by Brown, TW
“So what’s the deal?” Juan asked.
“Four or five people came out from behind that building,” an older lady in her mid-forties explained, pointing over to where a tan warehouse sat. “One of them shot up at the tower. Rick is hit, but he says it passed though and he is fine.”
“So how did you all get here so fast?”
“Keith has had this location manned for about a week.” The woman’s face flushed. “Look, he ain’t trying to take over or nothing…it was just that, with you being all messed up from that April girl, he was trying to help.”
“Relax,” Juan said, holding up his hands in a placating gesture. “Contrary to what some people might think, I ain’t trying to be in charge of anything. I’m glad folks are stepping up and taking things on when they need it done.”
The woman looked visibly relieved and Juan made a note that he should probably address the community about the idea of people being able to do things on their own without thinking that they are stepping on his toes…if he survived this attack that is. He wanted this community to feel like everybody could just do their own thing. As long as they weren’t hurting somebody else, what did it matter? If folks wanted to make trips out to the surrounding areas and search for stuff, who was he to tell them that they couldn’t?
The sound of a gunshot snapped him out of his ruminations when it was followed by the ting as the bullet hit a piece of a metal girder that he was currently sitting behind. Juan leaned to one side to try and get a look across the slough that was presently their best defense against being invaded. He didn’t see anything.
“Where are these clowns?” he said to nobody in particular.
As if in direct response, the watch from up in the tower—Rick according to the lady that had just filled him in on the situation—called down. “We got movement coming from the trees across St. Helens Road!” There was a brief pause, and then Juan thought he heard Rick utter, “Holy shit!”
Peeking his head up, Juan was a bit discouraged to discover that he could not see much past the long warehouse. Unfortunately, that was resolved rather quickly as several figures came into view, running up the length of the bridge span that still jutted from the opposite side of the slough.
“What the—” the woman beside him started, but the answer came on the heels.
“They have some sort of platform!” Rick called down from the tower, confirming what Juan and the woman were both seeing.
“These people have obviously been planning this,” one of the men in this group said.
“Yep,” Juan agreed.
This was bad…very bad. How had they missed this? Had it been his fault? He had stopped sending out foraging teams and patrols a long time ago. The belief was that they had no real need. In doing so, had he basically made them blind? So many questions and doubts came at once that Juan could not process them all.
Juan had never felt that he was the person to lead a community of survivors. He might be good on his feet when it came to acting in the moment, but he was no leader. He was not a person who planned. Hell, his biggest idea had been to put a damn fence around the island! He had not thought about the possibility of other survivors coming. How had he missed that considering all that had happened? First with the arrival of Keith, Thad and JoJo; then there was that group that had come ending in Margaret being shot. And through it all, Juan had focused on the zombies.
“What do we do?” the woman asked, turning to Juan and obviously expecting an answer.
Looking back to the gap in the bridge, Juan watched as a huge flat section rose in the air and then fell with a loud “whump”. Bullets rained down from the tower…until a bottle arced and exploded in a ball of flame. There were screams, and then a burning figure flung itself from the tower and landed with a sickening thud on the concrete road.
“Run!” Juan exclaimed.
***
Heads began to turn. Cynthia peeked from where she had been hiding for the past few hours. She watched as the zombies, slowly at first, began to react to Glenn’s distraction. However, she did notice that every time he let up, many of the zombies closest to the boarded up entrance to the school would turn back.
Something had to be bringing the attention of those zombies back. From her spot in the bed of the burnt up pickup truck, she could not really see what that might be. Her plan did not require that every single zombie be drawn away, but it would make it much easier for Glenn as well as far less dangerous for herself.
The entire time that she had spent in the back of the truck, she had struggled with her decision to do what was basically a suicide attack. She had more than just a little doubt that this plan would actually be pulled off with any success. In all likelihood, she and Glenn would die. Still, the past year had worn on her in such a way that she did not see that possibility as necessarily a bad thing.
Every day had been a struggle. Even with the four of them, things had been difficult at best. It seemed that every single time that they managed to find a place to possibly hold up, something terrible would arise.
Their idea to try and make the journey back home had been folly. Who had they expected to find still alive? Why should the community that they lived in be any different from all the others that they had seen in their travels?
For a few weeks, she had been trying to convince the others to perhaps swing north. She had been to a conference in Portland, Oregon a few years back and found the town to be a delight. Yet, there was one thing that had struck her most and left an imprint—she had chosen to drive up and had been treated to a wonderful stretch of road along Interstate 5 that was wide open farmland.
On the way home, she had agreed to meet Glenn in Vegas for a mini-vacation. That had taken her through some gorgeous mountain roads. The foothills had been incredible. There were farms here as well. Miles of wide open space with an abundance of running streams and rivers cutting through lush fields and still more farmland.
She had dreamt of that trip one night and the idea had struck. If she could convince the others, perhaps they could find a spot by one of those streams that were supposedly an endless source of trout and salmon. They could set up a farm and live like the pioneers.
That was where her guilt was now starting to get the better of her. Yes, the loss of her brother and his wife, one of her best friends, had been tragic and terrible. The loss of the baby had been nothing short of evil. Yet, why was it now up to her to try and rescue Baby Xander?
It all came down to the fact that she was tired of being afraid of everything. Daily life was a horror, and it had very little to do with the undead. This whole zombie apocalypse, or whatever you wanted to call it, had affirmed her belief that man was the scariest thing in the world. But that thought was tempered by thoughts of her husband, Glenn.
She knew that it was mostly the fault of society. It had become so entranced on the terrible, evil, and nasty. Nobody had wanted to hear the story about the guy who rescued a kitten from his neighbor’s tree, or the tattoo-covered biker gang that raised money to donate toys for children at Christmas time. You never got to hear the story about the high school teacher that spent three hours a day after school donating his time to tutor the at-risk students. Those stories got buried by the predatory teachers and coaches.
Maybe the good guys had lost the war. Perhaps it was won by people like that woman who called herself Ann. Perhaps it would not be terrible if the zombies won and everything got wiped out. If this was the world that was left, if these were the people in the majority as it certainly seemed, then she had no use for it.
Cynthia stood up in the back of the truck and let out a few yards of the rope she had at her side. Jumping from the truck, she ran for the nearby tree. This one would probably be dead soon, but it was big enough and sturdy enough for what she needed.
Tossing the line over a limb that was about ten feet up, she quickly began to climb. Reaching the branch that was about as thick as her leg, she took one more look towards Glenn. He was moving aw
ay and bringing most of the zombies with him. She hoped with all her heart that she would see him again. She prayed that if only one of them survived, that it would be him. She might not recover emotionally if he did not. After all, he was following her plan and she knew for a fact that he would have been just fine if they had simply made a run for it.
“We will make it,” she whispered. “And then you, me, and Baby Xander are going to head north to Oregon and live in the mountains. I will teach you to fish and you can show me how to get a plant to grow.” That last bit had always been a joke between the two of them. It just seemed that Glenn could get any plant to not just survive, but to thrive and become something amazing.
Cynthia shimmied along the branch until she was over the blackened husk of one of the four school buses that looked as if they had been torched from the outside. Dropping as quietly as possible to the roof, she tested with her foot and froze when she felt the metal buckle just a bit.
“Screw it,” she muttered. She took three steps and jumped, landing in a crouch on the overhang that covered the entrance to the high school.
“Now it gets hairy.”
***
“Daddy!” Ronni practically screamed. The man winced and she repeated her cry with much less volume.
“Where am I?” Chad asked, his eyes barely able to open to slits.
“We are back at the Miller place,” Ronni answered. A scream and sudden commotion in the hall made her jump.
She was torn between going to see what was happening in the hall and staying here beside her dad. The deciding factor was the growing commotion just outside their room and down the hall.
“I’ll be right back, Daddy,” she said, gently peeling her fingers from his and rushing to the open door.
They were in a room in a large house. The hallway ran either direction from where they had brought Chad. To the left would be a door on either side of the hall that opened to bedrooms larger than the living room of the apartment that she had grown up in. To the right were two more doors on each side and it opened up to a huge living room. This had been Dustin’s main house and he had helped build it himself. He had made the rooms so large because he had expected each one to be occupied by a family back when this was a religious-based compound.
Ronni looked to the right and had to take a few seconds to really figure out what she was seeing. Once she realized, she was unable to fight back the tears. It was that woman that had just come to see her.
“Kaja’s mother,” Ronni whispered.
The woman had apparently slashed her own throat. As the people in the hall moved this way and that, Ronni was able to make out the box cutter still clutched in the woman’s hand. However, she could not take her eyes off of the woman’s left foot. It kept twitching and flexing for several seconds.
People were bending down over the woman and trying to stop the blood that was still seeping from the clean, deep wound on her throat. Ronni noticed an arc of dark liquid dripping down the wall of the hallway across from where the woman now sat on the floor.
“You better put a spike in her head,” somebody said. Ronni was surprised when she realized that it had been her speaking. “If she was infected in any way and happened to be immune…” She let that sentence die on her lips.
A couple of the people gathered were looking at her like she was saying something heinous; but one of the women nodded her agreement and produced a knife from a fold in her heavy skirt. Before anybody could stop her, she stuck it in the temple of the dead woman. Ronni was surprised by the few people that had truly acted like this was some terrible thing. It was obvious that they had probably been in this compound since the beginning and had no idea how bad things were, or some of the unpleasant things you had to do to survive.
Her dad had known almost from the start.
“Daddy,” she gasped, and ran back to the bedside where Chad was just now starting to be able to open his eyes.
“Hey there, princess,” Chad rasped. “It’s so good to see you.”
For the first time that she could recall, she saw tears in her father’s eyes. She had seen him endure terrible physical pain, she had seen him forced to do things that so many would have been unable to do; and now, here he was, lying in a bed, holding his daughter’s hands and crying.
“A lot of people will want to know that you are awake,” Ronni said, hoping that it sounded cheerful.
“How did we get here? I was certain that both of us were done for.”
Ronni filled him in. She tried to make sure that she did not leave anything out. She also showed him her stitched and bandaged arms, saying that the doctor kept telling her that she would have died from blood loss if she had not thought so quickly.
“You did really well, sweetie,” Chad said. He closed his eyes and Ronni felt a flash of fear.
“Dad?” she said, giving his arm a little shake.
“Yeah?” Chad answered, but he kept his eyes shut.
“I don’t want you to leave me.”
“Leave you? I’m not gonna leave you. Where would I be going?”
“I mean ever.”
Chad opened his eyes and considered his daughter. She had a look on her face that he couldn’t read. There was more being said than he was hearing.
“Sweetie, I’m not—” he started, but she squeezed his hand and cut him off.
“No! What I mean is that from now on, if you go out there…I go out there. We need to stick together. We are all that each other have, and we need to take care of each other.”
“Well, well,” a voice called from the doorway. “Glad to see you among the living.” Dustin Miller walked in and moved to the other side of Chad’s bed. “We thought we had lost you there, fella.”
“You and me both,” Chad said, turning his attention to the man. “So…did you get the kids back okay?”
“Thanks to you and your daughter…we were able to bring some happiness to this place.”
“Kaja’s mom,” Ronni said in a voice barely above a whisper.
“Yes…that was…unfortunate.”
“What happened?” Chad looked between Dustin and his daughter. Ronni opened her mouth, but Dustin cut her off.
“Nothing that you need to concern yourself with right now. You just get some rest, take your time and get healthy.”
Chad could tell by the look on his daughter’s face that it most certainly was not “nothing” as Dustin claimed. He would have to ask her later.
“Nice to see you looking better,” another voice called. Scott Colson entered and took a spot beside Ronni.
“Yeah…well I wish I felt as good as I apparently look to everybody,” Chad huffed, causing Scott to laugh.
“Man, I was just trying to be nice…you look like crap.”
The conversation was upbeat and pleasant, but Chad was noticing a few things. His daughter was obviously bothered by something. Dustin kept watching her, and Scott had trouble keeping eye contact.
At last, Chad began to flag. He could barely keep his eyes open. At some point they simply closed and he fell into the steady breathing pattern of sleep.
“Okay, let’s go,” Dustin whispered.
The trio slipped out of the room as quietly as possible. As soon as they reached the hallway, Scott spun on Dustin.
“Three suicides in one day! What the hell is going on?”
“That last one claimed to be Kaja’s mother also,” Ronni said.
“I don’t know what is going on,” Dustin ran a hand through his curly blond hair and shoved his ball cap back on. “All I know is that Brett has been gone since we got back with your dad. Nobody has seen…or admits to seeing him. The search parties have come back empty and that big camp that we had been keeping an eye on is gone.”
“When it rains it pours,” Scott said. “Okay, well I am going to take the next group out. Ronni, you just get back in there with your dad and keep your eyes open. I have a feeling things are going to be a bit sketchy for a while and you should be there.”
>
“But I thought the doctor said that if he came out of the coma he would be okay.”
Had it been three weeks? Ronni had lost track of time. Her days had revolved around the care of her father. When they had first returned, there was doubt that Chad would pull through. Between the infection, the loss of blood, dehydration, and whatever else, it was just too much for a person to endure. But her dad had proved the doctor wrong.
Today, he had opened his eyes. Only, so much had happened in that few weeks. It had started with a fever that went through the camp. Several people died in a short time and nothing seemed to help. After that was the fire. There was still suspicion that the fire had been set intentionally.
However, none of that held a candle to the sudden and peculiar division that had unexpectedly ripped the place almost in half. Apparently there were a lot of people that were angry that Dustin had allowed the religious aspect of the place to stop being the focus.
It was right around then that the first hanging occurred. Ronni had not seen it for herself, but she had heard. What was odd was that the person hanging had been one of the people known to be immune to the bite, and that was something that the radical religious group had seized upon. They said that those who were immune had been chosen by God.
Up to now, Ronni had kept her having been bitten a secret. At least…she thought it was a secret.
***
“Jody!” a voice called from out on the porch to the apartment that he shared with Selina.
“I’m gonna change my name to Butch,” Jody grumbled as he sat up, swung his legs over, and climbed out of bed.
Selina made a soft snoring sound, reached out and grabbed his pillow, pulled it in and continued to sleep. Jody envied the woman. Sure, she had all of the bad things that went along with being pregnant: morning sickness, a sore back, a body that was openly betraying her, and then there was the need to pee almost every fifteen minutes…or so it seemed sometimes. He made a conscious effort not to think about the sudden mood swings; those were deserving of their very own category.
