DEAD: Blood & Betrayal: Book 11 of the DEAD Series

by TW Brown

  “Well, I guess I will never know,” Billy mumbled.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Huh?” He looked at me and his eyes focused like he had forgotten that I was there. “Oh, nothing. Don’t give it another thought, Thalia.”

  “But don’t you think that they might have a spy in our community? Maybe somebody has been living with us the whole time and reporting back to that horrible woman.”

  “I don’t see that as very likely,” Billy said with a tired smile. “More likely, some random person that I crossed paths with at some point. I ran with Jon and Jake and Jesus, quite a bit in the early days. And we didn’t necessarily take down all of Winter’s people.”

  “But how would she know that you are in charge?” I pressed.

  “Lucky guess? Hell, I don’t know. And it is likely that I never will.”

  With that, Billy gave me a pat on the head and just walked away. He did not seem to know, and more important, he sure didn’t seem to care. He and Jim got Maddy up after making sure that she was tied up nice and tight. They carried her off the road and into the woods after telling Paula to round us up, get everybody fed, and prepare to move out.

  The two returned less than twenty minutes later. Alone.

  I really wanted to know what they found out, so I ignored Paula’s demands that I move up with some guy named Morris and take point for the team, and instead walked over to the two men who were still basically whispering back and forth so intently that they did not even notice me until I was right up on them.

  “…and I say it is the only choice,” Billy hissed.

  “Hey there, Thalia,” Jim said much too loudly.

  He might be really cool under pressure and excellent in a fight, but he is lousy when it comes to being truly phony. For one, he never calls me by my name unless he knows I have caught him at something or there is a serious problem. The thing was, I had no idea what I’d just caught him doing wrong.

  “What did you find out?” I demanded, shaking off Paula’s hand as she tried to pull me back.

  “Not a damn thing,” Billy said, his face grim and tight with agitation.

  “Where is she?” I asked. I’m not stupid, I had a good idea. I just wanted to see if these two would at least give me some semblance of a straight answer, or if they were going to continue to treat me like a child.

  “We couldn’t risk leaving her behind, we don’t have the time to bring her along, and we didn’t think she deserved going down to the next passing zombie.” Jim looked me in the eye as he spoke. It did not escape me that Billy was very obviously displeased by Jim’s apparent honesty.

  “She didn’t have any useful information at all?” I pressed. “Not even how they know about Billy?”

  I saw a look flicker on Jim’s face for a second that let me know that he was perhaps not aware that Suzi knew about Billy; or at the least how she knew his name and that he was our leader. Billy flushed just a bit for some reason.

  “We didn’t get to that part. It isn’t mission critical,” Billy finally said after he glared at me and then rolled his eyes at Jim as if to indicate I might be a little bit crazy.

  “How do you not ask something like that?” I insisted. I glanced over and saw looks on both Jim and Paula’s face that let me know I was on the right path in my questioning. It seemed as if they might be curious as well.

  “Look, I was Jon’s shadow for a while. He wanted to mold me into a Marine or something. Kept telling me that I had a lot of potential. He also let that tidbit of information slip way back before we knew that Winter and his men were bad guys. It is highly doubtful that every single one of Winters’ men died when that compound fell after he and Jake and I went there and they poisoned the water supply or whatever. The number of living people these days makes it likely that you will cross paths with somebody that knew you or knew of you if you were in any way active in those early days. Our group, for those of you who were not there in the beginning…” he glanced at Jim and Paula before continuing as if to make some sort of point, “…was very active in these parts. We also dealt with the military. We were hooked up with a man named Randall Smith of the CDC. He was the head honcho at the first place we thought we would call home.”

  He continued to ramble on for whatever reason. It just sounded to me a bunch of “blah, blah, blah” stuff. However, when he mentioned Randall Smith, it made me once again remember my sister of the apocalypse: Emily. I could still see her laughing as we played in the snow, and then that creeper got her. They kept me away from her after that except for one time when Steve let me see her. Then she was gone.

  I heard Dr. Zahn and Sunshine say once that she had turned and that Steve had not been able to kill her. I thought that had to be wrong. He would not want her to walk the world as one of those things for the rest of forever. However, I’d also heard a story from Billy one night when he was drunk. In that story, he insisted that he saw her in La Grande with a bunch of other zombie children…and cats. That was when I decided that the story was just Billy being drunk. The thing about the cats was too weird.

  “Thalia!” Paula snapped.

  “What?” I shot back a little more aggressively than I probably should.

  “You and Morris get moving. We need to get back to Platypus Creek as soon as possible. We are marching straight through.”

  I had to fight back the urge to stomp my feet as I stormed to where the man I assumed to be Morris was waiting. He looked like a real creep. He had stringy hair that looked like it hadn’t been washed in a month. His mouth looked weird like he was kissing somebody, and his left eye had a patch over it. Once I got closer, I felt just a little bit bad.

  His mouth looked that way because he did not have any teeth in front. I could tell by looking that he had suffered something rather violent to end up that way. I seemed to recall that Morris was one of the people who were out on field operations a lot. In fact, he was gone almost as much as Jim. He often bypassed the offered rest period of two weeks after a run and signed up to leave with the next group. I seem to recall something about how he had been searching for his wife since he arrived at our community on a stretcher with a group that we took in almost five years ago.

  We started out after Paula gave us instructions. Even though Morris and I were a team, they wanted us to separate by about a quarter mile. I guess our little ambush had everybody on a state of hyper alert. It stood to reason that, with all the activity in the valley, some of the groups in the area might be a little nervous. With Morris and I separated, we would not likely both end up captured or killed.

  Comforting thought, that.

  My day went by in a blur. I was doing my best to be alert, and early on, I was pretty focused. My problem came towards the last half of my shift on patrol. I kept finding my mind wandering. At last, I reached the marker that Paula told me to stop at and wait for the rest of the team.

  We played leap frog like this for the rest of the day. As darkness fell, it was once more my turn to be out on point. I was given the landmark and told that, unlike earlier, Morris and I would stay close. I walked along for a ways before Morris finally broke the silence.

  “You really had folks worried back home,” he started.

  “I’m sure they were upset about the others. Jim and Jackson are much more important, and I imagine that losing them would hurt the community more than just my being gone,” I said with a shrug.

  “Yeah, but Jim and Jackson didn’t have their mom in the town square chewing poor Billy a new one in front of God and everybody.”

  “Melissa came down to the square?” I was honestly blown away.

  “Came down? More like exploded into. She was pissed that Billy sent you out there on a mission that was a sham to begin with. I guess word got out that it was some personal issue between Billy and one of the science geeks.”

  That is the thing about a small community like ours; everybody knows everybody else’s business. Keeping any kind of secret is next to impossible.

/>   “And once the doc got that guy to talk, well, I guess that put everybody on edge.” Morris reached down, picked up a rock and threw it at a shadow. Nothing moved and we kept walking. That was a common way to flush out any zombies that might be lurking in the shadows. They react to whatever noise is the most recent.

  “Wait? What?” I blurted, probably a little louder than I should considering the fact that we were supposed to be scouting for any possible trouble. Not likely that we would sneak up on anybody as I was making all this noise.

  “Yeah, I guess the guy was one of the scouts from that army. He gave up numbers, all sorts of stuff. Said that they had no quarrel with us, and that they actually wanted to ask us to join them. Supposedly, he said that little college settlement near Island City was really the bad guys. If you can believe him, they were the ones manufacturing some sort of weaponized version of the zombie virus. It supposedly even takes down the immune if you can take his word for anything. And I guess, according to those who were present for some or all of the doc’s questioning, he was beyond being able to lie. She did a real number on him.”

  I took this in and mulled it over the rest of my time out. Morris tried to talk to me some more, but I was not much for conversation. If all of this was true, then why would Billy lead a team out to ambush our escorts? Why not let them show up, bring them in and see what they had to say? Was there more to what they discovered in the interrogation that had not been leaked?

  We reached our marker and awaited the group. The rest of the night, I walked sort of off to myself. Jim tried to come chat with me once, but I told him I wasn’t in the mood to talk.

  One of my favorite things to do to pass time is to read. I love stories that take me away from everything. We don’t have a lot of books, and I have probably read all the ones that we do have at least a dozen times each. The best part about books (or any story for that matter) is that things might seem bleak and fuzzy in the beginning, but they always clear up by the time you reach the end. I have found that life is nothing like that in any way, shape, or form. More often than not, you don’t get any answers; just more questions. I was hoping that this was not going to be one of those times where I was left wondering.

  ***

  When we reached the first picket of sentries, I was actually surprised to discover Kayla walking the ridge. I guess she earned her place after that last run. If seeing her out on roving patrol was a surprise, it did not hold a candle to what happened the moment she spotted us.

  “Thalia!” the girl squealed loud enough to bring any zombie for five miles heading our direction. If that wasn’t odd enough, she bounded down the hill and grabbed me in a very uncomfortable hug.

  “Hey, Kayla,” I said once she pulled back to reveal that she had honest-to-goodness tears rolling down her cheeks.

  “I thought that we would never see you again,” she gushed.

  “Surprise!” I said meekly, throwing my hands up for emphasis.

  We moved on and eventually arrived at the gates. That was where I discovered my next shock. The place was a beehive of activity. People were loading carts, horses, mules, and anything that could carry anything with as much stuff as possible.

  “Umm…” I turned to Paula, but she just moved past me like I wasn’t even there. When I spun to Billy, he was simply gone!

  I looked over to Jim and he made the mistake of meeting my gaze. I stormed over to him, a terrible feeling in my gut.

  “What is going on?” I demanded.

  “Listen, cupcake, I hate to—” he began, but was interrupted.

  “Thalia!” I turned to see Melissa and Stevie running for me.

  Stevie was actually falling behind as Melissa came with a speed I did not know she possessed. She hit me full force, her arms throwing themselves around me and sweeping me into the biggest hug I can ever recall receiving from the woman. A second later, Stevie caught up and it was now a Thalia sandwich.

  I struggled with this encounter. Yes, I was happy to see them both; thrilled to be perfectly honest. But I had something else on my mind. Apparently it would have to wait, because coming for us on a beeline, as people cleared a path to avoid being run over, was Dr. Zahn.

  “Young lady, you are a sight for sore eyes,” the doctor said with more emotion than I think I had ever seen from her in my entire life (except anger, I’d seen the doc pissed plenty of times over the years).

  “And I am glad to see all of you,” I finally said once I was able to get free of Melissa’s grip. “What is going on?”

  “We’re moving!” Stevie blurted.

  I caught the scowl on Dr. Zahn’s face. That made no sense to me. Not that any of this did. Why would everybody agree to just pack and leave? This was our home. We had been here for most of my life. We had a good thing here.

  “What about Jackson?” I asked, my voice a bit choked up as the realization of a very unpleasant possibility hit me in the gut.

  “Excuse me?” Dr. Zahn seemed genuinely perplexed.

  I wriggled free of all the arms trying to wrap around me. Suddenly they felt suffocating. I pulled away and faced Melissa, Stevie, and Dr. Zahn.

  “What are we going to do about Jackson? He is prisoner back at that woman’s camp,” I said very slowly, making a point to try and watch everybody’s face at once for some sense of a reaction.

  “I have no idea what you are talking about,” Dr. Zahn finally said.

  I saw her look past my shoulder. I turned to see Jim, Billy, and Paula heading for the cabin. They were ducking out of this madness and heading for the community’s council chambers. I took off after them at a sprint.

  I reached the big porch and took a deep breath before I entered. I did not want to come across like a child. I wanted to be taken seriously. I would ask direct questions and expect direct answers.

  When I walked into the open chamber, I was met by three heads that turned to face me all at once. Of the three, one of them looked as guilty as Stevie that one time when he got caught with an entire loaf of fresh pumpkin bread that Melissa had just baked.

  “What are we doing about Jackson?” I asked as I came up the aisle.

  Billy was seated on the edge of the little stage, his feet actually touching the floor where my own would be a good foot off the ground. Paula was standing beside him, and Jim had spun one of the chairs around backwards and had straddled it.

  “Thalia,” Billy began, but I shook my head.

  “Don’t you dare say what I think you are gonna say!”

  “He knew this going into the mission,” Paula whispered. Only, it wasn’t a whisper of sadness or anything like that; instead, she seemed to almost be warning me off like I was out of line.

  “Every single time you leave the walls, you run that risk,” Billy added, only minus the veiled warning or threat I thought I was hearing from Paula.

  “So we leave him to die?” I exploded. “What if I was still there?”

  “Then it would be the same,” Paula said flatly, her voice now as emotionless as I’d ever heard it. “We have to think of the community. One person does not merit risking several lives.”

  I turned to Jim. He was only able to hold my glare for a second or two before he looked at the floor. “It’s the truth, cupcake,” he said sadly. “Any one of us would knowingly give our lives for the better and greater good of the rest. Jackson would say the same to you if it were me left behind and he somehow managed to end up free from that place.”

  “But there has to be something—” I started, only, the tears had sent a signal to my throat and closed it off, strangling my words.

  “You saw how many of them there are,” Jim said sadly. “We don’t stand a chance if we try and fight them.”

  “But they wanted us on their side!”

  “That is one person’s word under duress. He could be lying. We do not have the luxury of trusting him,” Billy said, his lips pressed tight in a grim expression of finality.

  I looked from one to the other and saw it in their
eyes. The choice had been made. Paula had obviously lied to me back at the ambush to shut me up. She knew already that Platypus Creek was packing and preparing to leave.

  “Maybe if you hadn’t killed the escorts, then maybe we could have spoken to Suzi and come to terms,” I insisted.

  “After what she did to that guy Hunter, do you really think that true for even a moment?” Jim asked, his head finally coming up as he now found the strength or courage to meet my gaze.

  I stared back at him. A part of my brain was telling me that he was exactly right. Not to mention, how could I think for a moment that we could ever be friends with a person like that and not spend the rest of our lives sleeping with one eye open?

  Still, my brain was in no mood to think rationally. I was angry, hurt, and confused. I was tired of being lied to by everybody. Was that just the way of the world once you became an adult? Lie, lie, lie, and lie some more?

  I wanted to scream. I wanted to yell and throw a fit. More importantly, I wanted to have things back the way they were before I went off on that stupid field run.

  I turned and left. I almost thought that one of them might call me back or come after me, but none of them did. I stood outside and looked at people jogging one way or another. And while there was certainly a lot of urgency, the one thing I didn’t see was panic.

  “Are you going to be okay?” a voice said from my left.

  I turned to see Cynthia Bird coming up the path. Sunshine was beside her and both women looked like they had been up for about a week straight without any sleep.

  “How can anybody ever say yes to that question?” I said, allowing my tears to finally escape my eyes.

  “I’m just glad that you made it back,” Sunshine said, closing the distance and putting an arm around me.