by mike Evans
“Try not to take this the wrong way, but you three don’t appreciate what is going on out there. You ever been a minority before? Dumb question, you’re a white kid in Iowa. Okay, imagine being the only one in a room of a hundred. Now, instead of a hundred, make it a thousand. Every one of those thousand people know exactly where you are, they watch your every move when you are out. Now, imagine them running faster than the fastest track star you’ve ever seen, and that when or if they catch you, they’ll all want a piece of you. I honestly think they are starving, and that might be why they are doing stupider things like following us through a propane inferno earlier. There had to have been thousands. It melted our tires down to the rims. I’ve been through a lot of close calls so far, but I’d have to rank this one pretty high. If the fire hadn’t taken them out, we wouldn’t have had enough ammo to take care of them.”
“You think you’re military or something?” Brandy asked. “What’s with the clothes?”
“I was on a military base. You wear what you have around you. I’d rather have a pair of jeans and a hoodie, but you make do with what you have. Besides, I’ve got pockets all over these things. I’ve got all kinds of crap in them that can come in useful. Can we see what your grandpa had, please?”
Talon held up a hand, realizing that he was catching the first taste of fresh air that he’d smelled in almost a year. He walked outside, looking around a bit nervous and covering his eyes, for the sun was not being kind to them. He looked down at his skin; it had never been more pale in all of his life, at least since birth, he figured. “Timmy, Brandy, look at the sky. I didn’t think that we’d ever get to see it again.”
Shaun came down the steps, not wanting to offer it but knew that he had no choice. “You guys want to take the night to think about what you want to do? What I mean is, we aren’t going to be in your way forever here, but if you’d like to go with us, we could probably make that work. Be even better if you guys really do have a nice stockpile and we took some time to get you all up to speed on whatever your grandpa has in there.”
Talon seemed to think he’d heard a joke by the smile on his face “You think that we need to wait around to learn how to use guns? We’ve been shooting longer than you probably have. My grandpa Pete always said if a gun is unloaded, it isn’t going to be good for too damn much. He started teaching us how to shoot before we were out of diapers. I bet I can give you a run for your money on any rifle you got. I don’t know how to do the machine guns, but I doubt it takes a genius to be able to operate one of those.”
“Once you’ve got your share of sun, maybe we could go look at it. You okay with that?” Shaun asked.
Talon turned around before Shaun could ever see it coming. He took him by his daypack straps, spinning him in a circle and launching him four feet away, where he landed hard, the handle of his knife digging into his side.
Ben and Brady were both more than confident about what Shaun could do and were not about to let him burn a bridge so newly built. The fact remained that they knew that this kid was their one shot at getting some weapons in their hands, and while they probably couldn’t force them off the property, it was better to have them okay with it than not.
Shaun was back on his feet, and dropping his gear, yelled, “Get out of the way, I’m not scared of this guy!”
Brady whispered, holding up his hands and quickly trying to reason with him. “We know you aren’t Shaun, and more than likely you can take him out and probably worse. But we need a place to stay, we need more weapons, and another few days of getting prepared for a trip isn’t going to hurt. God forbid we take the time to figure out what we are going to do. I kind of feel like we are winging it right now, and you were the one saying we need to be able to think. We don’t think, we die; pretty verbatim to what you said, wasn’t it?”
Shaun stopped, letting that sink in for a minute or two before picking up his gear and walking past Talon. “You touch me again and I don’t care how bad we need your guns. Or should I say they need your guns. I have everything I need and then some. If you do it right, you don’t need that much to survive. If you end up being dead weight, I’ll cut you loose, I promise.”
Talon puffed up his chest, “Well, if you end up being full of shit about this I’m going to-”
“Talon Luce, would you shut up? Like, seriously, shut up. You two sound stupid. You started it. He just wants to see grandpa’s guns,” Brandy scolded. “We have all the time in the world to sit out and see the sky. Until we know if this is really what is happening, I don’t want to be alone. We should watch the news or something and see if-”
“There’s no news to watch, Brandy. I’m sorry to say it, but there isn’t. You can go check, but I’d be amazed if you still had any power out here,” Jay said. “We’ve been not far away in a town, stuck in a row of buildings on and off for the last year. I promise he’s not full of it. I don’t think we’ve seen it to the extent that he has, but it's bad, and they are everywhere I swear it.”
Talon let out a breath, thinking about it, kicking at the gravel in the driveway. “Come on, let’s get my grandpa buried, and then we can show you what he has. Like I said, we don’t have any machine guns, but there’s plenty of guns and ammo, and it’d be a lot easier to use what he has than that bolt action rifle.”
They spent the next five hours opening up the house and getting a proper hole dug for his grandparents. It was the first time in which Shaun could remember that he’d buried a full-fledged Turned. He knew that it would not be the last grave that he dug, but wished deep down that it was.
Timmy sprinted through the house ahead of him. Brandy yelled, “Timmy, I don’t care if you know what you are doing, you don’t touch anything. There’s nowhere to take you to get fixed now.”
“I’m going to get a gun in case there are any more of those things coming. I’m not getting let out just to have one of those things try to eat me,” Timmy said.
“They won’t be able to eat you if I kill you first for not listening!” She took him around the waist, letting him kick and scream, and tossed him on the couch. He tried getting up, and she pushed him back to the couch. “Stay. Please, Timmy, just for a few minutes. I feel like my head is going to explode.”
Timmy crawled over to the remote resting on the couch and hit the buttons, but nothing came on. Brandy looked at the television and flipped the switch to the living room. She was not nearly as skeptical as Talon was about trusting strangers. She would have thought it strange under any other explanation that there was a group of teens walking around with a load of guns and ammunition. She leaned up against the wall, feeling like her entire world was beginning to spin, and a wave of dizziness came across her. She sunk to her knees and her shoulders began to shake as the tears started, slowly at first, until they flowed freely.
Timmy dropped the remote and said, “Quit crying, would you? You're going to make someone think something's wrong with you.”
She laughed as she ran her arms across her eyes. “I think something is wrong with me, Timmy. The entire year, I just prayed that God would send something... someone to come and end that, and that it was just grandma... I had never thought—not once—that this was so big.”
Timmy, who had no idea how to imagine what she was talking about, shrugged. “I don’t know, Brandy, but we aren’t dead, and Talon isn’t dead, and there’s no more dead around here now that grandma is gone. I loved grandma, but she scared the poop out of me.”
“Yeah, she was my favorite until she crashed the car into the barn... and came out trying to rip us apart. Grandpa Pete saved our asses, tossing us in the cellar. I don’t think that he thought he’d be leaving us in there for a year, or he wouldn’t have put us in there in the first place.”
☣ ☣ ☣
Shaun and the others followed Talon up the stairs. The house looked like any other old farm house they’d ever seen. Everything was old but well-kept and taken care of. The sheets were still crisp but had an inch of dust, and Shaun’s
body ached for a soft bed. The ones at the base had not been amazing, and he’d not slept in his own bed in over a year. The very thought of a night’s sleep not burdened and plagued by the dead was an amazing thought. The only thing better he could think of is if he still had Ellie in his life. He couldn’t begin to imagine the joy of a life with her without the dead, out somewhere like this.
Talon snapped his fingers. “Hey, Fox, you with us? We don’t need you breaking your neck going up that ladder. I said you need to watch this step here because it is loose. We don’t fix it because no dumbasses are allowed.”
Brady said, “Hey, you all right man? Your head doesn’t seem to be in the game. What’s going on with you?”
“Nothing, just thinking of sleeping in a bed and not having any of this shit to deal with. Just live as far away from those things as possible.”
“Yeah, but that leaves the rest of the country screwed, right? I thought this little trip we are on is to help people, not to find a better place for us to stay at. I’m sure there are some perfectly good islands that we haven’t even thought about. Screw the country, let’s go chill on the beach. We can find some girls in bikinis; it’d be a slice of heaven. Maybe Brandy would be interested in it,” Brady said smiling, winking his eyes and forgetting the fact Talon was her cousin.
Talon squeezed the back of his neck. “You can go ahead and stop picturing my cousin in a bikini, weirdo. If you can find some girls not related to me, then you might have just found the best idea I’ve heard.”
Shaun shook out of his funk. “Right, never mind, I was just rambling. I don’t want to run, I don’t want to hide on some island. This is our country, and we are going to get it back. I promise, we can do it; or at the very least, we can die trying.”
“Real positive kind of guy aren’t you, Fox?” Talon joked.
“He grows on you,” Ben said. “At least I think he will. We haven’t been around him all that long either. He comes up with some crazy shit though.”
Talon ignored them, heading up the ladder and stepping over the step he had said was broken, disappearing into the attic. Shaun pulled out his flashlight, knowing anything that was up there to light the way no longer functioned. Talon walked straight for a metal locker standing up against the wall at four feet wide and five feet tall. “Christ, what does your grandpa have?”
“He was never one to skimp on things when he thought they were important.”
Talon opened the first of two doors, exposing eight different rifles, a few shotguns, and a nice collection of pistols.
“Holy shit, that is awesome,” Brady said enthusiastically.
“Grandpa Pete was a cool guy. He always had time to take us shooting. I was looking forward to it when I got here a few days before grandma went crazy. If he wouldn’t have had a bum knee, I bet you anything that he would have been able to race up here to get something to arm himself. Now you see why it is that we wanted to try to hide here, instead of the basement. It would have broke my heart, but at least I wouldn’t have had to waste a year of my life in that basement.”
“That basement probably saved your life. If you would have gone out, just the three of you, I’m sure those things would have caught you off guard and killed you all. That isn’t what you are shooting for, now, is it?” Shaun asked.
“No, that wouldn’t be ideal. I have to take care of Timmy and Brandy now. If my Uncle Harold didn’t come to get us, then we are alone.”
“What kind of cars do your grandparents have—or… had?” Jay asked. “We don’t have any other way of getting anywhere.”
Shaun stepped through them, shining his light. He pulled out a semi-automatic Ruger, seeing he had large and small caliber; they could hunt with some and kill with others. He replaced it back, running his light around the attic, seeing they weren’t short of ammunition at all. Shaun smiled, glad to see that his .223 rifles would have plenty to feed it.
“My grandparents weren’t rich. My grandpa had a work truck; that wasn’t anything fancy, but if he owned it, then it’s safe to say it ran, and ran well. My grandma had a boat of a car, and she drove it to church on Wednesdays and Sundays, and when she needed groceries. She crashed it into an out building grandpa had. It might be okay we don’t know. Timmy ran to check on her when she did, and she looked like she was sleeping when he was tapping on the window. But when she came back around, that was when grandma became an entirely different person,” Talon explained.
“You don’t have to tell your story if you don’t want to, Talon,” Shaun said. “The camp that I came from, it was kind of a steadfast rule that we kept.”
“Well, I can tell it or not, but you know what, I’ve been in that damn basement with my cousins—a kid and a teen—for a year. They freaked out more than once. Not that I didn’t, but it was less than pleasant. The only thing that was nice, was figuring out early on that we were safe. She never tried getting in the basement, and I know that she could have. But I’ve wanted to say something about how crazy it was to anyone for a long time. If you don’t want to hear it, go downstairs.”
“They are stupid strong,” Ben said.
“Right, anyways—and don’t interrupt Shaun, it’s rude,” Talon said. “So anyways, Timmy saw her crash into a wall. When he ran up to try to get her out, that was when she woke up. Timmy was pounding on the window, his face was white, and when he looked back at me, I was splitting wood for Grandpa Pete. The wood-splitter was in need of repair, and a buddy of his had dropped off a ton of wood that needed splitting in return for a couple pigs.”
Jay didn’t want to ask, and had he thought about it, would have happily pulled those words back into his mouth. “I didn’t see any pigs out there. It was pretty desolate for as far as we could see walking up here, except for your grandmother of course.”
“Well, I can assure you over the last year that Grandma had eaten really well. It was almost impossible to see her from the window, but it wasn’t completely impossible. After she’d chewed on Grandpa Pete for a while—not too long, it looked like because she left a lot of him in one piece—she’d started eating the pigs. I could hear them screaming; it was all we heard for days.”
“Jesus, how many pigs were there?” Ben inquired.
“Probably a hundred. It took weeks to get that sound out of my ears. We got so used to it that it was almost something you didn’t notice until another one started. Let’s just say sleep wasn’t a good thing for a while, not that it ever was overly comfortable down there. Cold, dark… if it hadn’t been for the blankets that they stored down there, we probably would have gotten sick and died. The fact that grandma was a preserves nut didn’t hurt either. We’d have starved to death down there without it. There were a lot of times I didn’t think I could eat another bite of that shit, but you give it enough time and it’ll start to sound good again. All the sugar she put in that fruit, I bet I’ll have diabetes before I’m thirty.”
Shaun took four of the rifles, handing them out to everyone, and took one for himself. “We need to make sure these things are as solid as you say they are,” Shaun said.
“I know my grandpa’s gun collection was nothing short of immaculate,” Talon said proudly.
Brandy and Timmy watched as the four headed back down, carrying a rifle, a pistol, and a can of ammunition to be divided up between them. She got up off the couch, standing in the doorway and watching while holding Timmy’s hand to keep him from sprinting up to the gun play. They lined up, testing out the rifles, and once Shaun had seen the boys doing better with each shot, he started to feel a little more confident that he had someone to watch his back and did not have to worry about babysitting everyone.
Talon was every bit the good shot he said he was. Shaun watched the rifles out in the daylight and saw they truly were impeccable; no wear, no rust, nothing that would leave him questioning how good they were. When they were done, Shaun said, “You going to come with us or stay here? You have plenty of ammo, but I promise it goes quickly, and it is hard to say
if hordes of the dead will come through here, or if they are going to bypass this place. If you don’t give them a reason to come here, you might never have anything to worry about. Hell, you might never shoot off one bullet. But you’re going to need supplies, and nothing ever goes like it should.”
Talon thought about it, running his hands through his red hair. He wasn’t done processing the fact that what his grandmother had turned into was now the norm. He put his rifle around his shoulder, looking at the four strangers while trying to decide.
Brandy cleared her throat from the doorway loud enough to let everyone know that his decision was not final, regardless of what he was about to say.
“I better go talk to Brandy. You guys wait out here, this is family talk,” Talon announced.
He walked back to the house and when she let go of Timmy, he raced out to the others. Shaun held out a hand for a high five from him. The little red haired boy jumped into the air, which wasn’t very high, and brought down his hand with everything he could.
