by Chris Lowry
BATTLEFIELD Z
SWEET HOME ZOMBIE
By
Chris Lowry
Copyright 2016 by Grand Ozarks Media LLC
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval systems.
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CHAPTER ONE
I grew tired of convalescence after just three days. It could have been the drugs. Anna directed Byron's Boys, as she grew to call his Brigade, on what items to seek and return during their forays for treasure. Their hunts went well, not only into cabins along the riverbanks but houses in a small suburb miles out, and tiny little bergs in a radius of our short-term home.
The Z were plentiful, and they brought back a group of six more survivors, another cobbled together family who avoided me with a studied effort.
Anna said they were shy, which is what she told me about Tyler, the scout.
I caught sight of my reflection in the master bedroom mirror and knew she was lying to spare my feelings. The road rash left red scars along one side of the etched and roughhewed face that stared back at me, and a mottled yellow and purple bruise dotted the opposite cheekbone, a gift from Harriet's hand when I returned without her daughter.
The fever had built huge circles under my eyes, the heat and low food melting away the pounds until my skin stretched like parchment over my skull.
I looked the part of a walking dead man, and wondered for a moment how she could even bring herself to play nursemaid. But the drugs managed the pain of the burns across my back, which rippled and itched as they began to heal, and though I looked worse for the wear I still had full use of my body, which in the Z world was a blessing.
Byron reported to me each night after hunting, as he called it, keeping me up to speed on the happenings in his kingdom. The self-declared boy King.
“He's not in charge,” Brian told me one night.
“Who is?” I asked.
Right now, we were a collection of survivors, a motley crew looking for way more than a good time.
Brian stuttered and hemmed.
“Zombie got your tongue?”
“That's not funny,” he shot me a look then grinned. “At least not appropriate.”
Given the circumstances I was less than concerned about appropriate. We were surviving, but just and a power struggle between Brian and a fourteen-year-old homicidal psychotic wasn't going to help anyone sleep at night.
Especially me.
“He needs to rest,” Anna came into the back bedroom.
I was the only one who got a room all to myself, and Anna by virtue of being my nurse got to share it with me.
She shared the bed too, though we had yet to share each other.
I was only a little concerned about it.
She had a story, but hadn't told me yet. I figured she would share it in good time, or the way things had been working out, in bad time just before something awful happened.
She was right though.
It had been three days of Vicodin, and though I'd cut it down to half pills I was still tired. Maybe it wasn't just the drug. My body was tired from being beaten, battered and blown up. More than once.
Anna put me on a regimen of yoga and stretching twice a day. I wasn't good at it. Even before the Z my muscles were tight from running, like coiled springs I liked to say, but I couldn't touch my toes.
She wanted the muscles to stretch and heal in my backs and legs, and prevent scar tissue from building up. I listened to her.
No one should ever be in an explosion. It rattled things around, brain and gibbly bits, and the consequences of shock wave damage only showed up later.
I'd read an article about it before the apocalypse.
Now I spent some time wondering about concussions and burst blood vessels. Guess I didn't really have to worry about long term damage though.
Between the Z, the militias and now each other, we'd be lucky to last through winter.
CHAPTER TWO
Anna ushered Brian out then began the process of putting me to bed. It started with pushing me back onto the pillows, running a warm rag across my face and neck, then rolling me over to check the healing on my back.
It was scarred and burned, and some long gashes that required stitches she had done herself. I was happy to hear from Brian she had improved. A long-jagged gash on my head was her first or second effort at stitching and it did not look pretty.
She rubbed salve and ointment on the burns, bandaged them lightly, then spread the rest on other cuts, abrasions and small little wounds that I had barely noticed at the time. Her fingertips were cool against my hot skin, gentle and sure.
“They want you out there,” she told me.
I started to get up, but she held me against the bed by straddling my back and sitting on my butt.
“Not right now,” she continued. “But later. I don't think they realized how much they relied on you to make decisions.”
“But I left,” my voice was muffled by the pillow.
“And look what happened when you did.”
“Brian seems to be doing okay. We've been here three days and no trouble.”
“That's Byron’s doing. He's set patrols, controlled his boys and kept us fed. He tells everyone he's in charge.”
“Let him.”
“I would. I do. But Brian wants to move on. He doesn't think this place is safe.”
I sighed and shifted under her so she leaned up on her knees and I could roll over. I hissed for a second as my back rubbed against the sheets, but settled back down. She eyed me with a smirk and then lowered herself onto me.
I could feel the heat of her through my pants and felt something stir.
That drew a bigger smirk.
“You're still sick.”
“Talking to the wrong guy,” I said in that voice guys get when all the blood is rushing from their brain to other regions.
She ground down in a little circle. It felt electric.
“You're still sick,” she giggled to a lower part of me.
I put my hands on her hips, my thumbs comfortable in the crease of her thighs.
“I'll talk to them tomorrow.”
She ran her fingertip down the side of my cheek and watched me with large eyes.
“Then rest now. You'll need your strength.”
She slid off then and I felt a cool breeze settle over me. She didn't go far, just rolled to the side of me and curled up.
"What were you before?" she asked and I almost didn't answer.
The before didn't matter now, the before was ancient history. This was a time for the present, a moment for Buddhists and Taoists living only for the now because the past and future did not exist, only this time.
"I bet you were a cop. Or a soldier."
She made a cute gesture with her full lips, touching them with the tip of her finger and watching me with large eyes.
"Neither," I told her.
Though I could not have been either one. I took the tests for soldiering, as most boys in the south do once they turn seventeen. The Marines courted me hard, as did the Air Force and they said I was a "unique" personality, though I supposed they said it all the boys working to fulfill a monthly quota. But my type would not do well as a peace keeper, s
o there was no police force in my future and there were no wars to ship me to at the time I was of age, nor after. No real wars anyway, just actions and observation in countries where we were forced to stand silent while bad men did evil things often in front of us.
My type would not stand idly by.
"Why are you so angry?" she whispered softly into my chest.
Anna was nestled in the crook of my arm, using my shoulder as a pillow, her jean clad legs intertwined with mine. I could feel the heat between us simmering as she used the tip of her finger to trace the outlines of the button on my shirt.
"Do I seem angry?"
"Don't try to avoid it," she said again, still in a soft voice, almost a whisper into my neck. "It's okay. I think it might even be needed. Now. I was just wondering why?"
I breathed out then, like a sigh and she shifted. I squeezed her close to let her know it wasn't her that was making me uncomfortable.
"I grew up in a not so nice place," I told her. "My mom was a hippie gypsy and she married a not so nice man on her third marriage. He did not like kids, and liked to show it with his fists. Against her. Against me. Once against my younger brother, but I started getting in the way of that early. Then I got in the way of him hitting my mom. I got very good at getting hit."
"I'm sorry."
"Nothing to be sorry about," I said and meant it. "It made me who I am, what I am. It's the past and I can't do anything about it."
I didn't tell her the rest. For years, I bottled it up and kept it like a stone in my gut. Sometimes I hated. I even fought back a couple of times, a scrawny thirteen-year-old taking swings at a twenty-eight-year-old ex-Golden Gloves. He thought it was funny to try and knock me out. Rabbit punches to the temple to get my dizzy and an uppercut or roundhouse that knocked me in the wall.
My mom would try to stop him, and he would knock her down too, and laugh.
One night, I took his shotgun and loaded the double barrels. I sneaked into his room and slid the barrels into his mouth to wake him up. He didn't struggle. He didn't move.
But he was scared and pissed the bed.
That's when I realized something. I was a killer at heart. I could have pulled the triggers and gone back to sleep, secure in the knowledge that the world was a better place with the absence of one redneck.
My mom woke up and started crying.
I left.
I packed a backpack with clothes, a book and carried the shotgun out into the yard where I tossed it in the bushes. They didn't follow after me.
Pine Bluff was a small town even then, smaller still since I left by about twenty thousand people. Hell, maybe now the population was down to a couple of dozen survivors, or maybe the town dried up and disappeared. But then it rolled up the shutters at nine pm. No one stirred, except for lonely deputies patrolling the streets.
I walked to the train tracks and started down them until I heard the familiar click clack rumble on the rails. The trains slowed as they went through town, dropping from sixty miles per hour down to twenty, and slower if there was a backup in the switching station.
When it rolled past, I ran with it and jumped onto a ladder, dragging myself to the top of an open flat car and settled in. I thought about what I had done.
They would call the police and I would go to juvie. It was a threat the step-father made almost daily for infractions as minor as smarting off. I had straight A's in school, never got in trouble there, but kept my head down, a mostly shy boy who was terrified any one would find out about the beatings. I purposely knocked into walls, tripped on sidewalks, just to have an excuse for shabby clothes and fresh bruises.
I think all the teachers could see right through me, but the kids at least bought it.
I thought about life as I knew it.
There had to be something better out there. Some of the kids in school had both parents, and clean clothes and didn't stink like cigarette smoke and weed every day. They had food to eat that they bought in stores instead of hunting and fishing and growing it.
And they had parents who didn't think it was a game to hit, to hurt.
The rocking of the train put me to sleep and I woke up when it stopped in Fordyce, an even smaller town an hour and a half south of Pine Bluff. A flashlight beam cut across the rails and a watchman picked me out in the flatbed.
He took me into the guard shack, fed me a cold Coke and hot chicken noodle soup while he called my grandfather. I didn't dare call my mother, and my real Dad was working in Oklahoma on an oil rig at the time, two weeks on, two weeks off. He only stayed in town on his off weeks, and sometimes not even then.
My Papaw drove down in his truck, shook the watchman's hand and loaded me up. We didn't talk driving back, but he glared at the swollen eye and purple lined jaw visible in the flash of headlights. At the time I thought he was glaring at me.
He delivered me to my grandmother who tucked me in the double sized bed in the back room, and made me biscuits and bacon when I woke up the next morning.
I met my mother at her job, and she suggested I go live with my Dad. It was a casual suggestion, as if reached on a whim. So I did, living with my step-mother and her daughter for two weeks, and my father when he was home.
And I kept my head down, kept the feelings bottled up.
Anna kissed me after I told her. It was a long slow kiss, full of passion and promise. There was no desperation in it, no extension into something else, it was a kiss that offered comfort and support, and acceptance.
When she pulled back, I stared into her eyes and saw them glisten in the half light from the fading fire.
"That's why you're going after your kids."
It was that, sure, but more. I had broken so many promises I made to myself to be a better Dad than the examples I grew up with, but kept making stupid choices that led to two divorces and kids being raised by other men. I made noise and racket about those step dads being better than mine, and vows of revenge should they do to my kids what was done to me.
Then I realized they were better men than me, stepping in to pick up for my failures, tucking in where I couldn't, showing up when I wasn't.
I could blame the exes for that, for their choice for leaving, but ultimately, I decided I knew who was responsible.
Responsible for my mom kicking me out. For picking a man who hated me. For being shuttled between houses where no one really wanted me. For being unbearable, or unworthy of love by two wives. For missing the little moments in growing up and thinking it's okay because of all the time I missed in childhood.
I knew who was responsible and hated him.
And when he looked back at me in the mirror, I could see that hatred raging like a fire.
I kissed her on the forehead and wondered how long it would be before I messed her up too. In this new post Z world, it might not take long.
She wanted to know why I was angry, and I could never tell her.
But I could take it out on zombies and anyone who tried to hurt her, or me or any of my family.
CHAPTER THREE
"How are you feeling?"
"How do I look?"
Brian made a face. It was a crinkly face with a half-smile that said he wanted to say something nice but didn't like lying.
"I feel better than that," I told him.
"Good," he said. "If I had to answer out loud, my voice would betray me."
"You should check your face."
"Check your face, Frankenstein."
Good to see he still had his sense of humor. He was going to need it.
"We're not staying here."
"I know," he sighed. "It's been good for a rest stop, but it's time to move on."
That was easier than I thought. I had assumed he would fight against it. We had fish, running water in the river, a solar shower and generator for the cabin. Sure, everyone was sleeping on the floor in mattresses, air beds and nests of blankets so that once they were settled in for the night, no one dared move for fear of stepping on someone.
&nb
sp; It reminded me of some holidays in many years past, when all of the kids and their children visited the grandparents at a lake house on Lake of the Ozarks. Each family got a bedroom, no matter how many kids in that group, and people just slept on the bunks, or carpet or bed.
It was worse here. Thirty or so people crammed into a three-bedroom cabin that wasn't too large to start with.
It felt safer at night, but crowded during the day.
Peg and Harriet helped Hannah entertain the kids outside, corralled inside a wire clearing that blocked Z for a few moments if they showed, and Byron took his squad of boys on raids into surrounding houses and townships to keep us fed.
But this part of Alabama was sparsely populated, so pickings were slim.
Byron asked about foraging as far as Birmingham or Mobile, or even over toward Fort Benning on the Georgia border, but Brian kept him in reeled in closer to the cabin.
"It's settled then."
He shrugged.
"I guess."
We used to do an exercise in one of the personal development courses I took after my second divorce. Describe your ideal life, and an ideal day in it. What would you do day after day if money, or job or circumstance were no object? How would you like to spend the majority of your days? The exercise was supposed to be extremely detailed, and mine involved taking the kids in an RV someplace remote, wild and fantastic, like Zion or Brice Canyon, or the desert Southwest to explore.
I thought about that now, standing next to Brian as we stared at the narrow flowing river, the leaves shifting over to the red spectrum. Not quite cold yet, not even nippy in the mornings, but the air drier, the humidity blown away in a breeze that promised to bring colder weather sometime soon.
"Where do you want to end up now?"
He sighed and kept his eyes on the water.
"We never talk about the before," he spoke in a soft voice just loud enough for me to hear. "I wanted to be a leader in our company. Isn't that sort of a joke? It's what the managers called each other. Leaders. We didn't have managers in training, we had leaders in training. Leadership development courses, all by just changing the name. But it was still a company of managers. Clock watchers and petty paper pushers who were paid to make sure other clock watchers arrived on time and left on time, and did just enough to keep from getting fired."
