by Brown, TW
“I went to the fire station with my cousin Kary Ann. They let me slide down the pole and sit in the big engine.”
“Maybe you can show me,” Shari said as she took the girl’s hand.
“We can’t go inside because there are four firemen in there that got sick like everybody else and will bite you,” Valarie warned.
“Wait,” Kevin called, stopping the two before they left. “So there are people that you haven’t cut the legs off?”
“Yes,” Valarie answered with a frown.
“How come you didn’t do it to the others?” Shari asked.
“Because,” Valarie replied with a strange look, “they are inside.” She planted her fists on her hips and gave both Kevin and Shari a look that indicated they should have already known such a thing.
“So any of the buildings that are closed might have…more sick people inside?” Kevin asked.
“Lots of them do, but sometimes they break the windows and fall out. Then I have to fix them so they can’t chase me.”
“What made you think to cut off their legs?” Shari asked, unable to stand it any longer.
“Mr. Glenn only had one leg because of his died beaties and when he got sick, he couldn’t catch me,” Valarie explained like it made complete sense.
“Died beaties?” Shari glanced at Kevin.
“Diabetes,” he whispered.
“So you decided to cut the legs off of all the sick people after Mr. Glenn,” Shari said.
“No,” Valarie shook her head, “not until my meema got sick, she told me to cut off her legs as soon as she closed her eyes. So I did. Then when she got out of bed, she fell and couldn’t chase me.”
“So you started cutting off all the legs of every zom…er…sick person you found?” Kevin asked.
“Not everyone,” Valarie insisted.
“Just the ones outside,” Kevin said. “Okay, that is good information to have, wouldn’t you agree, Shari?”
“Yes.”
“So remember that while Valarie is showing you the best way to get to Sage Farms.”
Kevin waited and watched as the two disappeared around a corner. There was a small voice in his mind that said it might not be a good idea to have Shari out wandering the area without him, but since it was clear that Valarie had taken care of herself these past months, she was in good hands.
After a quick check of the building, he determined that the best way in was going to be through the front window. He would deal with Valarie’s reaction later.
Looking around, it was easy to find a rock. He hated the idea of how much noise he was about to cause, but it couldn’t be helped. If this place hadn’t been hit by looters, there was a good chance that he would be returning to the country club with quite a haul. The truck was parked behind a collapsed billboard on the edge of town. It would be nice if he could return with a full load.
Hurling the rock, the window shattered in a deafening crash of glass. After knocking away a few of the larger pieces that dangled threateningly around the edges, he stepped back and waited for the three shadowy figures heading his way to arrive.
The first was a man in his fifties. Kevin figured him to be Mr. Redd. His once dark skin now had a nasty greyness to it. The filthy bandage on his hand gave away the cause of his demise. On his heels was a portly Hispanic woman, also in her fifties. Her wild white hair added to her ghastly appearance. She had one leg wrapped from ankle to knee. The dried blood that had seeped into the bandage was likely the only reason it remained in place. The last to come from the shadows of the gaping entry to the store was a girl no older than ten. Her torso was tilted drastically to the left where a good portion of her middle had been torn open and feasted upon.
Never one to take things for granted, Kevin waited for the trio to reach the broken window. As they made their awkward attempts to climb through, he did away with each. Once we was certain all three were dispatched, he pulled the bodies out into the street. He was about to climb in and look around when he heard a crash from somewhere back in the dark recesses of the store.
Without any sort of light source, he would be relying on the minimal light coming through the windows and doors. The fact that the sky was heavy with dark, ominous clouds that promised some snowfall if his guess on the temperature proved correct gave little relief. He decided to step inside. Perhaps it had simply been something knocked off balance by one of the zombified occupants that finally toppled. If he could look down each of the short aisles, then he was certain he would be able to see if there was any danger.
Climbing through, Kevin could almost hear him and his old band of movie enthusiasts warning that he not to go inside. He felt a tinge of fear start to grow in his belly as he walked past the checkout counter.
There were six aisles. To his left was the produce section with a few islands of rotting fruits and vegetables visible. The entire store reeked of decomposing food mixed with the identifiable stench of the undead. Hopefully the salvageable items wouldn’t be so permeated with the smell that they were unusable. He’d kept a bar of his favorite soap in his sock drawer back in the days before zombies. He liked how it made them smell. He’d already discovered that clothing had to be washed and aired out for several days if it came from a “zombie-rich” environment. He didn’t relish the idea of brushing his teeth with zombie scented toothpaste.
As he moved along the front of the store and checked the aisles one at a time, he also made an observation of what was down each aisle. On the plus side, it was obvious that this place had not been looted. And the zombies trapped inside hadn’t knocked over too much of the merchandise. By the time he reached the far aisle, he was becoming convinced that the noise must’ve been something that had been knocked askew when the three zombies came to the front of the store.
Then he saw it.
Missing most everything from the middle of the chest on down, the female zombie in the shopping cart flailed its arms at him. That movement caused the cart to swing around to the left. The zombie craned its neck to try and find Kevin and let loose with a series of rasping groans.
There was simply no scenario that Kevin could imagine that put this half-eaten body in a shopping cart. He pulled one of his metal spikes and came up behind the creature. Grabbing it by the hair, he yanked its head back and drove the spike into its eye.
With that bit of unpleasant business finished, he went back to the front of the store and grabbed a cart. Making his way down the aisles he began scooping the shelves clean. He didn’t care to look through or sort anything. All of that could be done when they returned home to the country club.
By the time he’d filled every cart in the store, he had all but one aisle completely cleaned out. In a stroke of luck, he found the keys to the front doors in a small office in the front of the store near the checkout counter.
He was pushing the last of the carts out to the sidewalk when he saw Shari and Valarie coming around the corner. A moment of inspiration had come while he was busy emptying the store of all its goods. He hoped it would work. It was instrumental in his plan to get Valarie to accept what was happening.
“Kevin,” Shari called as she stepped over and around the several zombies now crawling along the street drawn by all the racket.
“Find anything useful?” he asked as he rolled the last shopping cart out onto the sidewalk. He kicked aside one of the creepers that reached for his leg.
“The farm has a bunch of stuff that I don’t know what to do with,” Shari replied. “I found a small shed with boxes that had packages of seeds. They didn’t look like anything I’ve ever seen in the store, but the labels were really clear as to what was what.”
“Did Mr. Redd open his store?” Valarie pushed past Shari and hurried across the street with an expectant look on her face.
Kevin caught her by the shoulders as she reached the broken window; which, upon seeing, her expression changed from curious to worried in a hurry. She tried to peek around him and get a look inside. Fortunately
, he had already moved the bodies to the back of the store and behind the useless meat counter.
“Mr. Redd isn’t here,” Kevin said. “But since we needed supplies, I had to get inside.”
“He ain’t gonna like you breaking his window,” the girl said as she shook her head sadly.
“Well I am gonna leave my credit card on the counter,” Kevin announced. He produced a blue plastic rectangle from his pocket. “This will cover all the damages.”
Several of the undead had closed on the trio now. Kevin took Valarie by the hand and motioned for Shari to follow. “So, we have a truck nearby. Would you like to come with us, Valarie?”
“But I can’t.” The girl stopped suddenly, pulling her hand free. “I’m the Princess of Sage Farm. I have to stay.”
“She has quite a set up at the farm,” Shari offered. “There are jars and jars of food. I found a supply room with a small cannery. I guess the owners had a really good business. And for one person, I’d say she has enough food to last at least another year.”
“I have to stay here,” Valarie repeated. She was looking at the ground for the most part, but Kevin noticed her eyes kept drifting over to Shari. He had a flash of inspiration.
“But, Valarie,” Kevin turned back to the girl, “don’t you want to come with Shari? I bet she will let you sing all of her songs with her anytime you like.”
The girl’s head popped up. Her eyes were bright and the biggest smile he’d seen in a long time lit up her entire face. “Could we sing Whispers?”
“We can sing any song you want,” Shari said, stepping past Kevin and taking the girl’s hands in her own. “I bet Kevin can even find me a guitar before we go home.”
Valarie pushed one of the creepers that had caught up with them away with the toe of her tattered sneaker. She looked around and her eyes filled with tears.
“Nobody is getting better are they?” she whispered through a quiet sob.
Shari glanced at Kevin for an idea of how to answer. He gave a slight shake of his head. She turned back to Valarie and brushed away her tears.
“No, they aren’t.”
“I wasn’t a very good princess,” the girl wept.
“Valarie,” Shari hunched down a little so that she could look up into the girl’s downturned face, “you were the best princess in the whole world. You took care of all the sick people when everybody else ran away. You did very well.”
“Can I say goodbye to my meema before we go? I know she won’t understand if I just leave without saying goodbye. She is sick, but I know she still loves me.”
“Yes,” Kevin said, stepping up and nudging away another creeper that was trying its best to get up on the curb and get at them. “Then you can help Shari and I put all the groceries in the truck and come live with us.”
“I guess I’m not a princess no more,” the girl sighed, shrugging out of her sash.
“I think I know a place that needs a new princess,” Shari said with a wink back at Kevin.
***
“We can’t go that way,” Kevin sighed as he shifted the truck into reverse.
Up ahead, a massive mob of undead poured down the hill of the pasture to the right of the country road. It briefly reminded him of a story he had seen once about a stretch of road in California where tarantulas crossed in such big numbers that it caused cars to skid out of control as if the road was covered with ice.
“Look at all the people!” Valarie leaned forward in her seat. “Do you think that they know Shari is here?”
“I doubt it,” Kevin said.
He looked in the side view mirror and backed up, turning hard on the steering wheel. It was going to take a few attempts to get them turned all the way around. He was only mostly sure that they would be turned all the way around before the leading edge of that mob, that were obviously now headed their way, reached the truck.
“Uh oh,” Shari whispered. Coming out from the mostly barren trees were at least another hundred walking dead.
“What the hell are so many doing out here?” Kevin asked nobody in particular.
“I think they know you have Shari in the truck,” Valarie insisted, folding her arms across her chest.
“Everybody hang on tight,” Kevin hissed as he jerked the wheel to the left and sent the truck careening through a rickety wooden fence.
The truck plowed through a jumbled mess of knocked over garbage cans and other debris that had accumulated in the front yard of what had probably once been a very beautiful little home. Fire had gutted half of the place and it looked like looters had picked through whatever was left,
He made a snap decision and decided to veer left down the burnt side of the house. Of course that put the zombies on his side and the house on Shari’s so it was probably more instinctive than he realized.
Blowing through the fence that had once sealed off the back yard and been high enough to prevent passers-by from seeing in, he swerved to avoid a sturdy looking play structure and a hardy black walnut tree with a tire swing still dangling from one drooping branch. The back fence was already knocked over in one spot and revealed a gently rolling field of waist-high grass.
Kevin judged the angle of the hill and was confident that the truck could make it. He’d heard a lot of jostling in back, but that couldn’t be helped. If they even made it back with half of what they’d found, this would be a great haul. He goosed the accelerator and took the field at a slight angle.
As he reached the top of the first ridge, he saw what had brought the zombie horde. A narrow road passed by below, and cruising along its confined course was a band that looked like the marauders at the end of Dawn of the Dead mounted on modified choppers.
These were not your run-of-the-mill motorcycle. Each one was an armored war machine; part Road Warrior, part Knightriders. Many were of the three-wheeled variety, and all of them had armor plating with big kite shields in the front. Each was equipped with a sidecar, and in that car was a person decked out in what looked like hellishly modified baseball catcher’s gear. These individuals were wielding an assortment of weapons that would make any LARP fan jealous.
“They aren’t gonna get out of there,” Shari whispered.
Kevin scanned the entire scene. Whoever these people were, they had driven down into this valley and built quite a camp for themselves beside a river. The only problem was that they were at the bottom of the valley and it had allowed them to be trapped. From their vantage point at the top of the sheer ridge, Kevin could see that a horde stretching for at least a mile had created a big half-moon that effectively reached both ends of the little valley these people had set up camp in. The horde had probably found them by sheer coincidence, but it would be these people’s undoing.
“The bikes can’t make it up this hill,” Kevin observed. “They’re too heavy and would bog down, maybe if the ground were dry…but not now.”
“Is there any way we can help them?” Shari asked.
“Probably,” Kevin admitted. “But we don’t know anything about these people. They could be like Shaw and his men.”
“Or they could be like us,” Shari insisted.
“But that is a risk I can’t take.”
They watched for another moment as the bikes zoomed back and forth. Even with the windows rolled up, the engines could be heard…along with the screams. Kevin glanced to his left and saw the wall of walking dead swinging around, coming up on their position. It was time to move.
“We can’t just leave,” Shari insisted.
“Actually, we can. And did you see any of those people waving us down?”
Shari thought about it. The people were not close enough that she could see any faces, but she also realized that not one of them had waved their arms or done anything to try and get attention from the people sitting in the military truck watching them be overwhelmed by thousands of zombies.
“No,” Shari admitted.
“So they were either just as concerned about us as they were about the zombies,
or they realized that if we drove down there, we might not make it out, and they didn’t want to drag us down with them.”
“Have we really reached that point?” Shari asked sadly.
Kevin didn’t reply. He scouted the horizon, found the hole in the oncoming horde and pointed the truck in that direction. Valarie looked back and forth between the two, but remained silent. She hadn’t been away from Sage Farm for very long, but she already missed it. Something about seeing so many more sick people just didn’t feel right to her.
Two hours later, the truck was winding through the once well-to-do neighborhood that bordered the south side of the country club. A few of the undead still trapped inside the homes that had not yet been searched and emptied of everything useful pounded impotently on windows, some pawed at the insides of the cars, and a few turned to follow the sound.
Kevin pulled up to the brick wall and backed the truck up as close as possible. He knew they would not have long to unload before unwanted company arrived.
“Okay, Shari, help Valarie over the wall and I will start emptying the cargo,” he instructed.
“Shouldn’t we both unload?”
“Normally yes, but I don’t want her on this side of the wall when the first zombies show up.”
“What’s a zombie?” Valarie blurted. She’d heard that word before and she hated it when she couldn’t remember things. Now this nice man, Kevin, and one of her favorite singers in the entire world were using that word over and over. It had to be important.
“Umm…those are the sick people,” Shari said.
Valarie saw the look on Shari’s face. It was the look people used when they spoke to her and thought she couldn’t understand. An image stuck in her mind. It was her meema; she was on the bed after her legs had been cut off. Meema had opened her eyes, but…
“They weren’t my meema’s eyes,” Valarie whimpered.
“What?” Kevin and Shari both turned to face Valarie. Her brown eyes were welling with tears and the dark brown skin of her cheeks were slick and shiny from them.
