“What’s wrong with Buddy?” Gwen asked the question that was on all their minds.
“I don’t know,” admitted Julie.
“I don’t think he was trying to kill me,” Mickey said. “I mean, I think he was trying to kill whoever’s neck he thought he had his hands wrapped around, but…”
“It’s okay,” Gwen said. “You don’t have to make excuses for him. Let me ask you guys this. Does anyone have any idea where he’s taking us?”
“North,” Mickey said.
“North. Great.” Gwen exhaled. “Where? To the fucking North Pole?”
“If Buddy says there’s a good place north of here,” Julie said, “then I believe him.”
“Okay,” Gwen said. “But think of this. Panas and Biden and Sal went with Buddy, right? I mean, Larry too, but he came back when they went farther. Then Buddy comes back alone—”
“What are you implying?”
“Yeah,” Mickey said. “Buddy said Sal didn’t make it.”
“Exactly. The man who tried to strangle you said Sal didn’t make it. What the hell does that mean?”
“Panas and Biden are waiting for us,” offered Mickey weakly.
“Says Buddy.”
“Gwen, Buddy is our friend.”
“Friends don’t try and kill one another,” she said and Julie looked away, wondering if Gwen had Bobby and Harris in mind.
“Look,” Mickey said. “Something’s definitely up with Buddy. But there’s four of us, so even if—”
“What, you think you can protect us if Buddy… What about yourself?”
He didn’t say anything.
“That was mean, Gwen,” Julie spoke slowly.
“You’re right. I’m sorry. I’m just worried. We’re not in Eden anymore. We’re out here. With them.” She nodded to the zombie’s buried in the ground.
“Hey, Gwen,” Julie asked. “You still have that hammer?”
“Yeah, why?”
“Let me see it?”
She retrieved the hammer she carried and handed it over.
“What are you going to do with that?” Mickey asked Julie.
She nodded at the zombies sticking out of the earth. They stared at her, Gwen, and Mickey and their eyes did not waver.
“Really?” Mickey asked.
“Yeah. We can’t just leave them there, can we?”
“Why not?”
“Someone else might come by,” Julie said. “And I don’t want these things here when my baby…”
“We’re not bringing your baby back here, that’s for sure.”
“Give me that.” Gwen grabbed the hammer and crossed to the zombie heads. She brought the hammer up and down onto the skull of the closest one, killing it with one blow.
“Damn.” Mickey winced.
She moved to the next and brained it. The hammer cracked on the skull of the third. It was only stunned and its eyes blinked several times before Gwen hammered it a second, third, and fourth time. She finished off the others and cleaned her hammer off in the snow.
“There.”
Throughout his stay in Eden, Bear had steadily been losing weight, almost all of it fat. He found he could move faster for longer distances these days than ever before. When he reached the spot where Buddy crouched down he was breathing heavily but he was not out of breath.
He shook his head when he saw what awaited them.
Someone had strapped a zombie to a tree. They had gone to the trouble of gouging its eyes out and sewing its mouth shut.
That’s some fucked up shit
“It sure is,” Buddy remarked and the zombie turned its head in their direction.
Bear looked at him.
The tracks took an extreme turn around a corner ahead. Neither Bear nor Buddy could see what lay around it. Whatever it was, Buddy thought, looking at the zombie tied to the tree, it couldn’t be good.
He held up a finger and signaled Bear that he would go on ahead, crawling up the rise amidst the trees for a better view. Bear nodded and squatted where he was on the side of the tracks. Glocks in his hands he waited, watching Buddy crawl off on his hands and knees, watching the eyeless zombie turn its head as far as its neck allowed it, trying to follow Buddy’s progress. Bear thought about the undead buried up to their necks back down the tracks. He wondered what any of it meant.
Buddy laid flat and still and waved Bear over. Bear crouch-walked over to the other man and covered the last yards on his stomach, snow and seed cones hidden in the snow crunching under him.
Buddy pointed and spoke very quietly: “There they are.”
Bear looked. The first thing he saw was hundreds of zombies standing in place beyond the trees and hill he and Buddy hid on. They were clumped into two groups. One group gathered around the foot of a wooden cross that had been driven into the ground. The other group stood around a wooden wall twenty feet high that bridged a gap between cement block walls of similar height.
“Shit.”
There was a man on the wall and a man on the cross. Bear didn’t need Buddy’s binoculars to see either. The man on the wall was decked out in what looked like football shoulder pads and had sections of rubber tire strapped to his upper arms and thighs. Even at this distance—and the wall was set back several hundred yards from the tracks and the river—Bear could see the man’s hair was long and pulled into a ponytail. The guy had some kind of combat shotgun in his hands but didn’t look too concerned, staring down into the mass of zombies gathered below his wooden gate.
“That guy’s alive,” Buddy said.
Bear knew he wasn’t talking about the man on the wall.
Indeed, the man on the cross was alive. There were other crosses, four in total, with men crucified on them, but the zombies ignored these crosses and gathered all around the one. That was how Buddy knew the man attached to it was alive. Dead human bodies didn’t attract zombies.
“They nailed him to it. Christ.” Buddy offered Bear his binoculars but he declined.
“Does he look like he’s in pain?” Bear asked.
“He looks out of it. His head kind of lolls from side to side. Christ. What kind of people…” He shook his head. He knew the type of people. He’d dealt with their kind in Eden and elsewhere.
Our type of people, jig…
“Shut up,” Buddy muttered.
“What’s that?”
“No, nothing.”
“How many zombies do you figure?” Bear looked them over and estimated close to a thousand.
“I don’t know. Enough I don’t want to mess with them head on.”
“Yeah. So what are we going to do?”
“Looks like they’ve got some kind of camp or something behind that wall. Hard to tell. And I don’t really feel like changing positions and going for a better look. I’m going to assume they’re hostile. You with me on that, right?”
“Bet,” Bear agreed.
“Okay. We could double back a ways and try to circle around the whole camp there, behind it.”
“That’ll bring us into whatever cities or towns are up that way,” Bear said. “And we don’t know how many zombies they’ve got milling around…”
“Right. If we cross here we could do it at night. None of those zombies are anywhere near the tracks. If we’re quiet, we could probably just walk right by them in the dark.”
“If there’s no moon whoever they have on the wall won’t see us. I don’t remember what kind of moon we’re in for tonight.”
“Or, and hear me out on this one,” Buddy said. “If we had a distraction, we could walk right past now.”
“That’d have to be one major distraction.”
“Yeah.”
“Talk to me,” Bear said. “What do you have in mind?”
Buddy patted the M72 on Bear’s back and Bear said, “Mmmm.”
They crouched there, looking over the hundreds of zombies to the man on the wall. Bear finally took Buddy’s binoculars and scanned the barricade. He could see smoke rising past
it and assumed there were fires going inside for cooking or warmth, which meant there were people, perhaps many of them, beyond that wall. The man on the wall looked unwashed and bored. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other.
The man on the cross was calling out but Bear couldn’t hear him from this distance. All he could see was the man’s mouth moving. They had him tied nearly naked, his hands frozen into blue claws. Railroad spikes were driven through his forearms, nailing him to a plank of wood that was secured to a telephone pole. The man’s lower legs were duct taped to the pole.
Bear handed the binoculars to Buddy and slipped off the M72.
“You know how to handle this thing?”
“I think I can figure it out.”
“I’ll go back, get the others.”
“Grab my stuff, alright? I’m going to crawl a little closer and wait. When I see you over by the tracks, I’m going to put this rocket right through that gate. I’ll catch up with you guys. Don’t wait for me.”
“We won’t. Good luck.”
“Thanks.”
Bear disappeared and Buddy sat with his back against a pine tree, shielded by the evergreen. Funny, he thought, once this tree would have been filled with all sorts of birds. Who was he kidding. It was winter. The birds would have been down in Florida or some shit anyway.
He unsheathed and affixed his bayonet to the AK. He didn’t intend to get close enough to go at it hand-to-hand with any zombies or anyone from the camp, but… He leaned the rifle against the tree.
He’s gonna kill all them people in that camp.
He doesn’t have a choice.
Buddy strapped the M72 across his back and got onto his stomach, crawling forward, staying well on the hill. He figured if he kept low he could probably walk to where he wanted but decided not to take the chance. He thought he was making a lot of noise as he crawled ahead, but knew he was far enough away from the zombies and the gate that he couldn’t be heard.
When he got where he wanted he stopped and lay flat, craning his neck. The first of the zombies were to his immediate left, standing around, all intent on the man on the cross. He could make out this man and the man on the wall much clearer now.
Buddy pulled the M72 off and rolled onto his back. He removed the carrier sling from the LAW rocket and extended the inner tube. The tube telescoped towards the rear, aligning the detent lever with the outer tube’s trigger assembly. The disposable rocket launcher was armed.
After a few minutes Buddy rolled over onto his side, where he could keep an eye on the zombies outside the wall and the tracks off in the distance.
What are you thinking, jig? You know they left you here.
No, they didn’t. They wouldn’t leave me.
I won’t leave you either, heh-heh-heh…
Buddy forced himself to wait. Some time later he spotted four figures in the distance moving along the tracks. He got up on one knee and brought the LAW to his shoulder. The man on the wall spotted Mickey, Gwen, Julie, and Bear on the tracks, turned, and yelled out to people unseen on the other side of the barrier. Buddy knew he only had one shot so he aimed carefully through the rear peep sight, lining it up with the front reticle. The tube rested on his shoulder and in his left hand.
When he fired the man on the wall still yelled wildly down to those below. The 66mm rocket that shot out of the LAW, with a blast much like a shotgun’s, was a HEAT round designed to penetrate light armor. The rocket zipped over the zombies’ heads and punched through the wooden wall, detonating on impact. The entire wooden structure exploded in a shower of splinters and smoke. A couple dozen zombies closest to the blast—many had been pressed against the wall—were obliterated and flung aside like so many rag dolls.
The man on the wall was lifted off his feet and tossed backwards into the unseen camp. Buddy wasn’t sure if the blast had killed the guy or not. He was just glad he’d made the shot. He crouched there on his knee with smoke trailing from the ends of the spent launcher and watched the scene unfold below.
There was gunfire and screams as the zombies marched through the shards of wood that had once held them back. Buddy still couldn’t see into the camp but he could imagine the chaos unleashed within. He tossed the used launcher aside and ran back in the direction he’d come. The gunfire behind him intensified. He wondered how many men, women, and children were in the camp and if they’d survive the onslaught.
He reached his AK-47, scooped it up, and tore ass down the hill. There was no sight of Bear or the others on the tracks so he trusted they’d crossed. He broke from the trees and hustled across open ground, looking over his right shoulder once, satisfied that the zombies—hell bent on the camp and those within—had no idea he sprinted past them a few hundred yards away.
Part of him wanted to wait, concealed around the bend in the tracks, to watch and listen, to hear when the gunfire abated and to know who had won the fight. Part of him considered the fate of the man on the cross and he thought briefly of returning to put the man out of his misery. Instead he reached the tracks and slowed to a walk, the scene behind him disappearing as he followed the railroad, spying the prints of Bear and Buddy and Gwen and Julie in the snow.
“Do we have to spend another night outside?” Gwen asked as they marched through the snow. “It’s cold.” When Bear and Mickey looked at her she nodded towards Julie.
“She’s right,” Mickey said. “It’s cold as a bitch. Tonight’s gonna be colder than a witch’s tit.”
Bear nodded.
It was somewhere between midday and the time when the sun would go down.
“Julie,” Bear asked. “How you feeling?”
She smiled, breathed out a plume of air and gave a gloved thumbs up.
Bear whistled and that got Buddy’s attention. He stopped up ahead and waited for the other four to catch up to him.
Buddy had noticed he’d been spending more time on point lately. He figured it was some mix of his knowing where they were going and the others maybe being wary of him, after he’d almost strangled Mickey. He really felt bad about that. It was inexcusable.
He’d been walking point most of the day and thought back, wondering if they’d crossed paths with any zombies and if he’d had to kill any of them. He couldn’t remember. He looked down at the hatchet in his gloved hand and noted the dried blood on its blade but couldn’t discern how fresh or stale it was. Whatever.
Shit was getting harder to keep in check. Buddy had been hearing the voices more. They’d come and go. Sometimes he’d turn around and look towards the others thinking it was them. They were always back there, trudging along behind him, following, but not speaking. It scared him there were times he forgot why he was out here way ahead of the others.
The way they grouped around Julie, protecting her and the baby. From him? The thought didn’t sit well. But, at times like this, he could understand and accepted it. And he vowed to kill anything in their path that threatened Harris’ woman and child. Anything.
Buddy stood and waited for the others to catch up, well aware that the person at the head of the parade was either leading the parade or being pushed out.
“What’s up?” he asked when they reached him.
“Let’s find someplace we can hole up in for tonight,” Bear said, motioning his head towards Julie.
“If you guys are doing this for me—” Julie started but Mickey cut her off.
“I haven’t been able to feel my toes since breakfast. Okay?”
She looked from Mickey to Bear then to Gwen and shook her head, but seemed resigned to whatever they had in mind.
Buddy nodded and started off back ahead. Bear plodded along next to him.
Bear was a man of few words and Buddy really didn’t have much to say. While Mickey, Gwen, and Julie discussed names for the baby the two men in the front trudged along stoically.
Crusade (Eden Book 2) Page 7
