by mike Evans
Li looked up at Shaun smiling, not making him feel any better at all. “Shaun, would you like to try to push me? Since I am so small and you are big?”
“I was just saying that if you saw Clary, you wouldn’t have been surprised to know that he had manhandled some of the dead. He’s one of the deadliest guys I know. But I have a pretty good feeling that you are going to give him a run for his money in that department.”
He nodded, watching Timmy inhaling his food. He finally sat back and his face was beginning to turn shades of green. The end result wasn’t something he’d be surprised about. He leaned over, letting a stomach full of rice burst from his mouth. Li quickly kicked a garbage can directly under his mouth, catching every last grain. “Now, before you do that again, why don’t you head down to the bathroom in the rear of the store? It’s for employees, but I’ll make an exception this time.”
The three stared at him awkwardly. “You three are going to have to work on your sense of humors. Now, get him back there, unless you want to see him puking around the food again.”
Brandy bent down, putting an arm around him, and practically carried him the rest of the way back. “We need to move, come on.”
“I think I’m going to puke again, Brandy.”
The sound of puking echoed, followed by the sound of it hitting water. Shaun hoped for Brandy’s sake that she was able to make it back in time. The toilet flushed a minute later and Shaun had to ask. “Is your water still running? What about your electricity?”
“Haven’t had regular lights in the last five or six months. I have natural light that keeps me able to see something. If it wasn’t for that, I would have been sitting in the dark the last year. I probably would have driven myself to insanity. The water is still working, though. I think it is safe to drink even. I boil it for an hour to be sure. I'll take four gallons of water and boil it down to one. I don’t know if you can boil it out or if it is in there forever. I don’t walk around like one of those things, so I don’t think that we have any issues so far. You thirsty?”
Shaun thought about the water, knowing he’d be drinking it eventually or dying. He nodded, hesitating and then slamming back a glass of the boiled water. “We rest a few days and when you feel we are ready, we train? Is that about the gist of it?”
Li nodded. “You eat, take it easy. I’d like you to read this book, spend some time with it. Tie this sword to your belt. I want you to get used to it. The first one you’ll learn with is a tanto blade. It’s about a foot long. This one is a kama.”
Shaun unsheathed the tanto, looking at it. As his dad had done a million times before when handed a knife, he’d run his fingers across it to see how sharp it was. Li interjected, “That isn’t how we check to see that a blade is strong and true. I assure you that you will get cut if you do that. It is sharp; every weapon we have is sharp. I have spent the last year sharpening these until they could be no sharper.”
Shaun looked at the other and said, “This kama looks like a hatchet.”
Li held out his hand, standing with it. “You see this blade? It is long, skinny, and sharpened beyond all belief. You can break their wrists with the handle, you can pin arms with the blades, ram the blade down through their skulls. It is sharp and skinny, it won’t get stuck. You go in four inches and you hit brain; you bring it back out and you do it again. You are able to move through everywhere without ever being seen. But we learn, you do it slow, and you do it right, or you don’t do it at all. The last thing I will do is teach you is the smallest amount that you need to know and then send you off thinking you are a warrior. You look like you already are, but there is much I can show you if you can learn and be patient. If you can’t do that, then you can continue to fight with iron—the kind that runs out.”
Shaun held out his hand again, taking the weapons and putting them on his belt. He looked at his rig, radios, canteens, and started stripping them off. He was finally somewhere that he could breathe, and that he could rest. He realized if ever he was going to have a chance that this was more than likely going to be it.
He held the kama too high and Li adjusted his hand. Then he brought out a chain with a ball. “We will take baby steps, but when you’ve mastered the basics of this, we will show you how to use a kusarigama, which we attach to the handle. It will destroy our enemies and give you some distance to bring them off guard.”
Shaun went to say something but Li turned around, going back to the kitchen and getting a replacement bowl for Timmy, who stumbled back into the kitchen. “Yeah, yeah, I heard you Brandy. I’ll eat slower. It isn’t my fault it was great. I haven’t eaten anything that good in a year, what’d you expect me to do?”
Brandy swooped up the bowl from him, giving him a second one, and she portioned out his eating, ensuring that they’d be eating at a pace that would make neither of them ill.
Chapter 8
Li came into the room three days later, trying to be quiet. He’d heard the demons that the youths had been dealing with, and while he was happy to have company, he had enjoyed the quiet at night that he’d grown so used to.
Shaun was awake, doing pushups in the dark. He stopped when the light came through, looking up.
Li motioned for him to come forward. “Stand, Shaun.”
Shaun stood up, not quite sure what he was saying. Li pushed him from the side, sending him stumbling into a stack of rice bags. Shaun got into a wider stance this time. Li shoved him from the side again, but this time, he only wobbled the slightest. Shaun tried not to smile. He felt he’d have an advantage having wrestled, but like all good things in the apocalypse, knew that it would not last.
Li gripped him by the shirt, pulling him forward and then backward. Within two seconds, he was already off balance. When Li pulled him up, he said, “This is the dead biting your neck.” When he threw him back onto a mat on the ground, he said, “This is the dead jumping on you and leaving nothing at all left to recognize you by. You must be fast, you must be balanced. You need to see the third one dead, not just the first and second. It is important. If you can’t do that, then you can’t learn this. You should stick to your stupid guns.”
Shaun jumped back up, putting one foot forward and one back. He kept them wide this time. Li walked a circle around him, gripping him from behind, pulling him back with a foot across his legs and spinning at the same time. Shaun realized very quickly that this was his first lesson.
Over the next few months, Shaun and the others learned everything that they could. Timmy mostly watched from the side and practiced stabbing large bags of rice playfully with it. Three months later and Shaun had barely picked up his rifle to run over it, making sure it was in optimal shooting condition. He had grown fond of Li and had learned faster than anyone he’d ever seen.
Li watched Shaun going through practiced forms, realizing that he had learned faster than he ever had. Shaun saw Li watching him and finished his form, taking a breath. “What’s up, Lee?”
Li had been debating telling him for a while and brought out a small bottle of pills. He smiled, shaking it, and Shaun walked forward, holding his hand out. “You hear there are not very many left in there, right?”
Shaun and Brandy both nodded slowly. “What does that mean then?” Shaun questioned.
“That our training is pretty much done. I’m proud of both of you, though. You have worked very hard.”
Brandy didn’t realize she was crying until the tears started dripping onto her chin. Shaun looked over, not thinking about it, putting an arm around her shoulder and pulling her into him. “Can we do something, Li?” Shaun asked.
She pushed off of him. “Can we do something? What are you talking about, Shaun? I mean, yeah, can we do something, but what do you need them for?”
“Does it matter what I have? I’m old, it’s happening anyways.”
Shaun let go of Brandy, throwing his arms up in the air. “Does it matter? Yeah, it kind of does. You are one of the four people I know right now, like, in the worl
d. You are the only one who is going to complete our training. What do you expect us to do, sit around and watch you die?”
Li said, “If you haven’t noticed, I have been moving slower and slower. There’s a few different medications that I need.”
“So, we go get them. Simple as that,” Brandy said.
“Yeah, we go get them. You watch Timmy, and we go get ‘em. Simple as that, sound good?” Shaun agreed.
“Why hadn’t you said anything before now?”
“I hadn’t needed a lot of energy till I met you. I’d been taking my time on the medicine, but when I met you, it gave me a purpose, a reason to live, for a little while longer,” Li explained.
Shaun was thinking and realized that if he could get Li the motherload, they’d be able to go quite some time before it’d be an issue again. “I’ll go get them. You write down what you need, I can go now. How close are we to a pharmacy?”
“There aren’t a lot of pharmacies this side of town trust me I have raided them all. You will be a few miles away from the closest one I can think of. That is only assuming that they aren’t overrun with the dead.”
Shaun shrugged. “Stay quiet, and don’t be seen, right? Isn’t that what you say? I’ll be back in no time.”
“I can’t ask you to do that,” Li said, wishing that he could ask him but not having the heart to do it.
“You aren’t asking me. You could have continued taking your meds sparingly, but you didn’t. You helped us. We needed your help, and you did that for us. Now you need help, and we are sure as hell going to do it. If I can’t get somewhere and back, then what was the good in being trained?”
“We can leave and be back. You watch Timmy for a little bit and we are good to go,” Brandy said.
Shaun answered her with no question in his voice. “There isn’t any ‘we’. I’m going. I’ll be back.”
“You can kiss my ass! I need and owe him as much as you do, Shaun. Why do you think I can’t make it back?” she demanded.
“Because every time someone goes with me, something goes horribly wrong. I need you to stay here, I need you to just be safe. I can’t stand the idea of losing anyone. There will be plenty of time when I will need to count on you. We are still learning, let's just agree to-”
“Screw you! Timmy, you stay with Li. You listen to what he says.”
Timmy could hear the anger in her voice and started nodding his head. Shaun was going to say something when she punched him hard in the shoulder. “Get your shit and let's go. Li, you write down what we need to get, and we will come back with everything we can. Quit standing there, Shaun, go get your gear.”
He looked down at his weapons and she said, “Your guns, super ninja. Go get them. I want a pistol, too. This stuff is great, but it seems pretty stupid to leave them here when we might need them. You can only kill one of those things at a time with this stuff. We aren’t going to leave technology behind just because we think we know what we are doing.”
☣ ☣ ☣
Li watched as they got their gear on. He was proud to call them friends and students. “You be careful. Shaun, you think about the third kill, not the first.”
Shaun nodded. He’d been telling him that for the last three months and it was so etched into his brain he didn’t think that he would ever forget it. “We are going to take the roofs there. There’s enough distance between them that we won’t have any issue crossing them.”
Li thought about the buildings going down the block and opened the front door, looking around and making sure it was clear. “Shaun, I appreciate you going, but you falling to your death doesn’t make me feel better. I need you guys to come back. I don’t think that I could handle Timmy on my own. He’s a little bit crazy.”
Brandy nodded, hugging him, and Shaun checked that they had the slip of paper with the prescriptions written down on it. They exited the building, walking the alley. The dead that had been taken out still lay there on the ground, rotting from the summer heat. The wind blowing through encircled them in the smell of death. Brandy looked like she was going to puke, but Shaun took her arm and they walked to the edge of the alley, looking both ways before exiting onto the main street. “Take a bunch of deep breaths; big breaths, Brandy.”
She did as she was told and then they looked around, walking quickly down the alley. It was dark and Shaun knew it was the best time to move. They stayed in the shadows. A horde came screaming through, chasing a dog that was running for everything it could down the street. He wanted to do something but knew that against this many, it was not the wisest of ideas. Brandy whispered, “Poor dog.”
Shaun kept her against the wall for a minute longer with his arm. He hadn’t realized that he had her pinned against it by her breasts, and had there been any light in the street he would have had a face fifty different shades of red.
Brandy patted him on the ass, laughing. “You know you could have gotten to first base before you went straight to third, Fox.”
He tried to say something, but she said, “Focus. Plenty of time for you to put your foot in your mouth later.”
He nodded and they started jogging. He had his rifle tight on his shoulder so that it would not bounce. Everything they were carrying held a purpose. Shaun looked around the corners before turning. He looked for the street sign and realized it wasn’t there. He saw a pole that had been knocked over by a truck and knew they’d have to go another street up before they knew whether they were on the right road. They climbed over a pile of wrecked cars. Brandy whimpered when she caught her calf on the hood of a car. She brought her hands up and blood covered them.
Shaun shone a flashlight on it and cursed. “Fuck, that isn’t good.” He brought out his tanto blade, cutting the jean off of her, rolling it in a ball and throwing it in the opposite direction, hoping the dead would find it before they found them.
The horde that had passed a few minutes ago was circling back around. The whimpering of the dog was easy to hear. Shaun saw it coming, and the moonlight was making The Turned’s eyes almost glow in the night. It looked like a group of demons making their way towards him.
Shaun said, “Can you run on that leg?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“Not unless you want to get in the trunk of a car and hope for the best.”
“You think those things will find me in there and rip the trunk off?” she asked.
“Yep, sure do.”
“What about the dog?”
“He better keep running and not stop for anything. I don’t think dogs can contract the disease. Greg had a dog once, but it ran off. Or got eaten, hard to say.”
She looked at the car trunk and then looked at the building they were next to. “Come on, we can go in here and see if the doors are open.”
Shaun ran in, not hesitating at all. They sprinted through the doors and he found a pipe to jam through the glass, hoping the broken shards scattered across the floor would be enough to deter them and force them to try and find an alternate route in.
He looked at the floor and there was no shortage of blood from her leg. He knew that getting out of their line of sight was the first thing he needed to do, and the second would be finding a way to get her leg to stop bleeding. There were only two options, and he didn’t care for either of them.
When they got up to the second floor, Shaun looked and saw The Turned pounding on the glass to it. When it didn’t give, they did as they always did and started pounding it with their skulls. The force and numbers caused the glass to finally shatter and they entered slowly, all of their heads oozing black sludge. They had their noses up and were sniffing like a pack of wolves on the hunt.
Shaun held a finger to his mouth and the glare he got was warranted; she knew to shut up and wasn't stupid. They walked in, slowly spreading out. Three of them came for the stairs. Li’s words rang in his head and he let his hand off of his pistol, accepting that he had been training and the reason for it—to be able to kill and to be quiet while doing it. S
haun walked to the corner into a shadow, “You get up the stairs, now. Go!”
“I’m not leaving you to clean up my-”
“You aren’t doing anything, you are drawing them towards you. If they make it past me, you kill them or you get killed. You got any questions about that?” Shaun ordered.
She ran up to the top of the step. She could feel the blood still going down her leg. Shaun disappeared into the shadows, waiting for the first two to come past. When the third came around, he swung the ball on the chain Li had given him, whipping it around its legs and pulling back with all he had, sending it face first into the steps. The Turned’s teeth shattered and bounced down the steps. When it tried to get up, Shaun was already up in the air, bringing down the hatchet like weapon into its skull. The other two heard the scuffle going on behind and stopped dead in their tracks, screaming a war cry that Shaun was confident would bring the rest up the steps very soon.
