The berm that reinforced the ramshackle fencing met up with the access road on the northernmost arc of the loop. The six of them continued along, walking atop the wide earthen mound as they continued westward toward the junkyard. Between the mud, the grieving, and the injured, their progress moved along at a crawl. Nala struggled to help Tim, but he outweighed her by more than seventy pounds. Tar fell often and each time he was slower to rise. Jen grew quieter and her focus seemed to be back, though she was silent and withdrawn. Nala spent all of her remaining ammunition keeping the area in front of them clear of the undead, and Tar used his few remaining bullets on dispatching the undead that moved up from at their flanks. Even the slow stagger of the undead was enough to overcome the sluggish pace of the group.
It took more than half an hour for them to make it within sight of the corner of the junkyard. Tar's heart dropped into the pit of his stomach as a group of a dozen undead approached them from the west. Unsure of how to proceed, he stopped the forward progress of the six. Jen continued to tug on Tar's arm for a moment, until she too noticed the advancing undead. The undead drew inexorably closer while they all waited for someone to posit an idea. It was apparent that the undead were going to reach the corner before them, and even if they dropped down beforehand, the undead were sure to do the same in pursuit. The choice was to face them out in the open or in the mud and brackish water below the perimeter wall of Donner.
The undead staggered and stumbled up the rise, finally gaining the top of the berm. Their milky dead eyes were locked on the group as they moved in, their moans now filling the air. The baby continued his plaintive wailing as the rest blew gasps of steam into the chill air, trying to catch their breaths for the coming struggle. When the undead were within fifty feet, Tar finally spoke.
“Climb down, we will fight them as they fall,” Tar finally said, his voice full of confidence. “Go ahead, Lin, I'll hold the baby while you help get the injured down there.”
The undead were within twenty feet by the time Linda, holding the newborn, Jen, and Tim stood at the bottom of the barrier. Jen was barely holding it together and looked borderline catatonic. Tim and Linda stood in the muck below with their arms raised, waiting to help guide Nala and Tar safely down. Nala was seated on the edge of the wall to help lower people.
“Tar, let's go. It's your turn,” Nala called to the man's back.
The undead were nearly upon them, just a few paces away. Their moans seeming to grow more urgent as their quarry was nearly within reach. Tar turned and took Nala's hand and moved to the edge of the berm. He dropped down to the ground, landing heavily on his left buttock. A groan escaped his lips as he reached across his body and shoved Nala from atop the embankment. He grabbed her hand as she slipped off, swinging her into the waiting, outstretched arms of Linda and Tim below. Her momentum barely broken by Linda and Tim, Nala tumbled, face first, into the muck and mire. She pulled herself up and saw Tar, above, smiling broadly down at them.
“You all take care now, I'll do my best to make sure these bastards don't come after you.”
As he spoke the words the heads of the undead came into view, looming over the top of the man. Tar rolled away from their reaching arms and out of sight of the four below. A moment passed as they waited, anticipating a man's scream, but none came.
“Go!” Nala urged in a hiss.
She goaded them to start moving, hooking her one arm under Jen's shoulder and her other around Linda's waist.
“Lin!” Nala hissed. “You've got to move.”
Linda was openly weeping as they moved away from the berm, behind the corrugated steel wall of Sickler's junkyard. In their brief and desperate relationship, Tar had become a surrogate father to her. Her love of the gruff old coot very nearly made her turn back. If not for the infant, she likely would have.
As the five came to the edge of the junkyard, the remains of the refugee camp opened up into sight before them. The undead milled about, though in less numbers than they had in Donner. There were nearly a dozen in sight, either feasting or roaming about in search of prey. The camp had housed nearly eight hundred just that morning. All of those people were now either dead or once again scattered to the four winds. They paused for a minute, a hundred feet or so outside the camp, gathering their flagging strength and courage. Tim was desperate to get back to his family. The sight of the undead moving freely around the camp was enough to cause worry. When the group finally reached the outer edge of the camp and spotted their campsite from the night previous, Tim was pushed over the edge of panic. Most of their gear still lay on the ground, strewn about the campsite.
Nala was the first to spot movement through a thicket across the river. She nudged Tim and took hold of Linda's shoulder. When they looked at her they followed her pointed finger extended across the road and water. After a moment it became clear that there were a great many forms crossing the water. They were wading across an eddy pool towards a wide and shallow part of the river. The panic that was brought on by the sight of so much movement abated almost immediately, when a pair of them carrying the limp form of a third came into view. Without waiting to discuss it, Nala moved off in a crouch. She scrambled to the northwest, across the camp that stretched across the breadth of the road. She kept moving despite the handful of undead that lurked about, stopping only when she had arrived at the guardrail alongside the river.
The rest of the group shadowed Nala on the near side of the road, though moving much slower. They crept cautiously, trying to remain hidden from the undead on the roadway above. They moved along the ditch where it was deep, or behind the dense brush that bordered the road near the boggy lowlands. Linda, burdened with the infant was first, followed by Tim who helped along the barely conscious, grieving form of Jen. Tim's body was racked by agony with every step as he moved along the road. His eyes never left the north, as if somehow he might see his family there. As she came to a stop at the guardrail overlooking the river, Nala's head shot around on a pivot, looking for imminent danger. When the rest saw Nala reach the other side of the roadway, they stopped in the culvert opposite her and waited, watching her.
Nala was crouched with her body pressed against the guardrail. She scanned the area cautiously as she waited on the group that was making its way to the shallows on this side of the river. Two men in the group came ashore first and looked shocked at the sight of Nala as she stood. She nodded in recognition of the Ute and flagged them up onto the roadway. The next sixty seconds were a flurry of movement as the group of nearly twenty men, women, and children, including two strangers, made their way out of the water and over the railing. Once the entire group, including the body they carried, was over the guardrail, they all turned to her. Nala looked about, scanning the group quickly, then the area around them on the road, ending her scan of the area with her gaze locked on Linda in the ditch opposite. She blew Linda a kiss and shooed the group onward, to the north. With one last wink, she turned back to the group that was now gathered around her on the roadway.
“Shouldn't we wait for her?” Tim asked, his voice filled with genuine concern with the well-being of the slight woman.
“She is more than capable of handling herself. Besides, they are from Donner,” Linda reassured the man before starting off to the north with her arm around Jen's waist.
As they moved northward, they gradually moved out of sight of the roaming undead. The two-lane rural highway ahead of them lay clear and barren. Their anxiety gradually lessened with the undead out of sight, even Jen seemed a bit less sluggish. Nearly a half-mile up, a wide pasture opened to the right side of the road. Tim's pace quickened and he started to leave the two women behind. He could no longer bear the suspense of his family's fate as the field opened up to the right side of the road. There were still more than three dozen cars, trucks and SUVs scattered about the boggy, makeshift parking lot. Tracks and furrowed mud told the tale of a great many vehicles that had already departed. Tim was anxiously scanning the lot when Linda's voice from be
hind called out.
“There!” she shouted, excitedly.
Tim turned back and followed the length of her extended arm. He could see a pair of hands waving excitedly in the back corner of the lot. At the sight of Laura's face beaming through the windowless Yukon, Tim smiled broadly. He sighed heavily, breathing out the tension and nagging fears of the past five or six hours. His worries for his family lifted from his heart at last. The three made their way as quickly as Tim was able to usher them through the rows of cars. They were moving along the final row towards where the mangled nose of the Yukon poked out from the rear of an abandoned BMW.
Just as Laura and Luna's beaming faces came into sight from the driver's seat of the Yukon, a voice called out from further ahead.
“Ladies, Gentlemen,” came the voice before correcting. “Well, gentleman.”
Tim looked confusedly into the high weeds at the end of the aisle as the words came to him. The voice was full of quaint southern charm and rang cheerfully in their ears, slowing the trio as they took in the image of a man that none of them had ever seen before. At first Linda assumed that he was a refugee she hadn't yet met. Tim and Laura assumed he was a resident of Donner. They all looked at the man quizzically as he approached. The stranger came clear of the weeds and brought his right arm up from his side, raising a pistol to chest level, his face still beaming with what appeared to be genuine delight at seeing them. They all froze in place.
“No!” came Laura's roar from inside the vehicle.
The stranger pressed the trigger and the pistol jerked slightly. A tendril of smoke drifted from the barrel. The sound split the silence, echoing across the empty field filled with glass and steel. Gore and blood showered across Linda's face as Tim dropped to the ground, dead at her feet. Linda screeched in horror, dropping to her knees to try and do something for the man, even though the shattered remnants of his skull immediately told her it was beyond hope.
“Ladies it is, then!” the man exclaimed, raising his voice to be heard over Laura's anguished wailing and Linda's scream of surprise and horror.
Grayson stepped out of the cover of the forest, flashing a toothy smile with a touch of a smirk on the corner. Laura pushed past the man as she rushed out of the SUV to her husband's side.
“No, no, no, no, no, no!” she sobbed as she pulled the man's bloody, destroyed head into her lap, clutching him tightly into her stomach.
Her howls of agony melted into a steady sobbing as she clutched his bloody head into her.
“It looks like today is a mixed bag for all of us,” Grayson remarked to Linda, ignoring Laura's heart-wrenching bellows. “No Tar, but female companionship is in short supply these days, as is morale. That one is still a bit young, though, I'm sure there are some who won't mind.”
He was speaking about Sophie as the little girl, clutching her Hello Kitty purse, came clear of the Yukon. She moved in a wide arc to avoid Grayson, coming to a stop at Laura's side.
“Linda!” came Nala's voice screaming from out of sight, down the road. “Linda, Yen's been shot! We need you.”
“Another one!” Grayson remarked, clapping his hands together excitedly. “The day just gets better and better. Pablo, start loading them up.”
Another man came out of the high weeds from the same spot that Grayson had emerged. He moved purposefully towards Laura and Sophie. Laura's screams began to take on a note of fury. Sophie, seemingly unfazed by the events, unzipped her purse and forced it into Laura's hands.
“We are creating a new world out of the corpse of the old, ladies. Of course some sacrifices will need to be made,” he said looking to Laura, still clutching her husband's head. “But in the end you will see. The sheep need a shepherd.”
Linda stood and advanced on the man at this point.
“How fucking dare you!” she screamed at him, her hands balled into fists as she approached, “You fucking animal! Isn't there enough death for you?”
Pablo smirked as he moved past the diminutive form bearing down on Grayson. He was intent on Laura and Sophie. Grayson retreated before Linda with a smile of his own, her sails full of fury. He came to a stop when his back struck the open rear passenger door of the Yukon. He was left standing between the doors of the BMW and the Yukon. Linda pulled up short, at the front bumper, still screaming.
A look of surprise and fear came over Grayson's face as a gunshot split the air. He and Linda both noticed in the same moment that Laura's sobbing had stopped. Linda's heart dropped, fearing that the other man had killed her.
“Pablo, tell me you didn't kill that woman,” Grayson spoke, giving voice to Linda's fears as well.
Both turned to see Laura standing there, red faced with tears pouring from her eyes. Her jaw was set and teeth gritted. She was holding an empty Hello Kitty purse in one hand, pushing Sophie behind her, protectively. In her other hand she held the snub nosed .38 revolver that Sophie had ferreted away during the flight from the lumberyard. At her feet lay Pablo, face down in the mud. The gore from the exit wound in the back of his head glistening as the sun broke through the gloom. Laura squeezed the trigger as Grayson's eyes met hers. She pulled the trigger again and again, emptying the gun into the corpse of the man who killed her husband.
Epilogue
The young woman rested on her knees. The earth on which she knelt was strewn with crumbled chunks of concrete. She lay a bouquet of wildflowers atop the earthen mound in front of her. The grass had just started to reclaim the crumbled soil, its sparse greenery whipped in the brisk westerly breeze coming from the deeper Pacific. She had come here nearly every day since they lay her mother to rest. Burial was a rarity these days. Arable land on the hard chunk of rock was almost always dedicated to the growing of food, to lay a decaying body in that soil was almost sacrilegious. They had survived on this rock for as long as she could remember, scraping whatever meager food they could from the soil and whatever they could drag back from the mainland.
She hadn't been here her whole life, of course, on the small cluster of islands the older people called the Farallon Islands. The younger people had never known it as anything other than Home, and thus it was renamed. She closed her eyes and thought of her father, doing her best but failing in her attempt to recall his face. She heard footsteps and opened her eyes to see her godmother coming down from the walkway above. She walked slowly, though she were only in her late thirties, the last fifteen years of hardship and toil had taken their toll on her body. Thoughts of her father moved aside as she came into the clearing in front of the grave.
“You doing okay?” she asked, the frown lines that creased her wind-worn skin showed heavily in the question. “Stupid question, I know. I'm sorry.”
“Yeah, I'll be okay, Jen,” Luna responded.
The question seemed odd to Luna. Death was ubiquitous in everyday life to her. Its occurrence was just another part of life. She had to remind herself that Jen hadn't grown up the same as she. In her time, death was seen as a great tragedy. People cried and mourned for days, weeks sometimes. The idea that death, the passing from the pain of life, would be met with sadness rather than in a celebration to honor their lives, was almost harder for Luna to grasp than the rest of the world Jen and her mother had always spoken of. The world where food was stacked on shelves and thrown away rather than given to feed people. Of course, she was sad at the passing of her mother, she would miss their walks and conversations. She was a source of endless encouragement and affection. Her mother was also the last living connection she had to her father, Tim. The memory of her father haunted her, and no matter how she racked her brain, she couldn't remember his face.
Rather than focus on the loss, Luna and the rest of the island’s children were raised to remember the joys that the deceased had brought. They were taught that by focusing on these tender, warm, funny, and proud moments, the feelings of loss were diminished. This allowed the person to live in your heart eternally. This is how all death was treated, though almost every other person that Luna cou
ld remember that died was given to the ocean at sunset. The only other person that Luna knew of that was interred in the soil like her mother was Yen. He was Jen's husband and had died a few years previous, when she was still a little girl.
“Did Sophie come to see you?” Jen asked.
“Yeah, I know she wants me to go to the dance with her tonight, I'm just not feeling really festive at the moment,” Luna replied, looking back to the mound of earth.
She saw the look on Jen's face and felt the need to correct the woman.
“Not about Mom. I miss her, I miss our morning walks and sewing together. I have a lifetime of memories with her to always look back on. I'm sad about my father. I can't remember him, not even his face.”
With that, Luna started crying, almost ashamed that her three-year-old self didn't take a mental photo of her father. Jen leaned in and held her.
“Tim was a brave man. He fought and struggled every step of the way to get us all to safety. In the end he died so that you and your mother. . . so that all of us had a chance to live. He saved my life, he saved all of our lives.”
She paused for a moment and Luna realized that Jen was crying as well. She knew the story of course, it was remembered by all every spring at sowing time. The tale of her parents and Jen's survival wasn't extraordinary. Everyone that had lived on the island had faced the undead and the other hardships of living in the husk of a dying world. The distance they had traveled as well as the survival of the children in tow, was far from ordinary. Their journey had taken them across thousands of miles of death and ruined landscape. One of the elder women had been so fetched with their story that she made a hymn that they sang every spring when they tilled the hard soil and planted seeds and seedlings. The sowing song, as it was called, was sung to children from the time they were born, they all knew it by heart and knew its context as well.
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