Enduring Armageddon

by Parker, Brian

  I nodded my head and asked Alejandro if he’d seen where they took our backpacks. “No clue, man. I was knocked out when they brought me in here,” he replied.

  “We should probably search the camp, see what we can find where they…” I stopped short as a booming gunshot rang out in the night. I didn’t even need to go see, I knew what had happened. I’d heard that gun fired lots of times before.

  I shook my weary head and said, “Alejandro, I need you on the perimeter. That shot will surely bring some of the creatures this way. They won’t see you as a threat so I just need you to redirect them away from here or something.” He nodded, obviously thankful that I wasn’t asking him to kill the ones that would inevitably be drawn to the sound of the pistol.

  “Chuck, do you think that was Trisha?” Sam asked fearfully.

  “Yeah, honey, it was. That’s why she didn’t want us to cover up Jesse’s body. She wants to be with him. You guys start searching the camp for our bags and anything useful, I’ll go get Trisha and bring her back here to be with Jesse.”

  Everyone else stumbled away in shock to find our gear so we could leave this accursed place while I went to find Trisha’s body. I stopped by the RV and ducked inside to retrieve another sheet. I realized quickly that I’d gone to the wrong vehicle in the darkness. Kim’s headless body lay across the aisle in a pool of sticky blood. I turned around and went to the second RV in the camp to get the sheets.

  She’d only walked past the interior set of vehicles. I’m not sure where she found it, but Trisha held Jesse’s nickel-plated pistol in her hand. The giant caliber had done its job and if I didn’t know exactly who I was looking at, I’m not sure if I would have recognized her. I gently pried the big gun from her hand and thumbed the hammer while I squeezed the trigger to ride it forward without discharging another round. Then I placed it on safe and tucked it into my belt.

  I wrapped the sheet around her body and tried to pick her up but my ribs screamed in protest so I settled on pulling the sheet behind me like a sled. Once I got to the gravesite I slid her down inside as gently as I could. The dirt went in much easier than it came out as I pushed it with the flat shovel.

  Halfway through the burial Rebecca came up behind me and said, “Chuck, I found some alcohol and bandages. We’ve got to pour it on your wound and get you bandaged up so it doesn’t get infected.”

  “Alright. Let me finish burying them first.”

  “They’re not going anywhere. The longer that wound’s exposed, the more bacteria can get in there,” she replied.

  I acquiesced to her logic and set the shovel down. Rebecca busied herself preparing the bandages while I pulled my shirt up over my head with a slight moan of pain. “Jesus, Chuck. How are you still upright?” she asked.

  I stared down at my side. This was the first time that I’d seen my injuries from the fight and the wounds from yesterday were a disgusting mess. My entire right side was almost solid purple, with several dark pink clusters at various points. Those must be where the guy’s boot actually impacted with my ribs. There were four or five smaller bruises on the other side, but the jagged gash from the pocket knife had a solid stream of blood flowing down into my waistband. When I regarded it in the firelight it looked a lot worse than it felt, but that might be from the adrenaline that still coursed through my body from the fight.

  “I don’t know. Things needed to be done and I was the only person who could do it. I don’t have time to bleed.”

  “Okay, Jesse Ventura, you’ve got some time now,” she said in response to my bad movie reference. “I’ll talk to the others to see if they’d be willing to stay the night here.

  “Here it goes,” she continued. I suppressed the urge to scream in pain as she poured the alcohol over the rough knife wound. It hurt a lot worse than when Greg cleaned my hand in Springfield and at the time I thought that was the worst pain that I’d ever experienced. The alcohol dissolved the newly formed scabs and the blood began to flow freely again. She squeezed my wrist to indicate that she was going to pour the alcohol again.

  Oh my God! The exposed wound screamed in protest against the severe burn of the cleansing alcohol. She poured it on the outside a few more times and then had me lay on my side and spread the wound to pour the alcohol inside. “We don’t have a way to stitch this up, but they do have antibiotic ointment. I’ll smear it on there and try to squeeze the cut closed with the bandage,” Rebecca said.

  The tight bandages hurt like hell against my ribs, but it would probably help in the long run to have them stabilized. “You know,” she said quietly, “nothing happened to me again. I saw them rape Sam a few times and that bitch sodomized Alejandro with the barrel of a loaded rifle in front of all of us, but they never got a chance to do anything to me.”

  I grasped her hands and pulled her in close to me. “Oh, thank God,” I said. She finally broke down and sobbed into my shoulder.

  “I don’t know what they did to Trisha inside the camper,” she muttered, “but we could hear her screams and I think that they were going to come for me tonight. Thank you so much for coming when you did or else…or else I don’t know what they would have done.”

  “It’s okay, Rebecca,” I said as I stroked her hair. “I’m here. I won’t ever leave you again.” I didn’t know if I could keep that promise, but it’s what she needed to hear.

  She cried herself out after a few minutes and then leaned back and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “We need to get where we’re going, Chuck,” she insisted. “We need to get somewhere that will allow us to put up some security and keep people like this away. I need someplace safe for the baby.”

  I nodded dumbly and replied, “I know, babe. We’re trying to get there. Once we bury Jesse and Trisha we should be able to leave and we’ll make our way to western Texas where we can grow crops for food.” Honestly, I didn’t know how things were going to go without Jesse. He was the one with farming experience. He was also our intimidation factor. That big motherfucker scared plenty of people away just from his size alone. I’d only known him for a few months, but I felt like I’d lost my lifelong friend. I hadn’t had time to work through my issues with seeing him dismembered and partially eaten by cannibals.

  Fuck! I hated everything about this world. Maybe Trisha did the right thing and ended it on her own terms before any more damage could be done to her. I unconsciously shook my head in disagreement and Rebecca looked at me questioningly. “Sorry,” I replied. “I had a crazy thought go through my mind and I shook my head by accident.”

  She nodded and continued to wrap my ribs. “Okay, looks like you’re all done,” she stated. “I’m going to check on the others.”

  “Alright,” I said as I pulled the shirt back over my head. “I’ll finish burying Jesse and Trisha and then help everyone search the camp.”

  She leaned in to peck me on the cheek and wrinkled her nose. “Maybe we can get your real clothes back too, these smell awful. And take it easy okay? Don’t overexert yourself and reopen your side.”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll pace myself,” I said to her back as she walked towards the vans where the previous inhabitants kept their possessions.

  I stared down into the hole where the two bodies were mostly covered by dirt. We’d traveled so far together and been through so much and their lives were uselessly snubbed out along a highway somewhere north of Fort Worth. I slid the shovel into the dirt with disgust and picked up a full spade. I dropped the earth onto the forms of my former companions and repeated the process until they were completely covered, but not forgotten.

  * * *

  We huddled together in the second RV that night. No one would go into Kim’s RV to see if there were supplies. I decided that it was in everyone’s best interest to not ask about anything that had happened. Alejandro reported that he’d been able to get the few creatures that’d wandered up to go back to the wood line without needing to hurt them. I filed that away. It would definitely be useful to have him around if h
e could just make them leave without fighting.

  In the morning I went to the spot where the children and I had dropped our gear prior to attacking the camp. I changed clothes and slipped my mask on. I’d felt like I was missing something all night, but once I resealed my mask the feeling drifted away. I’d just have to deal with the cracked lens.

  Then I went into the other camper and retrieved several weapons, including my M-4. We also got a nice, silenced rifle and a lot of ammo. Alejandro said that he could ride the horses, but other than the children, none of us had been on a horse before. The horses would absolutely increase our rate of travel and after talking it over with everyone, we decided to hold off leaving until the next day so we could learn to ride.

  We spent the remainder of the day learning to ride inside the perimeter of the cannibals’ camp. Alejandro spent the morning teaching us how to stay in the seat while the horse walked and then how to control the damn things once they started running. I was a willing participant, but I would have given anything for a taxi to get me from point A to B.

  We held a short memorial ceremony right before we left the camp at the burial site of Jesse and Trisha. Then we hopped up into the saddle and began the long, slow ride westward. I rode by myself, while Rebecca rode with Jackson in front of her, Sam and Jordyn rode together and Alejandro brought up the rear of our little group on the horse that only he seemed able to control.

  TEN

  I wiped the sweat that had formed under my hat with the back of my hand. Even though the temperatures were still in the fifties, I’d worked up quite a sweat covering our seeds with my hoe. It had been almost a year since the bombs fell from the sky and destroyed our world as we knew it and after some rough times we were trying to carve a life for ourselves in the harsh west Texas environment.

  We traveled for a few months on horseback after Jesse was murdered. Through the new wasteland north of DFW, over the plains of western Texas and we were finally lucky enough to stumble upon a small, but stable, community called Balmorhea. It was somewhere in west Texas about a hundred miles southeast of the army base in El Paso. Initially, Rebecca had been against being that close to a radioactive pit, but the good outweighed the bad.

  Prior to the war, Balmorhea had been a state park with a lake and a small forest. The water was pretty rare out in this part of the country and if we were going to try to farm, it would be of utmost importance. There were many vacant homes, both from years of a down-turned economy and from the initial wave of the zombies coming from El Paso. The residents had already figured out that the best way to deal with them was noise reduction and putting up lots of fences, so the knowledge that we had about the infected wasn’t as important as it had been to Jasper’s group.

  What worried me was how quickly the townspeople accepted us with little to no questions. When we asked them about scavengers or marauders, they’d never seen any. I was finally able to impress upon Pedro Hernandez, the town’s mayor, the need for security through our stories of what had happened to us during our journey from Illinois. While there wasn’t much between here and where El Paso had been, there were sure to be groups forming who would eventually begin expanding their search for food and resources.

  The townspeople even accepted Alejandro for what he was. At first, a few of the residents had been distrustful of us because we traveled with someone who looked just like the creatures that had killed so many in their community and we thought we would have to continue moving west. But the local pastor, a man named Emilio, had helped everyone to see past the surface and recognize that he was just a normal person who’d been injured. Now, Alejandro was a treasured part of the community because of his knowledge of basic farming and his uncanny ability to create just about anything out of spare parts. He swore that it wasn’t a skill that he had before the war so we chalked it up to the old saying about necessity being the mother of ingenuity.

  The weather wasn’t nearly as bad down here as the winter that wiped out the north. According to the residents who’d lived there a while, the temperatures weren’t too much worse than what Balmorhea usually experienced. The only out of the ordinary thing they noticed was the prolonged length of the winter season. There was no telling what would happen, but as the temperatures started to rise we were hopeful that it was a sign that the debris was settling out of the clouds and that things would return to normal. We were in theoretical territory here regarding the weather. In fact, one of the theories was that after the nuclear winter, the earth would right itself by super-heating and that would throw us into a nuclear summer. Only time would tell what would actually happen though.

  Until then we had to make do with what we had and pray for good weather. My little group had wisely liberated a livestock feed store of just about every vegetable seed package that it had a couple hundred miles west of Fort Worth. Even though they’d taken some getting used to, I was thankful for the horses that we took from the cannibals’ camp. Without the water and food that they allowed us to carry we wouldn’t have made it very far across the cold, dry west Texas plains.

  Now that we were here and the dark and severe winter had given way to a pseudo-spring, it was time to plant the crops that we hoped would survive and help to provide sustenance for us. The angry clouds full of soot that we’d become accustomed to had been replaced by thin watery ones that obscured the sun’s full light, but the town was scraping the bottom of the barrel for any type of food besides venison from the plentiful deer population of the region and a dwindling selection of canned goods from the grocery store.

  We were fairly certain that the worst of the damage to the soil had been washed away by the recent rains that were no longer poison to the touch. Even without knowing if they’d survive, we had to plant the town’s seeds in order to vary our diets and provide different types of nutrients for our bodies or else we risked getting sick.

  The vehicles in the town still worked since we were far enough away from El Paso to avoid the EMP, but over the course of the year all the gasoline had been siphoned off to help heat people’s homes and the horses had proved invaluable to us once again. Alejandro helped the townsfolk develop makeshift plows to speed up the planting process. His first couple of designs weren’t necessarily failures, but it took a lot of work for little gain. He’d been able to perfect his plow design over the last month in preparation for the spring. What he’d come up with was to remove the blades from lawnmowers and he used shop tools to bend the blades into a U shape. Then, he secured them to a metal frame made from the rear axle of a small car. The wheels were necessary to keep the blades at the right height instead of digging too deep or too shallow. After that, he’d mounted a small platform and bolted a lawn chair to it. Voila! It was an instant plow that could be pulled by two horses and increased our ability to farm.

  I bent forward at the waist to begin the mind-numbing task of pushing dirt back into the seam cut by Alejandro’s plow. I had covered a few more feet of corn kernels when I noticed movement to my right. I whirled towards the motion with my hoe ready to strike out at whatever creature came my way. I felt silly when I realized it was Rebecca picking her way over the field towards me. She carried a thermos in her hand so I knew it was either coffee or soup, both would be welcomed.

  “Hey, Chuck,” she called out when she got within fifty feet of me. We’d developed that little routine to avoid startling people and ending up with someone getting stabbed or shot. “Got some soup here to help you warm up.”

  “Thanks, babe,” I replied and waved her over. I chuckled to myself as I watched her take exaggerated steps over the newly-planted rows of vegetables.

  “How’s Jesse doing?” I asked. We’d chosen to name our baby boy after our deceased friend since without his help we probably would have died in Illinois and many other locations along the way.

  “He’s sleeping. Jordyn is watching him while I came out here to bring you guys some soup.”

  I looked around and muttered, “Son of a bitch. I didn’t even reali
ze that she went inside.” I couldn’t afford to slip up. Vigilance, and a healthy dose of luck, had helped keep us alive so far. Jackson was still hoeing away over at the potato section of the field, but somehow I’d missed Jordyn leaving.

  “It’s alright, Chuck. The town has a solid fence in place now. Besides, we haven’t seen any of the zombies in a couple of months,” she replied with her hands on her hips. It was true, once we decided to stay in Balmorhea, Alejandro and I helped the townspeople develop a solid layer of defense that included fences, shallow pits and tripwires that would signal the approach of anyone towards the town. We even had full-time guards sitting in elevated positions around the town’s perimeter and at the one gate.

  I nodded my head and reached for the thermos of soup. She unscrewed the cup from the top and poured some of the broth into it. I sipped gratefully at the warm chicken stock and felt the warmth grow in my stomach. “Thank you,” I said to Rebecca. “I really needed that. It’s a lot warmer than it used to be, but the wind coming off those mountains is fierce.”

  The town sat just to the north of the Davis Mountains, a small but significant range in the flat west Texas landscape. To make matters worse, when the wind wasn’t blowing off the mountains, it was coming from the plains and smashing against them. The locals said that the mountains helped with the rainfall, but the key for the crops was irrigation from the lake.

  “How do you think the crops are gonna do?” Rebecca asked as she surveyed the field around her.

  “Well, we’re planting vegetables that are supposed to be able to survive cooler weather, so I hope they’ll do alright. But if the weather stays cold like this, they probably won’t produce anything except small, stunted fruit. Jose Serrano says that the weather is about consistent for this time of year, so we’re all optimistic that the winter is over.”