Battlefield Z Omnibus, Vol. 1 [Books 1-9]

by Lowry, Chris

  The woods looked safe to me. Or the same, if not safe.

  If someone was hiding there, the camo they were using was effective. I gave a moment's thought to another militia and recalled that Valdosta was near by and home to a military base.

  "I don't see anything," I returned to the car after walking around and watering the ground past the trunk. I really hoped no one shot me while my pants were unzipped. I mean give a guy a little bit of dignity.

  Besides, I had already been shot in the head. Technically it was a deep graze, stitched up now with Frankenstein stitches courtesy of Anna who I learned after got all of her medical training from binge watching Scrubs on Netflix. But a bullet wound along the skull is still being shot in the head no matter how you want to get technical about it, so I was going to wear that particular badge of honor with distinction.

  I climbed back in the car.

  "Well?"

  "Did you see any other roads back there?"

  The last one I recalled was thirty or forty miles ago and it was pointed southwest. If we turned around now we'd lose daylight, lose gas and lose miles, and that thought alone made me anxious. I was trying to get to Arkansas to reach my kids, and going backwards was not in my plan. A sixteen-hour drive had already taken five days, mixed with walking, running and fighting with militia and religious groups. I wasn't ready to add turning back to find another route to the list.

  "It's probably safer to go back."

  A Z lumbered out of the woods and began to slip and slide up the side of the road toward the car. A second followed from the tree line and lumbered our direction.

  "I don't think anywhere is safe anymore," said Harriet.

  Brian cranked up the car and dropped it in gear.

  "We're going to have to change rides soon," he said as he pulled back onto the road and sent up a twirling whirlwind of leaves in our wake.

  I nodded as we kept going forward and wondered what exactly we were driving ourselves into.

  CHAPTER TWO

  "Are you sure?" Brian stared at the scuffed toes of his boots. We were standing outside the moat, a literal twelve-foot-wide creek that circled a Queen Anne style home in the middle of a pasture. The house had two large sheds between it and what he hoped was a large stocked pond, so it was surrounded by water on all sides. The long winding drive was paved, but crossed over a deep culvert onto the island. As far as forts went, he could do worse.

  The sheds were stocked with food, some from the previous owner, and the rest from a raid we made into the neighboring towns, which set me back three more days. It did give them enough provisions for months, and with the protection of the moat, it was as safe a place as could be found in this new Z infested world.

  Brian of course wanted me to stay.

  "I've got to know," I said and checked my pistol. We had only known each other less than a week, but war makes strange bonds, and strong bonds at that. We had been through a couple of battles together, and that was making the goodbye harder than it had to be.

  If I didn't need to keep going to Arkansas I would have stayed.

  He still had plenty to do.

  "Board up the windows," I told him. "I'd see if I could fix the motor in the shed so in case you get overrun by the front, you have a way to bolt across the pond."

  "Lake."

  We had this debate before, and neither of us had Google to ask about the difference between a pond and a lake. My experience with lakes were the reservoirs built by the Corp of Engineers that stretched for miles and created a couple of hundred miles of shoreline. Brian was from Florida so a lake was any body of water big enough to hold a gator or three and a pond was what held storm runoff. It was a fun little argument over a couple of room temperature beers he found in a cabinet.

  "Lond? Pake?" I ventured and he gave me a grin.

  "Pake," he said. "I like that. That's what we'll call it."

  He held out his hand and we shook.

  "If you see something coming this way, pull the truck across the road on this side of the bridge and blow all four tires," I kept going on the defense.

  "We've got it," he said. "Are you going to try to make it back this way?"

  I studied the blue sky full of puffy clouds strung out like wisps of cotton candy toward the horizon.

  "I don't know."

  "Damn, you could at least lie a little."

  I nodded.

  "Once I get my oldest two I have to go find my third," I explained.

  My youngest daughter by the second wife was missing somewhere on the East Coast. Or Missouri. Her mother and stepfather had packed up and disappeared into a wave of refugees heading toward a camp in South Carolina per the government's instructions. I had no way of knowing if they made it out of Florida or were trapped in Savannah, or in a camp that was still there or didn't exist.

  There was no way to communicate, and no want to get information now. I didn't want to think of it as hopeless, because that was all I really had. Hope.

  Hope to make it. Hope to learn something. Hope to find them. Hope to know what to do once I did.

  I'd ask for rumors from travelers if we ran across any, but so we'd only rescued a group of women accused of being witches, and a trio from a house who died on our escape from Florida. The rest of our encounters had been with bandits. That was the nice word I used for the military turned militia who were robbing and pillaging the countryside, setting up miniature little kingdoms. I didn't often use nice words when referring to them.

  "Ready?" I asked Anna.

  The thin brunette we had rescued from being burned at the stake as a witch had opted to come with me. Harriet had blamed her for her daughter's abduction by religious fanatics and there was some residual resentment brewing I suspected. She was a willowy five six, with pretty brown eyes and a keen mind. To be honest, even though I could move faster I didn't mind the company. I wasn't sure what I would find in Arkansas, but if it was bad news, it might be better for me to have someone around.

  She climbed behind the wheel of a gray car with a full tank of gas we found in town and started it up. I watched Brian, Peg, Harriet and Hannah in the side mirror until we turned the final bend in the driveway and pulled out onto the two lane blacktop headed west.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Anna drove at a steady twenty-five miles per hour which felt molasses slow but did a great job at conserving our gas. We cut across the state of Georgia in a zigzag pattern avoiding Quitman and bypassing Albany to the South.

  We stopped for a lunch of canned tuna and peaches and refilled water containers from a fountain that still worked at a city park in a one stoplight town. I checked the gas station there for a printed map, but there wasn't one to be found. We scored a compass that I stuck to the dashboard and a couple of boxes of stale candy bars I shoved into our backpack.

  Anna didn't say anything while driving, and I kept the rifle in my lap and ready. We drove past lumbering Z on the side of the road, and could see them in pastures or cleared areas as we drove by. They would stop what they were doing and look up at the car, shift direction and start lumbering after us.

  We didn't talk about what she did before, or what I did. We didn't speak of the cult I had rescued her from, or what I planned to do once I found my children. She just smirked a little as she drove, as if we were some kind of odd couple on a roadtrip vacation and she knew the secret jokes I was about to tell.

  I was glad for the silence. It had been a week since I'd been shot in the head and the headaches had finally disappeared. Technically I hadn't been so much shot in the head as a bullet that was aimed at my noggin glanced off the bone and grazed my skull. It burrowed a shallow groove in the bone, bled a lot and left me with a Frankenstein looking scar giving me a part in my hairline where hair would never grow. It was still an ugly red pucker wound, but the stars that danced in my vision had gone, and the pain had finally subsided.

  The silence was a welcome respite.

  It got old after four hours. We drove without mu
sic, without talking, just the thoughts in our heads and mine kept coming back to Arkansas and South Carolina. I was trying to make plans, A-Z full of what if scenarios and if then outcomes, and my head was starting to hurt from the wheels turning inside of it. I wished I would have kept one of the beers we had round and vowed to grab a sixer as soon as we found another store.

  “How are we on gas?” I asked Anna.

  She flicked a gaze down to the gauge.

  “Half a tank.”

  I glanced at the watch on my wrist. The hour hand was edging toward five o'clock. Back before the Z I would have just kept driving in the dark, and even at twenty-five miles an hour it might not be that dangerous to just keep going. But another four or five hours of driving would put us on the side of the road out of gas around midnight and I didn't want to hunt for a new ride in the dark.

  I also didn't want our headlights to be a beacon advertising our presence to every bandit, marauder and Z we passed. I fought down the anxiety that bubbled up on how much time I was losing and reminded myself it had been five weeks since Z Day one, and getting myself killed in the dark wouldn't help anyone.

  “We should look for a place to stay in the next town we come to,” I told her. “Hole up for the night.”

  She didn't say anything which I took to be a yes, and that lifted some of the pounding in my head. I didn't realize how much I wanted her input.

  The next town was only five miles up the road and we stopped next to a Welcome to Cuthbert sign, blue letters painted onto a white backdrop. The population was printed out at 8,706 but someone had scratched through it and painted the number one in precise black strokes.

  “Think he's still here?” Anna asked.

  “Could be a her.”

  “I don't think a woman would fix the population sign,” she said.

  I nodded and gripped the rifle tighter as we heard a moan echo on the wind. I didn't see Z but that didn't mean they weren't there.

  I could see a couple of churches that bracketed the road ahead, and houses on either side closer to us. Further up the road what looked like a small shopping strip made up the downtown area.

  “We can explore that tomorrow,” I told her. “Pick a house.”

  I watched her finger twitch as she pointed first to one, then the other and her lips moved as she whispered the “eeny meeny tiger toe” song. It reminded me of something that my youngest did and a pang seized my heart and I almost insisted we keep driving. Stopping was a waste of time, and the road ahead couldn't be worse than the one we just drove through. We could stop and find gas instead of shelter, and keep rolling.

  I quelched the thought, buttoned down the feelings though. I couldn't recall exactly where Fort Benning was, but knew it was north of us and east and we had to be careful to stay far away from it. I didn't trust the military, not yet.

  Anna settled on the white frame house to the right, and I gave her an encouraging smile because it's the one I would have picked. I could see a twelve-foot fence that looked like a dog kennel behind it and the church next door was a simple wooden clapboard construction as opposed to the yellow stone monstrosity across the street.

  We drove closer and I hid a chuckle.

  Anna had picked the First Baptist house and not the Second Baptist directly across the highway. The small house must have been the parsonage. We'd still check the larger red brick home beside the larger church for supplies before we left, but the tiny cottage would do nicely for the two of us, if it was safe.

  She rolled into the driveway and shut off the car.

  “Stay here,” I told her and climbed out.

  “Screw that,” she said and opened her door. She grabbed the shotgun from the seat beside her and followed me to the front door.

  “Then stay back,” I warned her and knocked on the door with four loud raps. I tried the knob, twisted it open and stepped to one side with the rifle ready for anything that popped out.

  Nothing did.

  “You want to stay here or go first,” I smirked at her.

  She smirked right back and advanced on the door, shotgun at the ready.

  “Anna,” I stopped her.

  “I'm going first,” she insisted.

  “And I'm going to let you,” I cradled the rifle and extracted the sawed off from her hands to rack a shell into the chamber before passing it back to her.

  She grunted.

  “Was that a thank you?”

  She grunted again.

  “You're welcome.”

  I put a hand on her shoulder and followed her into the house. The living room was dark, empty so I held her up and we listened. The house felt abandoned, a fine layer of dust over everything. There were no ticks and hums from electricity, nothing to make us feel like there was another presence there.

  “Let's clear it,” I said to her and we proceeded from room to room.

  The house was empty.

  We raided the kitchen and found some home canned veggies and jams, plus a jackpot of tins of SPAM under one of the cabinets. There must have been thirty cans stacked in neat little rows. I set four aside and rummaged a pillow case off the bed to fill up with the rest.

  We put the canned mason jars and Spam by the front door to load into the car, then Anna helped me haul the bedding out into the living room, and tip over a cabinet to block the back door and set one beside the front door to do the same once we were settled.

  There was no running water, so she lifted the back of the toilet lid and refilled our water bottles with a couple of gallons she could pull from there. It had been sitting for weeks and we'd have to boil it, but at least we had water to drink.

  I set up the hiker's stove in the living room on the coffee table and hung blankets across the windows to block any light we might make, and our prep for the night was done.

  We had made good time and there was still daylight outside.

  “Let's move the car around back,” I told her. “I don't want to attract any attention.”

  “From the one person left?” she quirked up one side of her mouth. It was a cute gesture, made even more so by the sparkle in her eyes.

  She grabbed two pillowcases of food and hauled them into the backseat, then drove the car around back while I followed with the rifle.

  “That church looks nice,” she pointed as she got out.

  I followed her line of sight but couldn't be sure if she meant the simple wooden building beside us or the solid looking structure across the highway.

  “Would you mind if I prayed?” she asked.

  “You can't do that out here?”

  “I can,” she said. “I do. But I like to pray in church too. It makes me feel closer to God.”

  “Even after all this?”

  I motioned around, but it was a poor choice of timing. Right now, the sun was slanting westward and bathing everything in a soft golden glow. The wind filtered a grass scented breeze across us, and everything looked like a picture on a postcard. All this, if it was just this moment, would be perfect.

  I thought for a moment that if I could be happy here, if I could be happy not knowing, that this would be a good place to ride out the end of the world.

  “Especially after all this,” she motioned too, and I could see she was grateful. Maybe for just the moment, but that's all we really get, moments. Once the past has happened, it's done, and the future now was so uncertain it was a joke. We had the now, we had this exact time and it was beautiful. There was food to eat and a safe place to sleep and right now, no one trying to kill us. I guess even I could be grateful for all of that.

  “Before you pray, we need to do something.”

  She looked at me then with wariness in her eyes, something that spoke of her past more than I could know. Maybe she would choose to tell me one day, maybe she would bury it deep and let it fester into a rage much like my own, something she could tap into and release upon the world in destructive fits that left her scarred but unbent. In that moment, her eyes looked like my own when I sta
rted at them in the mirror, the reflection cast back broken.

  I almost asked about it.

  In a past life before the Z I might have. But now, she was as cracked on the inside as I was. I had been broken long before the Z apocalypse, before the dead came back to life. I knew it as much a part of my make up as the receding hairline and the scar over my right eye from an encounter with the sharp end of a coffee table when I was three and fell off the bed.

  Broken. Bent. It didn't matter what you called it, and I hadn't spent any time in a psychologist's chair to understand it. I just knew I had it, and looking at her then I knew she did too.

  “We need to add to our weapons,” I explained and watched the wariness in her eyes recede.

  I lifted the trunk and grabbed metal wire, wire cutters, duct tape and machetes from a supply run with Brian before we left them, along with a pipe cutter from a hardware store. I led Anna to the dog run and clipped the fencing away from two poles, then cut them at the base.

  “Stick the machete in the end,” I instructed showing her how with the first pole so she could work on the second. We wrapped and secured the machete tight with the metal wire and duct tape, then wrapped a couple of grips near the middle and end to create “pikes.” They were Brian's brainchild, and I stole his idea because it was so good.

  Noise attracted more Z, and sometimes more than Z so if we had to stop a few, there really wasn't anything better than the pike.

  The poles were ten feet instead of the twelve I thought, but it kept the Z far enough away that the twenty-four-inch loss didn't matter. The machete on the end were good for slicing and stabbing, and the blunt end of the pike could serve as a miniature battering ram.

  Anna would have to practice on the balance of the pole because it was awkward until she got used to it, but she held it lightly in her hands as she swung it through a couple of arcs.

  “Use these first,” I told her. “Keep the Z at bay, and make sure you have a way out. This is an escape tool. We always want to escape.”