by Lowry, Chris
I could hear Anna and Peg sniffling behind me.
“Get him in the barn,” I said. “We’ll do what we can later.”
The two women helped Hannah up and carried the body of the boy to the barn.
“What can I do?” Raymer stepped away from Lou and his wife.
“Go help the Boy,” I told him. “Watch the back of the house.”
I turned to Bem and Bis.
“Get the van over by the barn. Clean it up but stay low. We may have to move fast.”
They nodded and kept quiet as they moved the van to the barn as well.
Brian had arranged the defenses of the farmhouse by spreading out men and women with rifles or pistols.
It was good enough for now. I nodded my thanks and worked my way up the hill to Tyler.
“Down,” he whispered as I approached.
The sniper guard lay dead in a pile of leaves and brush, a single shot through his forehead.
Tyler was further back, the palm of one hand covering the scope on his rifle as he searched the trees.
“He was too far up,” Tyler told me as he concentrated on the field and tree line. “They saw a flash on his glass.”
As if to show just how right he was, I saw a glint of reflection in the trees below.
“Left,” I said. “Three degrees.”
He shifted left.
“Got you, you bastard.”
He lined up, squeezed the trigger and let the echo of the shot ring across the field.
“Get him?”
I didn’t have a scope to check.
“You have to ask?”
I patted him on the shoulder.
“Keep them out there,” I told him.
“Do you think that was the guy that shot Byron?”
I nodded my head.
“You would know better than me,” I said. “But if it helps, you can tell yourself that’s who it was.”
“It does.”
I snugged the radio off the sniper’s belt and passed it to him.
“I’ll get Meroni’s” I told him. “Take out who you can, but watch yourself. Get me intel.”
He grit his teeth and grunted assent, then turned back to the scope.
I crawled backwards until I hit the curve of the hill and enough space to hide behind.
Then I stood up and went to check on the Boy.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
They didn’t come that night, which made me suspect dawn was their time line.
After staying up all night, I began to wonder if Tyler got the last one with his sniper shot.
Then the screaming started in the house.
I tried to run from the second gate, past the barn and to the porch, but the wound in my side had other ideas.
I loped, more like a fast limp.
Brian had moved everyone from Meroni’s group into the house except the four sentries he set at the cardinal points of the house.
Our group was in the barn, even Bis who moved out with us on the first night.
People piled at the front door as we ran toward them, screaming, yelling.
The sentries tried to force their way in against the flow of bodies coming out.
“This is it,” I thought. “They got someone through the backdoor.”
But they didn’t.
The hadn’t.
It was Meroni, or what was left of him.
The knot of people from inside streamed past me into the yard in front of the porch as Meroni stumbled out after them.
His chin and front of his shirt were covered with blood. He lifted up an arm and moaned as he lurched after one of the women he had helped save.
One of the sentries raised his gun in shaking hands and tried to end it.
He missed and winged his counterpart on the other end of the porch, flipped him over the side of the rail.
Another woman behind me screamed in horror.
I planted my feet, lifted a pistol and sent a shot through Meroni’s forehead.
The screaming and wailing continued around us.
“Brian!” I yelled.
“No need to shout,” he said from behind me.
“Get some light out here.”
He nodded in the pale luminescence of candlelight leaking from the open door of the ranch house.
We needed flashlights or a fire, torches.
Meroni had bit someone, maybe more than one someone. I wanted a body count to see who we were missing. Who was a potential zombie bomb waiting to go off among us.
My eyes scanned the crowd, looking for the kids.
“There,” said Anna from beside me.
She pointed and I saw them moving among the survivors from the house.
Bem working to administer aid if needed.
“Get them out of there,” I growled.
Anna moved past me to grab them. I watched as she herded the members of our group away from the people from the ranch.
Brian came back with a flashlight and we began to examine them.
“What the hell are you doing?” the sentry who shot the other asked.
He still held the gun, hands still shaking.
“Checking,” Brian told him. “They might have been bitten.”
Brian stopped by a woman, one of the screamers who mumbled through tears as she held a bloody hand to her neck.
“Meroni?” Brian asked.
She nodded and sobbed, breath coming in short gasps.
The sentry with the rifle saw her in the light and wailed.
A Z lumbered out of the darkness and plowed into one of the other men watching us. The dead rode the shrieking man down, gnawed on his face.
I pulled the pistol and shot the Z, then shot the man as well.
Silence dropped on the clearing like a curtain, the shock of the noise making everyone pause.
“Just hold on!” the sentry screamed and raised his rifle to aim at me.
Brian held up his hands and tried to calm him down.
“They were bit,” Brian said. “They were Z.”
The end of the rifle danced between the two of us, jittering hands twitching on the grip.
“This is all happening too fast,” the sentry cried.
He aimed the gun at the woman, who looked up at him with tear stained cheeks and whimpered.
“Oh God,” said the sentry.
He flipped the gun upside down, stuck the barrel in his mouth and pulled the trigger.
The people from the ranch squealed as his body dropped over with a thud.
We needed to get a handle on this. A smart hunter would have used the chaos as a distraction to sneak up on us and lay waste to the group.
That they hadn’t done so by now told me two things.
They weren’t smart or they were no more.
I hoped for the latter.
Tyler began shooting, which answered the former.
Bullets shattered through the windows of the farmhouse, splintered the wooden walls.
Anna herded our group into the safety of the barn.
“Get them inside,” I yelled to Brian as he began to move the rest of the survivors after them.
“What about me?” the bitten woman howled.
I shot her in the forehead and ran for the gate.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Tyler took out all but one.
I saw him squirming in the dirt beside the road on the other side of the fence.
Six of his buddies lay still in a line that stretched back toward the first hill.
I opened the gate, stalked out and grabbed the man by the collar to drag him inside.
My wound decided that was a dumb decision and almost made me pass out for it.
The Boy caught me as I stumbled.
“You should be back at the barn,” I snapped.
“So should you.”
He bent down, grabbed the guy by his wounded leg and pulled.
The scream lasted until I shut the gate behind us and latched it.
I wanted
to send a thumbs up to Tyler, tell him good job, but I didn’t know if he could see me in the dark.
But he saw the six men creeping up toward us, so I did it anyway.
The Boy dragged our prisoner back to the barn, but I stopped him before he carried him inside.
“Get in there,” I told him. “Get our group organized. I want the wounded lined up on one wall.”
“All or just the bitten?”
He was too young to ask that question, too young to know why it needed to be done.
I hated this world. Hated the Z and whatever made them. Hated what it was doing to my kids.
And when I saw how he looked at me, I hated what it turned me into.
Or maybe, it didn’t turn me at all. Maybe this was just who I was. Who I had been all along.
“Just the bites,” I said.
He nodded and went inside.
I slammed our prisoner against the wall.
“I’m going to ask you a few questions,” I told him. “You’re going to answer.”
He gave me an F-bomb. I slapped him.
“How many of you?”
Another expletive. I’ve always wondered about the penchant for cursing.
I liked the creativity behind it myself, when the use of the word was so shocking, it elicited giggles or fear.
A man who cursed during a beat down wasn’t original at all, just hurt and scared.
I needed him to be both. And more.
“How many?”
“We’re going to kill you,” he said. “All of you.”
I punted him in the nuts.
All the crap about fair fighting was good for the boxing ring, where the rule was no hitting below the belt. In real life, it was better to crush nut butter out of a man's sack.
He fell over and puked.
That's how you know it's done right.
Tears streaming from his eyes, no way to breath, snot and slobber leaking out as he gaped on the floor, both hands cradled around his groin.
Which left his head free.
I played kick ball with the base of his skull. Not too hard, just a tap. Enough to snap his head forward so hard, his chin bounced off his sternum.
He bit through the tip of his tongue and the tiny piece of pink meat plopped out on the floor.
He still couldn't breathe to scream. He squirmed instead. Rolled, hands cupping his balls, trying to find safety.
There wasn't any.
I sent a second kick into this stomach, hard enough to jolt the diaphragm and took no pleasure as he fought against the spasms.
Mouth moving like a fish out of water. Open, shut. Open, shut.
It takes a lot to break some men. It depends on will. Their self reliance and pain tolerance. All of it was bullshit. All of it was training.
But some things come natural. Spend your whole life with the heart outside of the body, then tell me about pain.
Pieces of you scattered across the country. Other men raising your children as their own. Reading to them. Kissing their boo boo's.
And know it's all on you.
Your fault. Your choices. The dumb things you did and chose. Spend a few nights in the cups, feeling that and then I'll tell you a story about pain.
Knowing you're not enough.
Will never be.
It took a minute to get control. To let go of his throat.
And by that time, he couldn't tell me anything.
Wouldn't be telling any anything again.
His wide eyes stared at me. An accusation. Judgement.
And I still didn't have the answers I needed.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Dawn came again. This time I wasn’t on a horse, but sitting in the open door of the barn waiting for better light.
No one slept inside.
I could feel them watching me, the dead body of the hunter with a knife sticking out of his skull stretched out in the road in front of the van.
The groups inside were delineated in clear lines.
All wounded on one side. Anyone with blood on their clothes, on their skin.
Some had argued it wasn’t there own.
Daylight would tell.
It was a telling distinction.
All of my people were on one wall, with a couple of the people from the ranch on the far end.
The wounded were all from inside the house.
Everyone from the ranch looked shell shocked.
I couldn’t blame them. In the day since we showed up, their home had been attacked, they had lost their leader and watched a man commit suicide in the dark.
It was a lot to take in.
Ever since I showed up, I corrected.
I looked over my shoulder half expecting a dark cloud to be there, ready to drop thunder and crack lightning.
But there was no cloud.
Just a clear blue morning that warmed from gray light to yellow with the sun.
A perfect Florida day in bloom.
“Now?” Brian asked.
“Let’s get it over with.”
He was polite as he asked the wounded to step outside.
Bem and Anna volunteered to help them clean off with rags and water.
Almost two dozen people in the house, eight bitten. For as many folks as he wanted to save, he took out more than a few once he turned Z.
He died in his sleep. One of the women nursing him told us.
The one with the neck wound screamed the rest awake, and he bit, chomped and chewed on the rest as they made their escape.
The signs of infection were progressing. Sweats. Fever.
“Say your goodbyes,” I told them and let them linger with the others for a few moments.
It was hard to ignore the tears.
“I’ll help,” Brian offered, but I shook my head.
“You can do it here,” one of the men said. “We can bury them here.”
“You don’t need to see this,” I told him. “You can bury them after.”
After a few moments of saying goodbye, I walked them into the pasture, out of sight of the house and barn.
Eight shots later, I came back alone.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
“Are you okay?” Anna asked.
I stared across the barn yard to my kids huddled by the door.
“I thought I would be,” I said.
She ran her hand across my scarred head and held the back of my neck cupped in her palm.
“This isn’t how I imagined the reunion going,” I confessed.
“Can’t write a script for this,” she told me.
“You have to leave,” the man who spoke up earlier stood at the head of the group. “We don’t want you here.”
I glanced at my group. Still the walking wounded, but we had the van.
Hurt from the loss of Byron. Hurt from the crash.
We still needed a safe place to rest, to recover.
But this wasn’t it.
These people wouldn’t give us rest. They would resent us and I didn’t want to kill all of them just for a place to sleep.
“We’ll take food for a day or two,” I told him. “We’re leaving as soon as we do.”
He nodded, seemed satisfied with that arrangement.
I radioed Tyler to come on down. Sent Bem and Anna to get supplies, knowing they would be smart. Judicious.
They were going to bury their dead.
We were going to keep going.
The van was packed tight. I stopped at the door and stared at the people inside. My kids. My people.
They looked like zombies too. Wiped out. Exhausted. Worn.
