by Lowry, Chris
If I had time, I would have led them around the track, tried to bunch them up, like the Boy did, and buy the kids space to run to the fence. Save my bullets for the run from the gate to the fence.
I should have planned better.
A soldier perched in the lowest corner of the far set of bleachers, aimed and fired. A bullet plowed into a Z that stepped beside me.
I smacked its skull in with the grip of the shotgun.
“Not him!” screamed the General.
I could see him behind the fence by the bleachers on the other side. He was practically standing up in his wheelchair, using his arms to lift and shake and shout.
He dropped and pointed to the kids.
The soldier nodded and aimed.
I screamed.
He sent a bullet into the ground beside the lump closest to him. It didn’t move.
“Bem! Boy!”
I ran, shouldered down the Z that got in my way, using the shotgun like a club. Gore splashed across me, over me.
A second bullet hit the lump and sent up a geyser of blood.
I screamed again and stopped running, aimed with the gun and pulled the trigger.
Nothing happened.
The works were gummed up with Z goo.
He shot into the kid again.
My kid.
I flipped the shotgun to grip it by the slippery barrel and let the rage bubble over.
He shot the second mound of clothes on the ground.
I bashed.
I smashed.
I lunged and swung. Gore drenched my arms, my hands, drenched my shirt, my pants.
There was no way to tell where Z ended and I began.
All I could see was red.
I ran past the kids, bullied, bashed and crushed my way through the herd. They ignored me.
The Z turned toward the gunfire, and cheering soldiers. The herd shifted toward them. The dead walked past me.
I went with them.
The soldiers couldn’t tell us apart.
Neither could the emissaries lined up on the other side.
Twenty yards away, they either didn’t see the shotgun, or couldn’t make it out.
The soldiers started shooting Z.
Fifteen shotgun’s blasting at the same time stopped them.
“Don’t do that,” Warren called across the field.
“We can get more,” the General yelled back.
“I think you’ve proven your point,” Warren responded. “And broke one of my laws.”
“They were dead anyway. I just helped them along.”
I moved through the Z, closer to the fence. I didn’t know if the shotgun would work, would shoot, but I could climb. I could reach the one who killed my kids and rip him apart.
“The law is the law,” screamed Warren.
“No! I am the law. Do it.”
The soldiers lifted their rifles and fired.
Three holes opened in Warren’s face, crimson blood washing across his immaculate white suit. He fell backwards into the bleachers.
His emissaries fired back.
It was no contest. Shotguns fired across thirty yards by emotional men against four or five rifles held by calm trained hands.
Five of the guards dropped before the rest stopped shooting. Two more fell before the smoke cleared and the rest held up their hands in surrender.
I was close now.
Under the soldier. The child killer.
I was going to bite his throat out and feel his blood gush in my teeth. I let the rage wash up again, gripped the fence and stuck my toe in a hole to launch up.
Two Z grabbed me by the arms and held me fast.
They didn’t moan.
They looked at me.
Brown eyes and hazel. My eyes and their mother’s.
Peering from a mask of goo and gore.
I stepped down, lowered my head.
“Round them up,” ordered the General.
He pointed his soldiers toward the emissaries.
“What about the corpses?” said one of the shooters.
He aimed into the Z and fired. A body dropped. Then another.
“I like what they were doing here,” the General grinned. “Go find out where they were keeping them and get them put back. Just leave them here for now.”
A soldier ran off to do his bidding.
The General watched the Z, studied them. I know he was looking for me. He glared at the two bodies in the center of the field, searched for mine.
But there were thirty to go through.
I shuffled around with the Z, both kids close to me, playing the part.
He couldn’t decide if I was one of the dead and he couldn’t find out until he cleared out the rest.
I thought he was going to order them to shoot then.
I would have.
I think.
But he didn’t.
He rolled away with his men, planning to come back and search later. If he was going to take over Vicksburg, he had more important things to worry about than which body was mine.
At least that’s what I think he was thinking.
Either way, he left.
It was just me and my kids.
Still alive in a herd of Z.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
We couldn’t talk. Talking would attract the Z. The Boy tried talking with his eyes. While that worked great when telling jokes, it wasn’t an effective form of communication to get us out.
The soldiers guarded the emissaries while they made them clean up the other set of bleachers.
That involved throwing the dead bodies down onto the football field, which made the Z herd and feast.
It moved us closer to the gate where the Z were let inside. The gate that was still open.
I stutter stepped to it, shuffling and dragging a foot.
I had a theory the Z responded to noise, to sight or a form of sight, and rhythm. The kids picked up on it and moved with me.
Step. Drag. Shuffle. Shuffle. Step. Drag.
Maybe I was being too cautious.
The Z were preoccupied with fresh dead meat. They weren’t paying attention to us.
The soldiers were watching the guards. They weren’t watching us.
We disappeared into the shadows under the bleachers that led into a blockhouse locker room.
In the dim interior, I stopped and pulled both kids close to me.
They wrapped their arms around me and squeezed, and I wasn’t sure if we would ever let go.
“Dad,” the Boy whispered. “You stink.”
We giggled quietly.
It was still too loud.
A Z limped out of the darkness, moaning, reaching for us.
I smashed it with the shotgun.
A couple outside looked up from eating, gristle and blood dripping from their rotting teeth. They turned and began to lurch inside.
Their movement attracted others.
The herd was coming back.
I grabbed each of their hands in mine and pulled them after me. We had to find a way out.
I tried to picture it in my head. We had a locker room just like it at my high school. Under the bleachers, one for each team. Rows of metal lockers, wooden benches bolted to the floor. Cinderblock walls with holes knocked out every four feet to let in natural light through a simple grate window.
We ran from one pool of light to the next as the sounds of moans increased around us.
There would either be a door in the middle of the building leading out, or one at the end of the building leading to a long fenced in walkway.
They were constructed this way in the south because of team rivalries. People take high school football seriously in small towns, and if a visiting team wins against the home team, it can cause skirmishes.
We even had a riot break out at my high school after a game when the visiting team lost, and got in some cheap hits at the game buzzer.
A couple of guys waited around and tossed rocks at the team as they lef
t the locker room. Then beer bottles. Then words.
The words were worse and led to the fights, which evolved into fights between the fans in the parking lot.
The police were called.
No one was arrested.
No tear gas used, no nightstick beat downs.
But after that, they installed a fence that covered the walkway for the opposing team to reach the parking lot.
I figured it was that kind of locker room when we reached the middle of the wall and found more metal lockers instead of a door.
We kept running.
I felt sticky fingers brush against my arms and lashed out with the shotgun. It whacked something that moaned.
Z.
I jerked my arm to bring the kids in closer and we ran to the end of the building.
There was the door.
It wasn’t locked.
I inched it open to peek out.
“Run,” the Boy shouted.
I glanced back over my shoulder at the light that spilled through the open doorway. We were surrounded by the dead in the room. A thick wall of zombies crashing in on us.
I jerked Bem through, then the Boy, lashing out with the shotgun, smashing and crashing against outstretched arms, hands, skulls.
Then I was through the door and yanked it closed. An arm shoved through, blocking the way.
I slammed the door over and over, blood and meat leaking down the edge.
But I couldn’t break the bone. The arm wedged it open, and Z fingers gripped it, trying to pry the knob from my hand.
“Go!” I snuffed. “Go!”
The sidewalk was five feet wide. It had fence on either side that ran to the parking lot.
Riots weren’t limited to just my town, and football rivalry made tempers flare.
For a game.
It was stupid.
Especially now, considering the Z.
They ran to the end of the fence and the gate that sealed the entrance. It was locked with a zip tie through the latch.
“Locked!”
I glanced around.
We were exposed in here. If any soldiers heard us, and came to investigate, we were fish in a barrel.
Then I saw a gap at the top of the gate.
I whistled.
But Bem was already climbing. That girl. Scooping dead Zombie guts and hiding in the corpse.
Changing places with zombies when the herd crowded around them.
All after Zach tried to do whatever he tried to do.
And now hopping the fence before I could tell her to.
The Boy followed.
The Z ripped the door out of my hands and I sprinted down the walkway. I hit the fence and scrambled up and over, landing hard on the other side.
We didn’t have time to catch our breaths though. The Z were loud.
It would draw attention to see what was agitating them.
We needed to move and I needed to get our bearings and get us out of here.
The Z hit the fence, shoved their arms through.
I pushed the kids in front of me and we raced across the parking lot.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The streets all looked the same. Houses packed in with trailers, each of them home to someone. Maybe a family. Maybe like mine.
There was confusion in the street. People milled around, drawn out by the gunfire, maybe by some of the emissaries as they escaped from the soldiers.
I stopped the kids on the edge of a house and looked around.
“Running is going to draw attention,” I said.
“Where we going?”
The Boy glared.
I knew it wasn’t directed at me.
“That was good thinking you two, back there in the field. How did you know the smell would stop them Bem?”
She sniffed.
“I didn’t. I was just trying something out.”
I brushed a gore strained crusty strand of hair back from her beautiful tiny face.
“Trying works. That’s what we do. We keep thinking, and we keep trying, and we make it work.”
The Boy nodded.
“I thought you were going to kill them all.”
“I got a lot of the Z.”
“Not the zombies.”
He meant the soldiers.
I would have gotten more than one. Maybe not all.
Then I would have been shot.
“You saved me too,” I told them. “If I’d gone after the soldiers, they would have shot me in the head. We look like Z, and we’d go down like them too.”
Someone screamed.
A woman walked around the edge of the building and just as I said we looked like Z, she saw us.
Timing is a bitch sometimes.
She screamed and ran.
“Zombies!”
“That decides it,” I said and led the kids in the other direction.
We should have turned the Z loose from the football field. We could have used that distraction.
We ran up the street, and turned a corner when I heard the growl of an engine approaching the opposite way. It sounded like a Bobcat tractor.
I dragged the kids into a narrow space between a house and a trailer and we crouched down, waited.
The General drove past leading a platoon of his men.
I had to admit, he looked damn scary in that contraption.
But he thought I was dead.
I wasn’t about to change his mind. Let him find out when they searched the bodies in the football field.
“I have an idea,” the Boy whispered in my ear. “Follow me.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
He led us under the trailer and out of the other side to the back yard. They were turned into what would soon be gardens too.
Warren had a good plan. I wondered if the General would keep it.
I could put some states between us, let the man chew on his obsession and hope we never ran into each other again.
That was my plan.
The Boy kept us moving over the fences, past three houses, three trailers and to a side street.
“Do you know where this goes?”
He pointed to a wooden sign next to the road. It was a brown parks sign, the kind with the name of the park carved into it in a throwback to historical significance. They didn’t last as long as the metal signs with white words stenciled on them, but the wear of the weather made a nice sheen to the wood.
“It shouldn’t be far.”
We jogged along the side of the road headed for the park. Jogging was an instant giveaway that we weren’t Z if anyone saw us. And all we had was a gory shotgun with a busted stock to stop them if they did.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The Boy hit the next corner too fast and slid in the muck. Bem grabbed him to help him up and two massive hands reached out and jerked them both around the corner.
I had fallen behind, dizzy from the blow to my head, from the fight, from the flight and the adrenal dump in my system.
Now that it was slowing up, the stress was making me slow.
And tired.
I saw them jerked away and screamed.
Gloved hands, so they weren’t Z.
But running around the corner would put me out in the open.
Then she screamed.
My little girl screamed, and my son shouted, a wordless howl of rage and pain.
I sprinted around the corner.
Grunter had Bem by the throat, holding her off the ground.
His leg was wrapped tight, stiff. But he had my little girl.
Another emissary straddled the Boy and choked him with both hands.
They were giants compared to the kids, men the size of wrestlers and football players. Probably had played in the stadium my kids had just survived.
“You!” Grunter screamed.
He flipped around and held Bem’s throat in the crook of his arm. Her little feet kicked against his chin as she tried to pull his forearm off her throat, lift herself up enough to breath.
“You did this.”
He tightened his forearm and Bem whimpered, tried to breath.
And I felt fear.
Not the first time I was afraid since the Z came. But a new kind of fear. My little girl was trapped between two men the size of cows, hard beefy jerks who wanted me dead.
They wanted me to hurt more than they wanted me dead though.
I knew this because they didn’t shoot me.
Their mistake.
I screamed then.
Something red. Something primal. Something that made the man on my son flinch away.
The Boy got his arm in an armbar, cinched his legs up over the guard’s neck and flipped him off.
He leaned back on the arm hard. The snap echoed across the street.
The man shrieked, but the Boy didn’t stop. He leaned even harder until bone sliced through the skin and dribbled on the ground.
The emissary passed out.
Grunt was too caught up in killing my daughter to notice.
Then I ran.
I've never been fast but a sonic boom echoed after me.
A hole opened in Grunt's forehead and the back of his head showered the ground in goo. I slammed into him, clawed his arm away and knocked Bem loose. She dropped to the ground and scrambled toward her brother.
Grunt teetered like a tree then fell on locked knees.
“They’re coming,” the Boy shouted.
We could hear them. Soldiers. Guards. More people. Too many to fight.
We chose the better form of valor and ran like hell.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
By like hell, I mean we ran as fast as three beat up, battered, choked and zombie ick covered people could run.
But we made it to the entrance of the park and ducked down a tunnel of ancient oaks that lined the asphalt road before anyone saw us.
I let the Boy lead.
He seemed to know something, or have an idea, and the hit to the head, the fighting had me a little woozy.
I wanted to rest.
I wanted to lock us all into someplace safe and hide.
But we couldn’t yet.
“Where is it?” I heard him mutter.
“What are you looking for?”
He pointed.
There was a plane tied down next to a grass runway.
