Tom was glad to take the back roads. The Dead moved quick on open ground sometimes, and he had his own nightmares of past freeways to contend with – memories of the early days on the road after things went bad and they left the mountains when the children’s mother and her other daughter were still with them.
Back roads also took them through the decayed suburbs of the past. They had to treat the roadsides with caution due to all the cover, walking as they always did, the scarcity of any viable fuel supplies leaving them only far less practical options. Four weeks into it, they were well-practiced by now. Tom walked in their center, modeling the grim and alert demeanor needed to avoid avoidable mistakes.
And life, as he knew, loved to offer lessons.
The undead thing broke into their awareness lurching from behind the trunk of a rusted tow truck, parked abandoned at a witty angle in front of a big white wooden house almost completely overgrown with lush ferns and vines. The neighboring dream homes lined their progress overlooking riotous lawns, front doors uniformly kicked open and sprayed with orange tags.
The Fury was a woman once, her summer dress congealed into a fetid second skin that clung to her gray-brown limbs and emaciated torso like someone’d covered her with a wet towel the color of mud and reeking of decay. Her skull bore only a few wispy chunks of hair, and coagulated, liplessly-feral teeth chattered together as she got to her feet for the first time in God knew how long, alerted to their approach by a favorable breeze.
Controlling things like the wind were problems Tom’d given up on long ago. He took a deliberate open-mouth breath between clenched teeth and scanned about as quickly as his thoughts assembled something akin to a poor man’s tactical map. Lucas hefted the rifle’s stock to one shoulder and swiveled back to his dad as the creature staggered out onto the road and started towards them.
“I can take the headshot,” Luke said.
“No.”
The boy thought his father mistrusted his aim. Then he kenned Tom’s workmanlike head-shake as Tom unshucked his bow and encouraged them to do the same, only noticing Lilianna’s arrow was already drawn after he made the signal. Tom couldn’t help but admire her deft moves, repositioning to cover their rear in case of multiple attacks as they’d drilled, while the living cadaver broke towards them in a knock-kneed run.
“Use your bow,” Tom said to Lucas. “Keep it quiet.”
There were no fake lessons here. Tom nocked his own arrow in a precautionary move that soon proved well-placed as his son tangled the carbine’s strap in the bow slung over his shoulder. The wedged bow then made the boy’s quiver tilt, and as he tried to wrest the old assault rifle clear, his arrows clattered to the ground, not properly secured the way they’d also trained.
Tom let out a grunt of displeasure he couldn’t help, directing his ire instead at the Fury now charging them. His arrow hit the thing in the throat and not the head as intended and Tom hissed, sensing the mistimed release too late to stop it.
The Dead banked hard to the right with the arrow jutting from its neck, a rabid dog’s intelligence surviving on instinctual cunning alone as it staggered behind the next parked car, the start of a row of rusting hulks Tom and his family had just passed.
“It’s just one lousy feral, dad,” Lilianna said in what was meant to be encouragement.
“Yeah, I know,” Tom replied as calmly as he could fake. “I’ve got her.”
“I’m sorry, dad,” Lucas said.
“Just pick up your goddamned arrows,” Tom answered him even though Lucas was already doing it.
They kept their eyes on the witch in the hedge scrabbling around the old vehicles making grunting sounds, then going up and over a slight gap between two of them to come around in a curving, awkward run from the rear.
“I’ve got it,” Tom said again.
He was still turning when his daughter released her shot, taking the dead woman at her full run. The arrow pierced the eye and the carbon steel tip jutted out the back of her skull as the corpse ran on for a second, then dropped wetly to the macadam.
“If I’m on target, you’re meant keep covering my rear,” he said.
“That’s what I was doing,” Lilianna replied. “I was going to draw again the moment I took my shot.”
“That’s not how we’re meant to do it.”
“I already had the shot,” she said. “That’s what I cover the rear for: rear attack.”
“From other targets.”
“Jesus, dad,” Lilianna snorted and only broke off the furious eye contact to walk back to the now-still mannequin and put her boot on its head to retrieve her arrow, eyes almost still entirely on her father as she added, “You know my draw speed, right?”
He wasn’t an indulgent parent, but that didn’t stop him feeling torn between irritation and a sort of glorious hot pride for his daughter’s fierceness. Unfortunately, it made her a firebrand for those all around – but a fire, too, when it kept her people safe.
Tom disguised his fluster with a sensible double-check of their surrounds. Lucas finished getting his shit together and straightened up from crouching to meet his father’s woefully stern and disapproving look.
“Jesus, dad, I get it.”
“You don’t get to be the pissed-off one,” Tom answered.
Luke’s frown broke and his eyes dropped to his scuffed basketball boots. He was a good kid and knew how to stew on his own stuff long enough to reach some measure of truth.
“You look sad,” Tom said.
“Yeah.”
“You know you don’t have to worry about me just because I’m angry,” Tom said to him for the millionth time. “You know I’m not going to hold my tongue when you’re in danger of getting yourself killed. You mean too much to me, boy.”
“I know that.”
“Look me in the eye.”
Reluctantly, Lucas did as told, ironic maybe to find his father still frequently checking the scene around them despite the lack of immediate threats.
“What is it?” Tom asked.
“You’re not feeling weird about the City, dad?”
“I’m totally feeling weird about the City,” Lila said. “And I also can’t wait. That’s weird too, huh? Let’s keep moving.”
“In a moment,” Tom said. “I was listening to your brother. You can scout ahead, Lila. No further than a –”
“– than a football field,” his daughter echoed him and laughed, pleased with herself and her efforts, wiping off the gory arrow with one of the rags they carried for such things. She fitted the arrow back to her bowstring and moved ahead.
Tom took back his own arrow too.
“You’re feeling weird about the City,” he said to Lucas.
“Yeah.”
“Go on.”
“I don’t know.”
“I’m sure you do,” Tom said. “Say anything you want.”
“I’m just . . . frightened . . . and also kind of sad about . . . It doesn’t make any sense.”
“It doesn’t have to make sense,” his father said.
“If this City’s for real – if they really have things up and running – we’re leaving all of this behind,” Lucas said.
“That’s the general idea.”
“It’s a big change.”
“Say what you really mean.”
“I just can’t believe I screwed up that shot,” Lucas said more fiercely. “And I just thought, what if that was the last walker I ever got to kill, you know?”
“‘Got to kill’?”
Not for the first time, Tom stopped himself saying something stupid about video games since Lucas had never seen one, despite living to the age of seven in that era now lost to them.
“We kill these things because they want us dead.”
“I’m just saying I don’t know if I’m ready for things to change,” Luke said.
“I get it.”
Tom nodded his head solemnly, that deliberate thing he did with his kids they were aware of and they als
o sometimes found frustrating – his meditation. Holding space.
Lucas sighed.
“We can just jump to the part now where you tell me how you see it.”
Tom chuckled, disguising it with another scan of the area. He motioned, and they started walking, Lilianna reaching the crossroad ahead and pausing as if looking out for traffic.
“To me,” Tom said, “if there’s a chance you and your sister could ever have something like we’ve lost, then we have to risk it.”
“But what about you, dad?”
“What about me?”
“Is that what you want too, to get the world back?”
Tom barely contemplated the question.
“It doesn’t matter what I want.”
*
THE ROADBLOCK APPEARED like a mirage, materializing out of the gray terrain only as Tom and his kids cleared the tasteful pines framing the last few streets. Ahead was a corner lot hosting the burnt-out ruin of a liquor store, the street narrowed by a bunch of rusted sheet fencing, an open checkpoint showing a big, military-looking marquee, the barricade completed by two shipping containers positioned in conspiracy with a nearby construction crane. A bona fide tank was parked to one side. It was hard to ignore the dozen fresh-dug graves in the grass to its left. A pair of gunmen manned the tank’s open turret, and another half-dozen men and women stood at sentry duty before a big, hand-painted canvas sign declaring the location COLUMBUS CHECKPOINT #3.
The sentries wore a patchwork of military and police gear, most with body armor, all toting assault rifles, despite their relaxed air. A smoke haze of bacon drifted through the narrow entrance they controlled like some kind of lure. A woman in mirror shades puffed a hand-rolled cigarette.
Pairs of sentries patrolled the knee-high grass east and west, and it was a man and woman in dark armored clothing scouting the liquor store who raised the alarm.
“Fury!”
At first Tom thought they were yelling about them, but across the vacant block, left of the tank, a skinny lithe figure in a tattered blue private school uniform loped on a diagonal trajectory straight for Tom and his family still a long bowshot from the sanctuary gates.
“Run for the checkpoint!”
The first shout came from the woman in the shades, she and her colleagues rapidly hefting weapons, several taking to one knee as the undead ten-year-old stumbled uneasily on the broken ground, continuing on with the namesake fury that gave the damned things life.
The sentry’s command turned into a chorus of shouts as Tom urged Lucas and his sister to follow the instructions, the creature barreling in at them emitting a fervid growling noise despite its jaws hanging wide open, like anticipating its next, long overdue meal.
Lucas broke into a run, following orders. Lilianna wasn’t so convinced.
She stayed at her father’s elbow as he drew the bow and armed it with practiced skill, giving himself the time he’d not heeded earlier in the day and sinking the shaft deep between the running Fury’s dead eyes.
The corpse carried on a bit as they sometimes did, momentum continuing it past them as they stepped aside and it tripped in the street and rolled a couple of times, flopping limbs falling still as Lilianna offered the oncoming soldiers a show of fatherly devotion, moving across as if making a point to show off her arrow-retrieval skills and unflustered charm in one fell swoop.
The running soldiers slowed, the last couple almost feeling foolish for it. The woman with the mirror shades was the squad leader, twin lines of paint daubed on her jacket’s upper arm as some indicator of rank. Rather than say anything, the blunt-faced woman eyed Tom up a moment and cracked a rueful grin. Gesture rather than words were sufficient to direct the surviving family forward and through to the entrance of the camp.
*
THE NEW ARRIVALS were steered straight into the command tent, old roadway beneath their boots, a back flap in the marquee pinned open to reveal more tents inside the checkpoint with their plastic dividers rolled up, rows of camp beds and a few tables and chairs inside, a smaller medical tent on the far side of the compound with an actual doctor and nurses and more guards standing by with facemasks and guns undermining the sense of sanctuary even as they guaranteed it.
It was dim in the marquee, like the feeling of potential execution ingrained like a deep paranoia, though Tom’s children felt it too – or so he judged by their grim faces. It wasn’t just the threat of the moment before. And it wasn’t just that they were now finally at the point of inevitable change they’d been trekking towards for four weeks.
The woman sentry, Drake, held her gun level like she might draw on them at any moment. Her back-up was a black kid toting an AK-47 and wearing mostly salvaged police gear, a single white stripe on his arm, and a name badge, Loxley, possibly not his own.
A dumpy woman in coveralls and a youngish, silver-haired guy in chinos and an ironed blue shirt arose from two seats at the marquee’s only table and reached for clipboards. The woman passed her partner a pen. Tom’s eyes scanned the radio gear on the table and several empty plastic containers.
“Hi, you’re making for Columbus?” the woman asked.
“Well, yeah.”
“I’m Rose. This is Archie,” she said. “We don’t have titles. The guards have ranks. If you mess around at all at this stage we just shoot you, clear?”
“Jesus,” Tom said quietly. “Yeah, OK.”
“We have a few questions and we’re sure you have a few,” Archie said.
Tom sniffed, declining to leap at the invitation.
“This is what you guys do, is it?” he said. “Good cop, bad cop?”
Rose and Archibald eyed each other a moment and then laughed, surprising Tom and his children by trading high fives.”
“That was an awesome response,” Rose said.
“This guy’s a keeper,” Archie said. “Name?”
“Tomas Eduard Vanicek,” Tom said. “These are my children Lilianna and Lucas.”
“You went for the same letter, huh?” Rose said. “I’d never do that.”
“It was their mother’s choice.”
He had to tease the words out of himself, like a tapeworm.
“I wanted Viking names,” he said weakly.
“I thought you named me after Luke Skywalker?” Lucas said.
Tom ignored him. The woman spoke again, strangely playful, like teasing a dangerous dog.
“What if you’d had three?” she asked.
Tom glanced at his kids.
“We did have three.”
“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.”
Lila tensed. Tom was so sensitive to her response it almost felt like the air flexed.
“She . . . wasn’t mine,” he said. “But we . . . found her early on.”
The woman called Rose gave him a curious look and dropped any pretense of sympathy as if it were a relief. In contrast, the sentry Drake seemed moved by their awkward pause.
“You kept your own two kids alive through four-and-a-half years of living hell?”
Tom nodded slowly, as if any admission might also be a weakness.
“I did.”
“You did well.”
“Yes, good job,” Rose said and glanced at her watch. “We have to disarm you.”
“Disarm?” Tom asked. “For how long?”
“For good,” Rose said and laughed at his expression.
“Just until we’re sure you’re socialized,” Archie said more soothingly.
“We’re socialized,” Tom said. “House-trained and everything.”
“You won’t need weapons in the City,” Rose said.
“Only Safety officers have an open-carry permit,” Archie said. “Don’t worry. You’re finally gonna be safe.”
“And what if someone turns?” Lilianna asked.
“You’ll be fine.”
“We still need your weapons,” Drake said.
Her tone was deliberately loud and flat. Immovable. Not much sympathy now.
“There’s no sanctuary without sacrifice, kids,” the woman said.
There was a long pause. Tom was mindful of Rose and Archie getting antsy.
“This is going to be a problem, is it, Mr Vanicek?” Rose asked. “You’re welcome to turn the fuck around and go back into the wild.”
“You don’t want that, do you?” Drake asked.
It sounded like a plea.
She added, “At least for your kids, right?”
Tom nodded, dropping his head as he motioned for his children to follow suit. He held out his bow. Lucas gingerly unshouldered the carbine, then his own smaller bow.
“I’m willing to disarm in a show of good faith,” Tom said. “But these are our possessions. Our things. They belong to us.”
“We’ll have the details recorded and you’ll know where they are being stored.”
Tom finally agreed. Tom handed Drake the bow and took the M14 from Lucas while unbuckling the ammo belt. Drake took those too, then snapped her fingers at Tom’s Bowie knife.
“All of you,” she said to the children too. “Sorry. Them’s the rules.”
“What about the Dead?”
“You have us for the Furies.”
“We’ve been relying on ourselves for a long time.”
“Then you’ll be glad to put that all behind you,” Rose said.
Tom bit his lip on the reply for so long that it never came. The women shot him hooded glances, mistaking silence with compliance. And all the while, Tom felt Lila and Lucas watching too, fighting back the sense of rising fear he also felt.
*
ROSE FLICKED SEVERAL pages ahead on her script while her silver-haired companion helped Drake stack the Vaniceks’ weapons on the table.
“We’re trying to rebuild America and we need every able-bodied, skillful, competent person we can,” Rose said. “What did you do?”
“What do you mean?”
After The Apocalypse Season 1 Box Set [Books 1-3] Page 2
