Enduring Armageddon

by Parker, Brian

  I slid along the perimeter just beyond the circle of light cast off by the roaring fire. The smell of food was stronger on this side of the camp and I inadvertently glanced into the night anticipating a zombie to come charging out of the darkness for the meat. I turned back towards the man I was set to kill in a few moments and counted out an extra two minutes to ensure that Jordyn made it to her location.

  The guy had a rough beard that must have been growing for the entire apocalypse. He wore one of the duster jackets and cowboy hats. I wondered if he was one of the men who’d ridden out to our party yesterday; surely they didn’t all have the same jackets so he must have been one of the riders. This guy was directly responsible. That decision pushed aside any doubt I might have harbored.

  At the end of the allotted time I rose up and stumbled out of the darkness into the flickering glow cast off by the camp’s fire. I wore the clothing of the zombie that I’d killed a few hours earlier and I hoped that the poor light would help to disguise my appearance. It worked just like I’d planned because the man slowly set his rifle down and picked up a metal bar.

  I advanced slowly, continuing my zombie impersonation until I was within five feet of the perimeter and then I rushed the guard. My spear ran true and hit him directly in the throat. The adrenaline was pumping and all my aches and pains faded away. The force of my thrust carried the wooden tip completely through the back of his neck and lodged the wood enough so that I was able to pull him to the outside of the camp’s boundary instead of allowing him to fall inside and possibly alerting more of the men.

  I yanked my spear out of the man’s collar and scanned inside the camp. No one was alerted and I saw Jordyn’s man go down much the same as mine did. I looked expectantly at where Jackson was. His man was still upright, half-turned towards the interior of the camp. Fuck, my mind screamed as I sprinted back around to the side of the camp where I’d left the thirteen-year-old boy to murder a man.

  As I ran towards Jackson’s position I tried to keep an eye on the guard, but he continued to stare into the camp and not into the darkness where Jackson waited. I covered the distance to the boy in less than a minute and suddenly stopped short. By the dim glow I could see the wooden spear clearly embedded into the man’s head, right behind his ear. The end of the spear rested on the ground and held the man upright so he still appeared to be on guard. Jackson had done his job.

  “Jackson!” I whispered.

  “I’m right here with Jordyn,” he replied out of the darkness.

  I groped my way forward and a hand closed around my ankle. “Watch out! You almost stepped on us,” Jordyn hissed.

  I knelt in the snow and hugged both of them fiercely. “You both did great.”

  “Thanks. Now it’s your turn. Go in there and save Rebecca and Sam,” Jackson said.

  I nodded stupidly, even though they couldn’t see my movements. “Alright, you guys follow me. I want you on the inside of that ring of cars,” I murmured. “No telling what will come up here for that meat that they’re cooking.”

  The children both stood up woodenly and I could tell that we’d need to talk about what they’d done later. We couldn’t afford to do it now, but sometime soon we’d have to let them work through their feelings about taking a life. I hopped onto the hood of an old station wagon and helped to pull each of them across. We carefully opened the driver’s door and they climbed into the back seat.

  “Stay down,” I advised. Jackson answered with a nod while Jordyn gripped another wooden spear tightly to her chest.

  I made my way into the camp towards the maroon van. I held my KA-BAR low so I could stab outwards quickly into anything that stepped in front of me. I didn’t see anyone else awake in the camp and I stopped just on the near side of the van. I was positive that another guard sat there; otherwise, how would they secure people inside a van?

  Sure enough, when I peeked over the hood, a man sat low to the ground on a seat that had been pulled from a vehicle. I ducked back down and hoped that I’d been quick enough to not be seen. I crept towards the rear of the vehicle and saw that the doors on this side had been secured by two large ratchet straps that wrapped completely over the top and around the vehicle. No wonder they couldn’t escape, those things were meant to tie down thousands of pounds of cargo.

  I risked a rapid glance into the interior of the van and saw several bodies lying under a couple of blankets for warmth. I accidently scraped my shoulder against the rear bumper of the van and I paused to determine what the guard would do. Evidently he was accustomed to noises coming from the van because I could still see his boots stretched out near the underside of the car.

  I gently placed the extra spears I carried onto the packed snow behind the van and readjusted my grip on the knife. I took a few rapid breaths to steady my nerves and then rushed around the side of the van. The man’s eyes grew as wide as saucers as I covered the distance. He managed to give a half-hearted shout of alarm before the knife was buried up to the cross guard in the side of his neck.

  The knife made a sickening suction sound as I slid it out and then plunged it back into the front of his throat near his Adam’s apple. There was a slight resistance when the blade nicked against his vertebra but it gave away quickly as the razor-sharp edge slid between the bones. I jerked the blade out and propped his head against the back of the seat and then dove back behind the van.

  As expected, the front door of the RV that Sam had been in earlier opened and a naked man stood in the doorway. I realized that it was the same man who’d hit me with his horse. “Carson! Carson, everything okay out there?” he shouted.

  “Yeah,” I mimicked in my best Texas accent.

  “What the hell’s goin’ on out here?” the man asked his dead friend.

  I didn’t know what else to say and I knew the fake accent wouldn’t work past a couple of syllables. The only thing I could do was attack and shut this guy up before he woke everyone up. I knelt down and picked up a spear.

  “Hey, Carson. Where the fuck are Grant and Randy? They ain’t at their posts.” This guy just wouldn’t shut up.

  I jumped to my feet and rushed towards him with the spear held tight against my side. “What the fu—” he didn’t finish his question as the wooden spear buried deep into his stomach.

  “Oh, God. Lord Jesus, help me!” he screamed. So much for being quiet. I jabbed the blade deep into his neck and tore violently towards myself to pull it out. Half of the man’s windpipe came out with the knife and his blood sprayed across my unprotected face.

  From deeper inside the RV a woman began screaming and I could hear people beginning to stir in the other vehicles. I sprinted to the next vehicle over and stabbed a man as he was unfolding himself from the back seat. I slashed and stabbed indiscriminately at every male form that I saw. The bonfire’s dancing light added to the confusion and it was clear that they thought that the attack was coming from somewhere outside of their perimeter.

  By the time it was done, only one person that I knew of had escaped. He’d made his way towards where the children were hidden. I raced back towards them and the pain in my side went from a dull ache to a pronounced stabbing pain. I placed my hand against my ribs and hit a hard solid object. Fuck, I’d been stabbed by a pocket knife and hadn’t even realized it. I jerked the little knife out and continued towards the station wagon.

  The man I was following hung limply from the end of Jordyn’s spear. She must have stabbed him and then his body weight pulled the handle from her grasp. She saw me and gave me the thumbs up. I returned the gesture and turned wearily back towards the fire.

  I took my time making my way back as I slowly bent and slit the throat of each man that I’d stabbed during the mêlée earlier. All told, the children and I had killed twelve men in the camp. By the time I’d returned to the van, my ribs were on fire and I wheezed slightly every time I gasped for a breath.

  I took one more look around the compound before I peered in the van’s window. I jumped back, mome
ntarily frightened when Alejandro’s face appeared behind the fogged and dirty window. He motioned for me to release the cargo straps and I attempted to make the clasp work for a few seconds before finally just using my knife to saw through the tough nylon material.

  The KA-BAR made short work of the two-inch strap and soon enough, the prisoners tumbled out of the van and landed in a heap. Alejandro was up instantly and he loped over to the RV where I’d stabbed the man with a spear. He grasped the spear and disappeared inside.

  I didn’t know what the hell he was doing, but soon enough everyone was hugging me and laughing for joy at being rescued. Rebecca and Sam cried uncontrollably and I had to physically separate myself from them. Trisha stood separate from us and leaned heavily against the van. Then I realized that I didn’t see Jesse.

  “Trisha, where’s Jesse?” I asked.

  She stared blankly at the ground. “Chuck, don’t,” Rebecca warned. “We need to get moving.”

  “Where’s Jesse,” I asked frantically. I pushed through Rebecca and Sam and stepped up into the van. The big man wasn’t inside either. “Where is he?” I demanded.

  “They killed him!” Trisha screeched as she stood up and got in my face. “Is that what you fucking wanted to know? They killed him and then they ate him!”

  I wiped her spittle from my face and sat down heavily on the van’s floorboard. “Those sick fuckers ate him. Can’t you smell him cooking? It’s all I can fucking smell and I…I…” she never finished her sentence as she collapsed and began sobbing.

  Sam knelt beside the grieving woman and wrapped her arms around her shoulders. I could hear her murmuring something but I couldn’t make out the words. Rebecca sat down beside me and said, “I told you not to ask about it. We could have done this somewhere else; somewhere where all these dead bodies weren’t around to remind her of what happened.”

  Privately I disagreed. Letting Trisha see that the men who’d done this to her husband were dead would probably help her out in the long run. Out loud I said, “I’m sorry. I had no idea what happened in here.”

  “That’s right, you don’t!” Rebecca exclaimed and stood up glaring at me. “You have no idea of the hell that we’ve been through while you were out hiding in the woods or whatever.”

  To say I was shocked would be an understatement. I’d risked my life coming in here to save them, personally killed nine men and been stabbed. She had no right to say that I was hiding in the woods. My temper boiled to the surface and I was about to unload on her when a little voice in the back of my head told me to keep my goddamned mouth shut and let her vent. She was right. I had no idea what they’d gone through in the past two days.

  “You were out there, safe while we were in here, with them,” she gestured at the dead men that lay all around us. “They tortured Jesse before they hacked him up and roasted him on the fire like a fucking animal. Made us watch them eat him piece by piece. They did unspeakable things to us in front of everyone and you think an ‘I’m sorry’ will cut it? You’ve no right to say that to any of us.”

  “Wait a damned minute, Becca,” I said. I’d tried to allow her to get it out of her system, but this was going too far. “I was beaten unconscious and left for dead. The only reason I’m alive right now is because Jordyn and Jackson saved me. I…”

  “They’re alive?” Sam asked excitedly.

  “Yeah, they’re just on the edge of the camp, safe in a vehicle.”

  Rebecca’s hand flew to her mouth and she asked, “Oh my God, what have I been saying?” Her eyes softened and she said, “Thank you so much, Chuck. I’m sorry. We… We’ve been through a lot.”

  I pulled her into a hug and whispered into her hair, “I’m sorry that I wasn’t able to prevent this. I promise you that it will never happen again.”

  She nodded but her arms hung impotently at her side. She looked up suddenly and I turned to see Alejandro walking up carrying something that looked like a bowling ball.

  “I killed her. May the Virgin Mary forgive me, I killed her,” he stated as he threw the object to the ground near the seat that the guard had used. I nudged it with my foot and the distorted face of a woman stared at me with open eyes from the severed head.

  “Who was she?” I asked. She must have been the woman who I’d heard scream when I speared the naked man in the gut.

  “The leader of this band of pendejos,” Alejandro said. “She told them what to do and they did it. Almost everything that happened to us was Kim’s fault.”

  “I’m glad she didn’t get away,” Trisha mumbled. “I’m so glad…” she surged to her feet and kicked the head far into the camp.

  “We need to bury what’s left of Jesse. Then I can go,” Trisha droned. She was obviously in shock and needed to get some rest.

  I answered her and said, “I’ll do it, Trisha, you need to…”

  “Don’t tell me what I need to do, Chuck,” she hissed. “You don’t get to tell me that. Thank you for saving everyone, but you don’t tell me what I need. I need to bury my husband and then it will all be over.”

  I held up my hands to show her that I wasn’t interested in arguing. “Alright, but let me help you bury him,” I said.

  She nodded and stumbled towards the bonfire. I re-hugged Rebecca and then passed her off to Sam. I don’t know where that teenager got her resiliency, but this was the second time that I knew of that she’d been subjected to unspeakable acts in the last six months. Other than the occasional rebellious streak, she was a model citizen of the apocalypse and I made a mental note to cut her some slack.

  “Alejandro, we killed the three guards and the nine men inside the camp. Plus, that lady there,” I gestured towards the far side of the camp where Kim’s head was kicked. “Did we get them all?”

  His eyes rolled up into his head as he thought and mentally counted the men that he’d seen in the camp. “Yeah,” he replied. “That was all of them. Thanks, man.”

  I ducked my head in acknowledgement. “Can you go out to the perimeter over there to the tan station wagon and get Jordyn and Jackson?” I asked as I gestured towards where I’d left the children.

  “The kids are alive?” he exclaimed.

  “Yeah. Just let them know who you are before you get in range of Jordyn’s spear,” I said over my shoulder as I hurried after Trisha.

  I caught up to her shambling form easy enough. She’d been through a lot and what we saw when we got to the bonfire didn’t help anything. “Oh, God, I’m sorry, Trisha,” I said.

  “Don’t,” she said. “Just help me find what’s left of him and we’ll bury him inside the camp so the mutants don’t dig him up and eat him.”

  We found his torso pretty easily. It was partially buried in the snow and had been dressed like a hunter would a deer. His insides had been scooped out and discarded (or consumed), his hands were missing and the pasty color of his once-dark skin made it clear that they’d drained the blood so the meat wouldn’t spoil. One massive hunk of flesh on a metal spike rested over a low section of coals where they’d been slow roasting it. That accounted for one of his legs and I assumed that the other one had already been eaten. It was impossible to tell what bones were his in the large pile near the fire, so I pulled out a femur and hoped that Trisha would understand.

  We looked for a long time, but we never found his head. No one knew if the men had stayed in camp the entire time or ridden out, so there was no way to know if it was even still in the camp. While we looked, Alejandro began digging Jesse’s grave near the fire pit. It was the only place where the ground wasn’t too frozen to penetrate with the pitchfork and flat-nosed shovel that we found near the horse trailer.

  It took us a few hours to dig the hole deep enough that we thought he’d be safe. Afterwards, we wrapped his remains in a sheet from the RV and lowered them down. Alejandro, who was the only one who was religious in our group, said a prayer and a few words. Trisha thanked him and everyone else for their hard work.

  “We’ve been doing this for
a long time,” Trisha said in the opening to her eulogy. “This world is so strange and messed up, but Jesse was always positive about our future. He was very grateful to have all of you as friends. Especially you, Chuck.

  “We were able to have him in our lives for this long because of Chuck’s decision to save him back in Virden and the only reason he wasn’t killed in the Springfield massacre was because you kept him with you instead of charging up to the front like every other idiot.

  “Every one of you was important to him. Sam, you were like the daughter we never had. You’ll be okay…after a while. I know that all of you are so much stronger than I am. I can’t go on after losing him, but you’ll be able to.”

  “Trisha, you are strong,” Sam said while she tried to place a comforting hand on the older woman’s shoulder.

  Trisha shied away from her touch and continued, “Jesse was such an amazing man; First, as the high school football star, then in the army and the war in Iraq, and then as the provider for our little family. We never had children—never will now—but I’m glad that they won’t be left alone after I’m gone.”

  “You’re safe now. Jesse’s sacrifice allowed you to survive,” I said in an effort to ease some of the pain I sensed in her voice. Her eyes flashed fire and I dropped it. Maybe the girls would be able to talk to her later.

  “Jesse was a good man, he didn’t deserve this,” Trisha continued. “He’ll be missed by everyone. I loved him more than I could ever love anyone else. I’m glad that I knew him.” She paused and grimaced. “I’m sorry, I’m done. I don’t have anything else to say in front of everyone, but I want to say a few things to him privately so please don’t cover him up yet. I’ve really got to go to the bathroom so when I come back, I’ll want to be with him.”

  She turned and walked away towards the perimeter. I glanced at Rebecca and raised my eyebrows in an effort to ask if we should go see if she was okay. “No, just let her be for a few minutes,” my wife answered. “She just needs some time.”