Renegade Z: a Battlefield Z series

by Chris Lowry

  “Ass, gas or grass,” I said. “No free rides.”

  He reached into his pocket and handed me a folded slip of paper.

  “They gave you a bill?” I asked as I unfolded it.

  “Assignments,” he said.

  A list of our names on the page, along with duties lined next to it. Garden. Shop. Clean. Guard.

  “Your name’s not on here?” said Brian.

  “That’s what I’ve been thinking about. I guess I’m more transparent than I thought.”

  “You told them something you didn’t tell us?”

  I shook my head.

  “I’m not staying,” I said and held up a hand to stop his protest. “You should. All of you should. This place is safe. I can go get Bis and come back.”

  He gave me a sad look and shook his head.

  “You haven’t learned your lesson yet, have you?”

  “What lesson?”

  “You don’t go off in the woods alone. You don’t go in the basement by yourself. You don’t go hunting for your lost kid on your lonesome.”

  “It’s safe here,” I said again.

  “Sure it is. It was safe on the bus too.”

  “Until you streaked in front of a Z horde,” added Peg.

  “Shouldn’t you be doing,” I shook the paper open and searched for her name. “Fishing?”

  “I start tomorrow,” she smirked. “But if we’re leaving this afternoon, I’m not wasting my time.”

  “We’re not leaving,” I put the emphasis on we.

  “Haven’t we had this discussion before,” said Brian.

  He held out his glass to me again.

  “I can keep the kids here, you can watch them, everybody waits behind the walls,” I said.

  It made sense to me.

  My mind had already constructed the reunion. I’d go. I’d use the map. I’d find Bis. And we would come back.

  Brian shook his head again. Peg got off the chair she was sitting in and moved to the other side of me.

  They bracketed me on the front porch.

  “Anna won’t let you leave again,” she said.

  “The kids won’t let you leave,” Brian said. “I won’t. Not again. Not this time.”

  Peg hooked her arm through mine and leaned against me.

  “You are a pain in the ass,” she said. “I think before all this, before this world, we would never have met and that makes me sad. Because I’m damn glad I met you.”

  She reached across me and grabbed Brian’s hand.

  It was a weird and wonderful hug, stuck between the two of them, feeling overwhelmed with gratitude and friendship.

  “Glad I met both of you,” she sniffed.

  “Who needs the tissue now?” I asked.

  She reached into her pocket and pulled a bandana out to swipe at her face.

  “Always a step ahead of you.”

  We heard a gunshot from the direction of the main gate.

  I pushed out of their embrace.

  “Get everyone together. Wait for me,” I said.

  Then I ran.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Gregory stood outside the gate.

  Tears streaked down his blood soaked face, slobber and snot dripping from his chin to land on Stroud in his arms.

  I got to the gate in time to watch the little man collapse under the weight of Stroud.

  “Don’t!” he screamed. “Don’t come out.”

  “Closer!” a voice yelled from the shadows of the forest behind him.

  “No!” Gregory screamed again.

  The guards on our side aimed their rifles into the woods.

  I kept my eyes on Gregory.

  He stood up and dragged Stroud closer toward the gate.

  “Stop them!” the Russian voice shouted through the speaker.

  Gregory sat backwards on the gate and yanked Stroud with him.

  I heard his back rattle against the metal fence.

  Then the world took a tumble. I saw blue sky, and green grass, and the sun on the wane and dirt right before I crashed into it.

  I rolled over and sat up, shaking my head and trying to clear the cobwebs.

  The gate was gone.

  A crater stood where Gregory and Stroud had been.

  People who had gathered to watch screamed and yelled, a bloodied smoking mess of chaos and confusion.

  Men poured into the madhouse.

  I couldn’t count how many. I had my shoes on, so higher than ten would have been difficult.

  And my ears were still ringing, head still gonging from my flight.

  The speaker dangled from a brick column and sparked as it warbled.

  The six guards were down, a couple rolling in agony, but others so still I knew they were dead.

  Dead and gone.

  The men from the outside ran through the smoke and haze.

  They looked like shadow figures moving through the clouds, sneaking up the short rise where I’d first seen Stroud and his men come to greet us at the gate.

  I watched as one moved toward a fallen figure, someone I didn’t know.

  He bent down, put the gun against her head and she grew still.

  I think she was screaming, but I still couldn’t hear her.

  Then he used zip ties to bind her wrists and ankles before he moved on.

  The others were doing the same.

  Not killing.

  Taking prisoners.

  I rolled over and pushed off the ground, let the world spin a little bit while I held on to a tree trunk.

  When it stopped, I took a practice step forward. The earth tilted, but not enough to spill me back on my face.

  The second step was easier, and then I could hear the blood pounding in my ear, the adrenaline dump combating whatever damage done to my head.

  It was a losing fight, I’m sure, but at least I could hear.

  Screaming.

  From the direction of the yellow house.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Stroud took our weapons when we walked in, and the fallen guards were too far out of the way to detour in that direction.

  Plus, there were at least six guys between me and them.

  I’ll admit to having bad judgement, but even a blind squirrel gets a nut once in a while.

  I didn’t rush into the fray unarmed. I chased the screams.

  The bad men rounded people up as they went, tying them up and leaving the squirming bundle where they were found.

  I nearly tripped over one of them as he zip tied a pretty brunette, ignoring her cries and protests.

  Her eyes gave me away.

  He whipped around, growled and tried to bring his gun up in time.

  I did my best muy thai interpretation and kneed him in the chin as we went down together.

  It didn’t knock him out like I hoped. But he bit through his tongue and gargled out a piece of pink meat and red blood in a bubbling yell.

  I gagged and cracked him across the throat with my elbow.

  He choked and bucked as I rolled him over on his back and straddled him, wrestled the gun free from a strap and pounded the butt past his hands and into his trachea.

  It was going to take him time to die, suffocate, but I couldn’t risk a shot to the head.

  Not yet.

  I didn’t hear any others.

  I didn’t wait for him to get still, and I didn’t untie the woman, despite her request and begging.

  She shot curses at my back as I kept moving, my only thought was the yellow house.

  Another man was waiting, aiming his gun around the corner of a building toward the big community center where the Ambassador was holed up.

  He sent a shot through the window, the first round fired in their attack on the town.

  The second shot fired popped through the back of his head and decorated the cobblestones with grey matter and dental work.

  I kept moving.

  The were shooting. I was wrong. My hearing was still jacked up, but as the volume dialed
back in with a really cool doppler effect, I could hear the bams and pops.

  But it was liberating.

  I shot as I ran. Back of the head. Man down. Side of the face. Man down.

  A shadow running toward me. I took a knee and lined up until I could see the white of his eyes.

  No gun. No weapon. It was a local, trying to hide.

  Nope. Trying to run from a man chasing him.

  I had a clear shot and dropped the intruder, then moved on.

  The yellow house had three of them lined up on either side of the door.

  They shot around the corner, shot up the stairs, trying to keep their bodies shielded by the walls from whoever was fighting back from the inside.

  It didn’t work.

  I lined up and did a quick connect the dots, a simple bang, bang, bang that plopped three bodies onto the porch.

  A bullet whizzed by my nose, scraping the tip with line of fire. It sent me spinning to the ground, and another round chewed up the sidewalk where I had just been.

  I looked up to see a grinning madman running toward me, another one behind him.

  They fired as they ran, and I was the luckiest SOB on the face of the earth, because while it’s great to run and shoot in movies, in real life, it just means you’re going to miss.

  Probably.

  They did.

  Until they got closer and stopped. Took careful aim.

  And dropped. Meat sacks with their strings clipped.

  More guards from the community swarmed out of the buildings. Armed and armored.

  They swept through the streets, cleaning up the invaders, clearing up the stragglers.

  They ignored me as they marched past. Either because I was unarmed, or because they recognized me.

  I didn’t know.

  All I know is my nose hurt. I reached up and almost started crying.

  It was still there. Most of it. A chunk of the tip was scraped away. Still bleeding, turning my hand into a crimson mess.

  Then Anna was there, trying to smother me with a rag to stop the bleeding.

  Brian lifted me up, the Boy under the other arm, and Tyler helping.

  They carried me into the yellow house while the fighting wound down outside.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  “Smell this,” said Bem.

  Tyler and the Boy giggled. I did not.

  “I can still use it,” I said.

  “Not right now,” she reminded me.

  She was right. I had a patch of gauze packed tight around my nose, which made smelling anything difficult.

  And I still had some trouble hearing. I had to look at people while they talked to me.

  I wondered how much of it was reading lips.

  But it might mean I wouldn’t overhear anymore conversations over campfires.

  Brian came in with Peg.

  “We’re ready,” he said.

  Our modified bus waited on the end of the street that wasn’t designed for cars.

  It was a concession by the Ambassador for our help.

  He was waiting as we marched out and shook my hand.

  “We have had trouble like this before,” he told me. “Not your fault. It is always the way. People will want what we have. But is still safe.”

  Tell that to Stroud, I almost said.

  But if it happened before, then they had lost people before.

  The guards had chased the rest of the men into the woods and lost some of them.

  We didn’t have a count of how many, but Anna knew a couple of faces.

  Which meant they were her husband’s group.

  They might chase us still. Or lay in an ambush.

  We would have to be careful.

  “Last chance,” I said to Brian before I got on the bus.

  He just shook his head and shoved me up the stairs.

  I settled into a seat in the middle and looked around at my group.

  I had wanted them to stay behind walls and locked gates, but they weren’t any safer in there, than they were right here with me.

  There were still threats out here. Z. Too many of them. The man chasing us. And whatever we might find.

  But we were going to find it together.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  “Is this what you expected?”

  I blame the Russian. He took a look at the map and drew a line in a grease pencil to show us the way.

  It avoided the Interstate and major roadways.

  How he knew about it, I’ll never know. The two lane and three lane blacktop rolled through the countryside toward our destination, a refugee camp in north Georgia.

  It had been a smooth thirty mile an hour ride, slow enough that we had time to react to whatever we might find.

  Like this.

  A wall. A giant freaking wall.

  Metal. Four stories high. It stretched across the horizon for as far as we could see running in a Northern direction and trailing Southeast.

  According to the map, we were only twenty miles from the coast.

  I wondered if the wall ran the whole way.

  “We’re going to have to backtrack,” said Peg. “Find another way.”

  There were thousands of Z at the base of the wall. A massive herd of them, waiting. Moaning.

  Too close, but they hadn’t seen us yet.

  Peg dropped the bus in reverse and we backed up, looking for a spot wide enough to turn around.

  She found it, did a k-turn and we went back up the road we had just traversed, searching for an alternative route.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  “What do you think it means?” Bem and Tyler sat next to each other by the fire.

  We found a great spot to camp in a campground by a lake.

  The north Georgia pines carpeted the earth with soft brown needles, which crackled, popped and let out a fragrant pine scented smoke as she fed them into the fire.

  “I have an idea,” Brian told me as we pulled into the parking lot.

  He grabbed the Boy, Karen, Byron and Hannah and led them to soccer fields on the far side of the park.

  They cut the nets off the goals and were using them to fish in the shallow waters of the lake.

  At first, I didn’t think it would work, but they had two dozen fish on the banks, ready to be cleaned, gutted and poked on the end of a stick over the coals.

  “Someone has to know something,” said Anna.

  She stared into the flames and sighed.

  “That’s the worst part about this, you know,” she said. “The not knowing. We run into these communities, or people and get information, but it’s all second hand or just lies. We don’t know what’s true anymore.”

  “This,” said Tyler as he gripped Bem’s hand. “This is what’s true.”

  I wanted to scoff. I wanted to snort. I wanted to reach over and rip his hand off, flip him the bird with his own finger, and drop it in the fire so he could smell his flesh cook.

  “You’re right,” I said. “This.”

  I put my hand on Anna’s shoulder and felt her settle into a comfortable slouch against it.

  Brian brought back a soccer net full of fish and they began to prepare the food.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  “Is that it?”

  The Boy double checked the map to make sure he was right.

  “Shit,” he muttered.

  “Language,” I said.

  But I felt like saying it too.

  We saw the outer fence of a refugee camp. Twelve feet inside of it was a second row of fence that stretched around the perimeter.