrix.

  Adrenaline pushed through my body, a violent force of super-concentrated senses and rapid heartbeats. My limbs were slow and sluggish at first. I hadn’t done anything but sit over the last few days and it took me a few minutes to get into my groove.

  “To your left, Reags!” Haley shouted.

  I followed her order without question and blasted a pasty, rotting Feeder right in the mouth. His head knocked backward with the explosion and blood and brain matter splattered the ground around him as he crumpled to his final death.

  Bang. Bang. Bang. I systematically took out Feeder after Feeder as we held our ground on the cobbled portico. Unfortunately, in order to hit them they had to get close.

  Too close for comfort.

  Feeders flooded the area. They scrambled over rooftops and raced around the long stretch of buildings across the wide street. Cars had been abandoned at some point and created natural barriers to the attacking line of Feeders.

  The ground we stood on was perfectly flat and gave us no advantage against the incoming, greedy horde. They popped out at unpredictable places, their jaws working up and down, slobbering black ooze that reflected their dark hunger.

  I didn’t know if they consciously ducked behind cars and the remains of what used to be pretty landscape or if it was all coincidental. I didn’t want to believe they could think ahead or recognize danger, but they appeared to be cognizant enough to duck out of the way just in time.

  Or maybe that was my frustration playing tricks on me. My kill count wasn’t nearly as big as I wanted it to be.

  “We need to get higher!” Harrison shouted over the roar of gunfire. “We can’t see them all from here!”

  I agreed, but there was no place to go. We could climb parts of the intricately designed church, but we’d have to back up in order to do that. We were trying to push the Feeders away from the church doors, not bring them closer.

  Thankfully, I didn’t have to worry about any doors but these. The Feeders had caught our fresh flesh scent and would be drawn to us. They wouldn’t waste time beating down one of the other huge doors when there was a promise of something warm and delicious just around the corner.

  They weren’t that smart.

  Or at least I hoped they weren’t.

  King rushed forward and Haley and I struggled to keep him covered. His accurate shots saved his life more than once, but when he put his gun down to climb on top of a mid-sized sedan, I nearly shot him myself.

  Stupid boy!

  The metal groaned beneath his weight, but once he was firmly planted on top, he had the best perspective.

  His weapon flew back into action and Feeders started falling left and right.

  “Genius idea!” Harrison yelled before following after his brother. Harrison picked a cab that had crashed into a landscaped tree.

  Haley and I cursed as we ran to catch up with him. He leapt onto the trunk with one running jump and then vaulted straight to the roof. The metal bent beneath him and he stumbled to the side, arms waving wildly to catch him.

  “Hang on, Harrison!” I screamed at him.

  A Feeder followed him up, leaping from one parked car to the trunk he’d just vacated. I focused my weapon and shot it in the side of the head. It fell forward and smashed against the cracked back window.

  Harrison shot me a wide-eyed grin over his shoulder. It said, “Whew, that was a close one!” I wanted to punch him.

  “They have the right idea!” Haley shouted.

  Reluctantly I agreed. “I’ll cover you!”

  I followed her over to a Jeep and shot anything that tried to get to her. Then she turned to cover me while I joined her at the top.

  It wasn’t safe ground and I wanted to immediately abandon the idea. The metal shifted beneath our feet. Our bodies rocked unsteadily with the force of our guns’ recoil. But we stayed put because we could see again and the Feeders couldn’t hide as well.

  Tomás and his men shouted behind us and even though we didn’t understand them, I knew it was a warning for us to pull back.

  But pulling back wasn’t something any of us did well.

  We continued to shoot, to kill and to refill our weapons.

  Just when I thought the horde had started to thin, a new wave of Feeders came crashing toward us.

  “Where are they coming from?” I asked Haley as we stood back to back, just like the old days. I knew what we were doing. The reality of killing Zombies and fighting for our lives was never hard to forget. But fighting with Haley like this, standing together and watching each other’s backs was something we hadn’t done in a very long time.

  It made me rather nostalgic. And despite the carnage and god-awful smell, I loved it.

  “Where do they ever come from?” she asked dryly. “The pits of hell.”

  “But they haven’t bothered the cathedral the entire time we’ve been there. Why now?”

  We fell silent for a few minutes while we tried to stay alive. The Feeders came in one aggressive line. Their dead legs carried them quickly over the street and their moaning screams warred with the rapid fire of our guns.

  I didn’t look at any one of them for too long. Their gruesome, rotting faces often haunted my dreams, so I tried to avoid eye contact. As long as I could aim, fire and move on, I would sleep better tonight.

  From the corner of my eye, a flag across the street flapped in the breeze catching my attention. It was tangled and torn down the middle, hanging from a long-abandoned shop.

  Mexico’s flag waved proudly from the iron setting it had been mounted
on. As dirty and tattered as it had become over the years, the symbol of Mexico was still proudly displayed.

  It gave me hope in a weird way. It wasn’t my flag and I had never felt a personal connection to Mexico before we stepped foot on this soil, but I couldn’t help but feel the stirrings of something in my soul.

  We weren’t just fighting to survive, we had a purpose. We lived with a purpose.

  Behind the church doors we protected, humanity thrived in ways we hadn’t seen. There was no warlord here, keeping slaves under his thumb. Tomás wasn’t a tyrant insistent upon world domination. There was no teenage boy pretending to be king, sending his subjects off to die for the fun of it.

  For the first time since Gage died, we had found people that lived freely, that lived in peaceful community.

  This church represented something more than sanctuary from the storm. This place was more than a beacon of light in the darkness.

  These people represented the future.

  At least that was what I believed.

  I had to.

  I couldn’t continue fighting for a better world when the only things to live in it were dictators and evil, greedy men. What was the point of ensuring the future of the planet, if the only people to inhabit it were pond scum?

  I needed to believe there were good people left. I needed to picture a world that could rebuild and repopulate, but also get along and live in some kind of harmony.

  I had to believe there were at least a few people worth all of this agony.

  My gaze scanned the storefront beneath the flag. There were more flags hanging from the ceiling behind shattered windows. The store had been completely ransacked in the post-apocalypse chaos, but not everything had been taken. I realized it had been a soccer store. Heavy scarves and multi-colored jerseys littered the floor and still hung from metal racks.

  Different South American countries were proudly displayed on the fronts of t-shirts. Brazil. Guatemala. Colombia.

  Colombia.

  We had a purpose, but we also had a goal. Getting to our destination was more important than ever.

  I thought back to Vaughan, suffering and fighting death. He needed medicine… he needed a cure.

  We knew they were working on one. If they were still alive… if they had somehow survived the brutality of this world.

  What if they had one already?

  Suddenly, getting to the research station seemed more important than ever.

  “There!” Haley shouted, pulling my attention the other direction. “Look who it is!”

  I followed her outstretched arm, but didn’t see anything for a minute. I fought off Feeders and tried to glance back in that general direction, hoping her hysterical words would start to make sense.

  Three dead Zombies later and after I’d wiped sweat from my brow, I could finally make out a group of people standing on top of a bus stop overhang.

  “No way!” I growled. “What do they think they’re doing?”

  Haley’s shoulder pressed more firmly into mine. I felt her muscles tense and stiffen. Her fear became a palpable thing in the air. “Does it look… Does it look like he’s directing them?”

  I sucked in a breath and held it. I couldn’t remember how to let it go. There was too much congestion in my chest and it seemed easier to hold it in than remember how to breathe.

  Damn.

  And I’d thought we were on our way out of Crazy Town.

  “How is he doing it?” I demanded. My attention turned back to the closest Feeders and I felt a sicker sense of satisfaction now that I knew where this current threat was coming from.

  “Do you think he expected us to live this long?” I asked Haley in a voice loud enough that she could hear me.

  “I’m guessing that he probably expected us to die the second we exited that tunnel!” She shouted back.

  “So what does he want?” I squinted so I could see the Rat King more clearly. He stood straight with shoulders squared and head held high. A cape billowed behind him, clasped at his neck and he held a tall stick that had the look of a scepter.

  Haley didn’t speak for a few minutes. She couldn’t speak. She was too busy killing anything that got near us. “My guess would be our new home!”

  “We have to get out of here!” I declared. “This is going to be a war and if we don’t leave now, we’re going to get trapped in it!”

  “We don’t have a car!”

  “Look around, Hales! There’s plenty to choose from!”

  “Hey!” Harrison shouted. “Do you see this!” I followed his gaze and found it on the same thing Haley and I had just figured out.

  “We need to go!” I hollered back.

  Harrison quirked an eyebrow at me. “Inside?”

  “Like go-go! We need to get your family and get the hell out of Dodge! We don’t want any part of this!”

  Harrison nodded once, “Then stop standing around and get your ass in gear!”

  “He needs his mouth washed out with soap,” Haley grumbled just loud enough for me to hear. I couldn’t have agreed more.

  “King, ready?” I turned around to call his attention, but it was a stupid mistake.

  He had been aggressively focused on killing Feeders that were trying to climb up his vehicle. When I called his name I distracted him and he looked up at the wrong time.

  A Feeder grabbed at his ankle. In a panicked move, he tried to jump back and forgot the surface he stood on. He shot right off the top of the sedan, arms thrashing, bullets flying wildly.

  “On, no!” I ran to the edge of the Jeep and waited three, incredibly long seconds for him to resurface. He didn’t.

  “King!” I shouted again. That caught Harrison’s attention and he spun around in a full circle looking for his brother. “Over there!” I yelled at Harrison. “He’s on the ground.”

  Harrison, King and I made a triangle of sorts with our positioning. Both Harrison and I were equal-distance from him but in opposite directions. Both of us had to get to him as fast as possible or he was going to get swarmed.

  I jumped from the roof to the hood and then to the hood of another abandoned car. I scrambled to the top of that car, down to the trunk and jumped to another hood a few feet away.

  My shaking legs landed with a hard thud and I dropped to a crouch to keep from toppling off too. The flat tires kept the car from shifting too much, but the metal was just barely strong enough to hold my weight.

  I stood up on rubbery knees and climbed up the next roof.

  That was how I continued to make my way down the street. From one car to the next, I leapt across recently dead Feeders and decaying corpses.

  By the time I reached King, he had already scrambled back to the hood of the car. His body was spread eagle as he tried to regain his balance and fight through the panic of being caught off guard.

  “Are you okay!” I yelled at him.

  He didn’t respond verbally, but he did pull himself to his knees. He didn’t have time to reassure me before he was back to shooting Feeders.

  “Is anything broken or sprained!” I yelled again.

  “I’m fine!” he finally shouted. “No bites! No broken bones! I just scared the shit out of myself.”

  My shoulders dropped with the weight of my relief. I hadn’t realized how worked up I’d gotten. The fear that something could happen to him had propelled me across this street and I barely remembered jumping the long distances from car to car.

  I turned around to see that Haley had followed me. “We should move the car now!” She yelled. “That way we can load up right into it.”

  “Good idea! See anything big enough to hold all of us?”

  We scanned the area in between killing more Zombies. I was on my fifth handgun and I’d run out of extra ammo. This was it for me. I had to go back inside anyway.

  I just knew it would be my last time.

  I had no idea what Tomás’s expectations were for us or how long he expected us to stay. He had never forbidden us from leaving a
nd we had made it very clear that we never intended to stay. But my faith in humanity had become a very fragile thing.

  While I had just praised the humanity of this place minutes ago, the real test would come when we tried to leave.

  For Tomás’s sake, I hoped he planned to keep his word.

  “There!” Haley pointed out a moving truck that had run into a fire hydrant.

  The front bumper had been dented, but it didn’t look like it was in too bad of shape. All of the tires were still intact. It also wasn’t huge. It was the small kind used to move couches or bookshelves.

  It wouldn’t be the fastest thing on wheels, but it would hold all of us. Plus, the driver had been killed just as he tried to exit. His body looked severely gone from where I stood, but part of it was still propped up on the floor of the cab.

  That probably meant it had a serious issue with flies and insects, but there would be keys nearby to get it started.

  It would also smell bad.

  Like I said, not the most perfect getaway vehicle in the world, but it would do.

  Harrison landed next to me. “You think it still runs?”

  I shook my head. I had no idea. “Only one way to find out.”

  “Go get my brothers!” He demanded. “King and I will get the truck and meet you over there.” He pointed to a clear spot that was as close to the cathedral as he could get.

  I shook my head again, this time more firmly. “No way. We’re not leaving you.”

  “Go, now, Reagan! Or we’re not going to get another chance. That kid brought an army with him. And he looks like an idiot with that cape on. That can only mean one thing, he’s a complete psychopath. I’m not sticking around to see what else he has up his sleeve!”

  Hadn’t I just said that? He was right, but leaving him and King was against everything I believed in. My entire body rebelled against moving away from them.

  “Go!” Harrison shouted. “We will be fine!”

  I looked at Haley. She shrugged and jumped down to the street. When she started sprinting back to the church, I had no choice but to follow her. Even if this was the dumbest idea in the history of ideas.