by Brown, TW
“And yet you keep returning.” Mackenzie knelt in front of Juan and took both his hands in hers. “You need to listen to your own words. We have plenty now. Also, there are other people who can make these trips.”
“After this one,” Juan insisted, suddenly nervous that she might put her foot down. “I know exactly where everything is. This is not a search operation, just a pick up and come home.”
Mackenzie seemed satisfied with that response, if not a little relieved. The moonlight was proving to be a blessing and a curse. The blessing was that he could clearly see her face; the curse was that he could see her swallowing his lie. For perhaps the first time in his life, his conscience was wreaking havoc on his soul.
“You go in, grab them, and then come home?” Mackenzie’s voice had that tone that was seeking reassurance.
“That’s it,” Juan said with a nod and a squeeze of her hands.
Of course, that was a lie. He knew it. But he had to play this scene through…like it or not.
***
Moab, Utah—“Climb, Cynthia!” Glenn screamed. He could do nothing but watch in horror as his wife started up the rope.
“Dammit, Glenn,” a female voice hissed in his ear, “I told you not to scream…you’re just bringing more of them!”
Glenn dismissed that voice—if he even heard it—as his sole focus was the woman at the base of the tree who was just now kicking the closest zombie in the face before continuing her ascent. The voice belonged to his sister-in-law, Melissa “Mel” Bird.
Glenn’s wife Cynthia was the sister of Mel’s husband, Kyle Bird. They had been on vacation in Chicago when the first reports of the “strange virus” began to spread. It had been his wife Cynthia who had made the joke about zombies.
“Like one of mom’s weird books,” she had said as they sat huddled in front of the television in their room at the Drake Hotel in downtown Chicago.
Kyle had not seen the humor in his sister’s comment. He had left the room and vanished for the better part of two hours. When he returned, he told everybody to grab their things. As soon as the questions began, he held up one hand to silence the room. Even Baby Xander, all of eighteen months old at the time, went silent. At a shade under six-and-a-half feet tall, he seldom had trouble getting people’s attention when he wanted it. The fact that he seldom wanted it made his demand for it that much more powerful.
“This city is going nuts,” Kyle said in his soft, even voice. “I snagged us an RV and we are leaving.”
That is exactly what they did. For the first few days, it was not that terrible. Since then, none of them could remember a day passing when they were not terrified, hungry, or scared.
They made it as far as Utah when they had to finally abandon the RV. A band of lunatics had chased them for almost a hundred miles. Of course the idiots had been on motorcycles. Glenn had been behind the wheel and after sideswiping almost a dozen of the pursuing motorcycles, the gang gave up. Once they put another hundred miles between them, they ditched the rig and headed up into the foothills of the Rocky Mountains.
Stopping along the way, they gathered any supplies that they could find. The hardest was scavenging things for the baby. The adults could force themselves to eat anything…but Xander was a bit more particular and seemed to prefer to starve than eat anything that did not pass whatever taste test he put it through with that first tentative bite.
The winter was spent in the foothills of the majestic Rockies. None of them wanted to risk trying to make it to the Pacific where they would attempt to work their way south and home to Palm Springs, California until the spring. It had been rough, but they survived.
Once they were confident that the weather was not too bad, they got moving. They had reached some suburb, not even sure of what state they were in, when they were caught in a nasty storm. Luckily, they happened upon what amounted to the most amazing and luxurious treehouse any of them had ever seen. The thing was built to resemble a castle turret and was connected to three others by rope bridges. Each was two stories high and furnished!
They had only intended to stay until the storm passed, but when Mel discovered a nearby home with a stocked pantry, they had killed off the few walkers and started to empty the place out. As was their usual luck, it had seemed fine until the last trip. From out of nowhere, what had to be over a thousand of the walking dead began to funnel through the yards and streets of this affluent neighborhood. (Herds were the reason they had chosen the treehouses over regular houses, they had been forced to abandon and run too many times over the past year.)
Mel had stayed behind with Baby Xander while Kyle, Cynthia and Glenn had gone to retrieve the massive haul. At some point, the three of them had split up in hopes that they could evade the zombies and get back to the treehouse without bringing the monsters to their current abode. Glenn had to be restrained to keep from going back down when he arrived and discovered that Cynthia was not back yet.
At last she had appeared…with at least fifty walkers on her heel. And she was limping. The bag of supplies was gone and she was clutching her left leg. Glenn could see a dark stain until she was almost directly underneath and began her climb.
Please don’t be bit, he thought in silent prayer.
At last, she made it to the landing. Kyle reached down and pulled his sister up with what seemed like no effort. However, when he set her down and all three adults saw the dark stain of blood in her thigh, Mel and Kyle took an involuntary step back. Only Glenn moved forward.
“It’s not a bite,” Cynthia said between clenched teeth. “Somebody shot me.”
***
“Ronni!” Chad called from up in the loft of the barn.
“Coming!” his daughter’s voice came from just below. A moment later, her head popped up through the square opening in the floor.
The sounds of activity from below still seemed loud to Chad. He didn’t remember Yosemite Village being this noisy. Folks here just did not seem to care about how much noise they made. With twenty-foot high fences and manned watch towers surrounding the enormous plot of land, not to mention the fact that every citizen deemed old enough and mature enough was heavily armed—he’d seen a girl that could not be any older than ten with a .22 pistol on her hip—and this place was the most secure environment he’d been in since the dead began to walk.
“Dustin wants us to be out on tower six today,” Chad informed his daughter.
She huffed and blew a strand of her blond hair from her eyes as she rolled them in that typical teenage girl fashion. It had taken him some time to learn that it wasn’t necessarily him; she reacted that way to pretty much everything.
“Some of the girls asked me if I was going to attend the teachers’ indoctrination.”
Chad was caught by surprise. Thus far, his daughter had shown no interest in doing anything. This indoctrination was a pretty big deal from what he’d been hearing. This place actually had two former school teachers who were getting things organized so that a school program could get started. There had been a call for volunteers, but he never once considered that Ronni would have any interest.
“You sure that is what you want to do?” Chad sat down on the bale of hay. “It is a pretty serious commitment.”
“It beats being on the tower or having to go out and clear the corpses,” Ronni replied with a shrug.
She folded her arms across her body and cocked her left hip out. Chad recognized that as her “ready to argue” pose. The thing was, he did not have a single thing to say against this decision. In fact, it would be a relief.
While there was usually not any problems associated with being on tower watch, that was also the place trouble would come first if outsiders tried to assault the compound. Corpse detail was nasty duty, and sometimes a few walkers might show up while the crews gathered the downed bodies for the burn pile. Relatively low risk compared to where they had been, but there was still a lot more risk than, say, sitting in a classroom teaching the “ABC’s” and “1-2-3’s
” to a bunch of children.
“Then I guess I will see you at dinner.” Chad got up and went to hug his daughter…but she had already turned and was heading down the ladder.
He tried not to feel hurt, but that was an exercise in futility. There had been so much in the past year, and none of it had done anything to help bring them any closer. It certainly was not how he had dreamed of their reunion happening when he came home from prison.
Between the loss of her mother basically before her eyes, being on the run, losing all of her friends to the undead, and then the assault, it was no wonder that she was building a rather hard shell. Worse still, it was not like he had any sort of parenting skills. He’d never been around children much before prison…much less after.
“Chad?” a voice from below called.
“Up in the loft, Dustin!”
A moment later the big, barrel-chested man squeezed through the square hole in the loft floor. He was wearing a black bandana on his head; curly ringlets of blond hair escaping from all sides. His blue eyes sparkled and his smile was genuine.
“Saw your daughter on the way in…everything okay?” The concern in his voice was real.
“As much as it can be,” Chad answered with a shrug.
“Sons would be much easier.”
“Amen, brother.” Immediately Chad wished he could yank that word out of the air and stuff it back down his throat with the foot that was currently residing in his mouth.
Dustin Miller was a self-proclaimed man of God. He refused to claim a denomination, stating that the Bible was the only religion he followed and all his doctrine came from there, not some label. He did not force his religion on anybody who came to live inside the fences of his sprawling compound. He told each new arrival that the decision was theirs and God’s.
“Sorry,” Chad said with a blush.
“Just give me five ‘Our Fathers’ and ten ‘Hail Marys’ while kneeling on a pack of pencils and we’ll call it good,” the man said with a stern expression that quickly melted back to the easy going smile. He gave a deep laugh and clapped Chad on the shoulder. “I’m not that thin-skinned, my friend. I don’t know how many times I have to tell you. Anyways, I was looking for you with a purpose.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Got two new arrivals on the late watch last night. They said that there is a truck stop about twenty miles from here. All the trucks are still shut up and secure. They went to a few and peeked inside. Lots of goods worth taking. I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind leading a dozen or so folks on a run. From what they say, the wagons should not have any trouble making the trip.”
The wagons in question were basically replicas of the old Prairie Schooners from the pioneer days. The difference was that they had better suspension, and the wheels were the heavy duty all-terrain sort.
“I figure the most you would be gone is a week,” Dustin continued when Chad stayed quiet.
“Ronni…” He left that word out there. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to do his share, it was just that things were already a bit strained between them.
“I asked Tina Curry if she wouldn’t mind keeping her over for a few days,” Dustin said, and then wiped at his face. “I’m not trying to pressure you into something you are not comfortable doing. But honestly, you have the most experience out there. A majority of the folks living here have been doing so since the beginning.”
“I’ll do it,” Chad agreed. Although it wasn’t for the reasons Dustin might assume. The reality was that Chad felt the need to get away for a bit and clear his head. The idea of how he’d anticipated the reunion with his daughter going was not quite matching up to the reality. Maybe if he were gone for a while, she would come to miss him; at least that was the hope.
He headed back to the cabin he shared with his daughter and another family—more units were being built and he was three away on the list from getting a place for just the two of them. It took him about twenty minutes to suit up and gather his gear. Part of him hoped that Ronni would come barging through that door any minute and tell him not to go.
A half hour later he was walking through the gates with a dozen other people to find this potential stash of goods. He looked back once to see if she might be up in one of the towers waving. He felt an unpleasant squeeze at his heart when there was no sign of anybody other than the guard on watch.
***
“George, you and Danny move down this side of the street and check house by house,” Jody instructed.
His group had been tasked to check out the exclusive neighborhood known as the Ridgepoint Estates. All of the houses looked like mansions. It seemed that the rich must have believed that their money would save them.
On the plus side, there were some great things to scavenge. Top of the line tools and gardening equipment that Danny had joked were probably only ever touched by the actual residents when they handed them to their hired groundskeeper along with a variety of standard tools like wrenches, screwdrivers, hammers and the like. On the down side, it seemed that the zombies had indeed stayed away for quite a while because there was almost no food to be found.
This first run was just sort of supposed to help break the rust off of them in preparation for the future ventures into the actual city of Jonesboro, Arkansas. Selina was technically the leader since she had been the one to do all of the organizing, but as soon as they got out of the tiny pencil dot town of Cash, she had turned things over to Jody.
Remar Jenks and his group were supposed to be hitting another housing development called Beaver Run. This was one of those sorts of places with postage stamp sized yards and every house looked like it was a clone of the ones on either side.
Truth be told, Jody felt that Remar’s group had a much tougher mission. For one, there were many more homes than the area he and his group were now scouring. That meant more possible bad things could happen. Entering a home was always risky since it was gloomy despite the sun and you were not familiar with the layout. That allowed for surprises, and surprises were not a good thing…at least in this case.
He glanced over at Selina and smiled. Her back was to him and she couldn’t see it, but he’d had one plastered on his face for the past week since she had shared the news of her pregnancy with him; it wasn’t like she was missing anything.
Jody Rafe was proud of how he’d handled that news. His instant gut reaction was to cut her out of the expedition, but he knew her well enough to know that such a move was a good way to ensure that the actions involved leading to her current condition would come to an immediate halt if he tried something like that. Besides, he knew enough about pregnancy to know that there was really no extreme danger to her condition in that first trimester.
His mind drifted back to the way she’d sprung the news. They were in bed and she was snuggled up against his side tracing designs on his chest.
“I know what you’re getting for Christmas,” she sing-songed.
“Huh?” he mumbled, doing his best not to just fall asleep.
“Well, I don’t know exactly…it might be a few days early or late, but it will be pretty close. Also…I am not sure what model you will be getting.”
“Okay, I’ll bite,” Jody rolled onto his side to face her and kissed her on the nose. As an added bonus, he nipped the tip of it playfully.
“I’m pregnant,” she said with a smile that lit the dark room with its brilliance.
“Hey…Sergeant Rafe!” a voice hissed in his ear, snapping him out of his pleasant memories with a mental slap to the face.
Danny Sullivan had been part of Jody’s original military unit. Together, they had been through a lot. Now that they were settled in the small town of Cash, Arkansas, the two had seemed to drift apart. Sometimes Jody felt really bad. It wasn’t like there was an abundance of women. In fact, the ratio was about eight or ten to one against at the moment.
“Sorry,” Jody whispered.
He didn’t need Danny to tell him what the problem was as a dozen zombies
all staggered around the corner a short distance away. So far, that had been the largest number that they had encountered. It wasn’t anything to be concerned about…unless it was the leading edge of a much larger group.
“When you gonna tell me why you keep grinning like a friggin’ idiot,” Danny shot back in his thick New Englander accent. “I know it can’t be strictly because you’re getting laid on the regular. So what’s the haps, man?”
Jody groaned inwardly. One of the things that Selina had insisted on after telling him was that he keep it a secret for a while. “It’s bad luck to tell before the second trimester,” she insisted.
Jody could hardly be the one to tell her that superstitions were stupid. Every time they went out into the field, he’d had a ritual about biting down on his dog tags before tucking them into his shirt. The thing is, he couldn’t actually remember why any more. It could have been something as silly as being a scene that he’d seen in a movie once and thought it was cool.
“Just feeling good about where we are compared to where we were a few short months ago,” Jody lied.
“When you two are finished yapping,” George interrupted, “you mind figuring out how you want to take down those damn zombies?”
“I still want you to move down that side of the street,” Jody said, thankful for the distraction from Danny’s line of questioning. “Selina and I will head down this side. That will put us in their field of vision. When they move for us, you come in from behind. We should be able to put them down in no time.”
“That’s not possible,” George said with a snort.
“Why not?” Jody asked with genuine concern. Had the big man seen something else that he’d missed?
“Because, you idiot, everything takes time. You can’t do an action that takes no time.”
“Nice one,” Danny quipped.
“Maybe I shouldn’t keep putting you two together.” Jody feigned a sigh. “Pretty soon you’ll be telling really awful dirty jokes and laughing before you even get to the punch line.”
