by Locke, Linus
“I designed a lot of that,” he said proudly. “Mad Man Rob is a master at fabrication. Without him I wouldn’t have ever seen that beast alive. If you tell him what needs to be done he will do it. If he doesn’t know how to do it–he’ll create a way to do it.”
“Must be heavy,” Jonathan observed keeping his words to a minimum, as it was far too cold to talk.
“Not really. We stripped it down to pretty much a structural frame that supports all of the weaponry. It’s really only slightly heavier than it was to begin with,” Michael said proudly.
Jonathan thought back to dreams–fuzzy dreams–he had had of a semi and an airplane, but his jaw was clamped shut too tightly to ask. He couldn’t help but admire the machine as they walked right by it. Deacon would have loved seeing it; hopefully he would have the chance.
“Hey, Mad Man? Do you want to make a run to town with us?” Michael yelled before they even opened the wooden door to the garage. Warm air blasted them both as Michael pushed the door open and stepped through. The clanking stopped as Mad Man Rob turned from his work. Dog trotted over to the twins and rubbed against Jonathan’s leg.
“What?” he hollered.
“We are going to town. Do you want to join us?” Michael asked once again.
“Yeah, let me grab my gear.” Mad Man Rob wandered further into the garage. Jonathan saw him grab a few big cylinders and clip them into what appeared to be a harness. He connected hoses and wrapped a belt with a long leather holster fastened to it around his waist. “I need to stop by the welding place on Grandview Ave and grab a few more tanks,” he said as he waved a brass Oxy/Acetylene torch in his hand.
Jonathan stepped to the side to allow Mad Man Rob to walk by and his eye was caught by the light reflected off something further back in the large garage. The ferocious chrome grille of the semi radiated with the fluorescent light from above, casting an eerie aura around it. The matte black paint job had only made the chrome stand out that much more. Jonathan had always been convinced that the research stating that twins had a certain extra sensory connection with each other was true. Seeing the monstrous semi parked, no waiting, there in the garage just hammered that in so much further.
“You like that?” Michael asked. Jonathan could hear it in his brother’s voice that his pride was swelling again. If he didn’t control it then there was no way his head would fit through the door they came in. Mad Man Rob was going to have to open the bay door.
“I have seen it before. I dreamt about it, Michael.”
“Really? Like, you actually saw it?”
“Yeah,” Jonathan replied.
“You always did believe all that stuff about twins being psychic. I’ve never had anything like that happen to me. I’ve had feelings that I’m sure where yours, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything you were doing. I think the strongest feeling I’ve had is sadness.” Jonathan left out the part of his story about what happened to Emalynn. “It felt like my heart broke, Jonathan, but I was having a great day.” Michael looked at Jonathan and saw sadness in his eyes.
“It is not really a psychic thing. I just … you know we have to hurry, Michael. I have to save my friend.” Jonathan walked out of the garage and walked across the gravel driveway. He climbed into the BMW and started it. Should have started it sooner, Jonathon observed. The engine whined a little before coming to life. It was about a minute before Michael climbed into the passenger side of the car.
“It’s been a long time since I’ve been in here,” he said, feeling nostalgic as he ran his hands along the dash and then the leather seats. “Mad Man is going to follow us in his truck. There are a few other guys riding with him.”
“What do I do to get out of here?” Jonathan asked.
“Just follow the Mad Man out.” Michael pointed to the black 1950’s Chevy pickup. It rode lower than Jonathan had expected from the Mad Man, and he wasn’t really surprised to see a plow of sorts made of steel pipes, very similar to the ones Deacon built for the Tundra, wrapping around the front. The truck was also very quiet, which Jonathan figured was to avoid attracting attention. The Chevy was his supply-run truck, his grocery getter.
Jonathan couldn’t help but smile as he pulled up behind the truck. The unofficial license plate read UN-DEAD. The black letters popped out against the polished stainless plate. “He makes those himself,” Michael said as he realized what Jonathan was looking at.
“Guillermo is going to love this guy,” Jonathan stated. “He has the same strange obsession with naming things.”
The large door in front of them opened. Jonathan hadn’t seen it the first time. The gate was opened before he made it around the bus. He hadn’t even realized exactly how tall the gate was. The wall was gigantic, much higher than necessary, or so Jonathan thought. The gate was just as large, and Jonathan could see from this side that it was supported by car axels that allowed a pulley system to slide the gate open with ease. He followed the truck out onto the street. There was nothing around but a few fiends standing in the field across from them, frozen in place.
Pulling off of Cedar Street, Jonathan followed the truck up the steep, winding driveway of the towering hospital. The brick building sat up on a hill, or down in the hill if entered from the other side. Before they could turn to drive along the side of the hospital toward the entrance, Mad Man Rob swerved out and drove around back. Jonathan could feel that something wasn’t right, and out of a habit he had picked up over the last few months he checked his options for an escape route.
“What is happening?” asked Jonathan. He was nervous and trying to keep a good distance between him and the truck in front in case they needed room.
“Bandits!” Michael exclaimed.
“Really?” Jonathan was sure he was being messed with, but it did seem plausible now more than ever.
“Well, no, but kind of, yes. Remember that old cartoon, the Hatfields and the McCoys? Where the granny sat on the rocker on her porch and shot her shotgun at the neighbors. Every blast rocked her chair again? Think of us as one family, and them,” he pointed to the hospital, “as the other. They’ve definitely upgraded their fleet. I saw a pretty sweet looking military Humvee over there. They didn’t have that last time we ran into them.”
Jonathan pulled up closer behind the truck and rolled down his window. “What do we do?”
“We’re in neutral territory, but they don’t always follow the rules, Jonathan. Their camp is up north. We set up an agreement that if either group needs supplies from certain areas we are welcome to them without any trouble. The last time we ran into them in a neutral zone they killed three of our guys, so we try to avoid them as much as possible.”
Jonathan’s thoughts drifted to Laikynn and the cannibal camp. Not exactly the same, but if the cannibal camp would have left them alone … well. Memories flashed in his head. He tried to fight them, but they told him what would have to be done if the two groups couldn’t coexist. Jonathan found it best to leave that part out of the story he told his brother, as well.
Mad Man Rob stepped gently out of the truck, leaving the door open. He ran back to the BMW. “Well? It’s your call. If you think we can trust these bastards this time we’ll go in. If not, we can wait them out.”
“We do not have all day,” Jonathan replied.
“Guillermo won’t starve to death right away, Jonathan, but I know how you must feel about him lying there. Let’s wait for just a little bit, ok?”
“Thirty minutes. Any longer than that and I am going in, with or without you guys.” Jonathan stared straight ahead through the windshield. He didn’t want to see neither Michael nor Mad Man Rob until it was time to go find what he needed.
“I’ll make a deal with you, Jon,” Mad Man Rob said. “You come with me now to grab what I need, and when we get back, I’ll go in with you … whether they’re still here or not. We’ll be back in thirty.”
Jonathan nodded and watched as Mad Man ran back up to his truck. He sat down slowly and pulled the d
oor closed quietly. The truck rolled past a couple dumpsters, then along a thin path that led them to the other side of the hospital. They turned away from the building just as they came to the emergency room entrance, drove down a sloped driveway, and pulled back out onto the road.
Driving well over the speed limit, and ignoring the stop signs, they reached the small store in less than five minutes. Jonathan and Michael watched as Mad Man Rob and two other guys climbed out of the small truck. Luckily for the man riding the middle, the transmission was automatic. Jonathan could only imagine how uncomfortable it would be having the shifter slammed into your crotch. The men held assault rifles. Mad Man Rob grabbed his harnessed tanks and brass cutting torch from the truck bed than signaled for one of the men to back up to the dock where the dwindling supply of tanks was.
Matt and Rick were the other two guys that came with Mad Man Rob. Matt was a tall thin man with a tangled beard and an oily brown coat and matching coveralls. Rick was much shorter, shorter than Jonathan by at least four inches, but the man was stalky. He filled out his sweatshirt and didn’t seem to be bothered so much by the blistering cold. All three of them chain-smoked their cigarettes like there was no tomorrow, which Jonathan accepted as a strong possibility.
The twins stepped out of the BMW and looked around. Cold wind snapped against their faces like a cold gym towel as it whistled by. Jonathan could see some fiends wandering about down one of the side streets. They moved slowly and didn’t seem to care much for them, or maybe they hadn’t noticed them. Across the street was an empty lot with a set of train tracks running through them. Behind that was a white garage and the levy, beyond that was the Mississippi River.
Jonathan thought about walking over, seeing the river, but his eyes were drawn to a woman who had just walked up over the levy. She was too far away to see, and at first Jonathan thought she was just a fiend. Then she took off running toward them. Another survivor? Jonathan’s heart stuttered. He watched as she ran toward them. She looked as though she must have been starving and cold. Her clothes were a wreck.
Michael raised his rifle as he noticed what his brother had been staring at. “We got a runner,” he said.
“A runner?” asked Jonathan. “Is she with the group at the hospital?”
Michael turned to him with a confused look. His head cocked to the side as he repeated, “She’s a runner.” Aiming his rifle, he let the round fly. It whizzed across the street and into the frozen gravel drive way where the woman was running. The round drove into the frozen earth that made up the levy. Michael aimed again and fired another shot. Her head split open, a red mist filled the air, freezing before it settled onto the white rocks.
“What the hell did you do that for?” Jonathan yelled. He jogged to the end of the small parking lot. His hands on his head.
“SHE … WAS … A … RUNNER,” Michael said slowly. “You know them, right? You studied these damned things.”
Jonathan had an overwhelming confusion wash over him. “What? She was a fiend?”
“Fiend. Bone bag. Deadie. Undead–thing. Yes, Jonathan. You’ve never seen them before?” Michael felt a strange amusement at this. “About, I don’t know, a few months back, I guess, they started to run. Not all of them, but quite a few.”
“I need to study it,”
“I’m not helping you load that thing up in the car, Jonathan.”
“I will need a living one, anyway,” Jonathan replied.
“We’re all set,” Mad Man Rob said. The truck now had six of the large metal bottles loaded into the bed. “Let’s get you to that hospital.”
Chapter 18
Pulling off of Cedar Street once again, they drove up the path and pulled around to the front of the building. Jonathan couldn’t tell if the others were gone or not. The parking lot was packed full of cars, most of which still had doors open or windows down. So many people flooded the hospitals thinking their loved ones were just sick, not believing the stories coming from the coasts about the dead rising. Mad Man Rob must have felt they were all clear; he pulled right up to the front of the building, coasting alongside the windows that lined the front, many of which had been busted out and boarded up.
The frozen ice crystals crunched under the tires of the BMW as they came to a stop behind the truck once again. Jonathan watched as the men climbed out of the truck. Mad Man Rob, Matt, and Rick instantly readied their weapons which put Jonathan on edge. He knew there was always a threat from the fiends, but he hated when they added the threat of humans. Fiends were at least predictable. Humans were scared, greedy, and reckless.
Running his hands along the door handle, Jonathan was reluctant to open it. He knew as soon as he did that cold air would take his breath away. Michael climbed out first, and Jonathan, not wanting to look like the weak brother, followed instantly. The air was dry as it ran down into his lungs. Flurries of snow began to dot the world around them.
“Let’s get this done quickly,” Rick insisted. He walked toward the boarded up glass doors and slid them open easily. The automatic mechanism that controlled them had been disconnected long ago, but both groups knew to keep it shut. Rick closed the doors as everyone made it through.
“She said there should be med rooms on each floor. I guess what we need could be in any of them,” Jonathan pointed out. “Stick together or split up?”
“Might as well split up,” Mad Man Rob suggested. “That way we can grab anything else that looks good. We boarded up all the broken windows after everything settled down, and now we keep the doors shut to keep the bone bags out. I doubt there are any here, but if there are, it’ll just be a straggler or two,” he added, noticing Jonathan’s expression. “You two take this main floor while the three of us check the lower level?”
“Sounds good,” Michael said. The group split up. Jonathan didn’t feel great about the decision, but he was in their territory now. He wasn’t in the position to vote against these guys.
Jonathan followed Michael as they walked through the hallway. The air had a stale, musty aroma. The hall broke into a series of rooms and smaller hallways. A gift shop sat down one hallway, waiting rooms down another. Going into the gift shop crossed Jonathan’s mind. He thought about grabbing something for Guillermo, he’d like that, but the windows surrounding the room, along with the floors and walls within, were smeared with blood. Every seat in the waiting room was stained that stale brown color. Chunks of flesh clung to the walls and tables.
“Look,” Michael said. He pointed to a thick spot of blood that glimmered enough to catch his eye. “It’s still wet.”
“Looks like human blood. Fiend’s blood is usually already coagulated as it leaves the body,” Jonathan explained as he crouched down next to the blood splotch. “This definitely happened rece–“ A clatter rang through the doors behind the nurse’s station in the physician’s area. Michael placed his index finger to his lip and gripped his rifle. Jonathan followed his lead by un-holstering one of the Springfields.
Michael crept around the large desk and toward the door that led back to the exam rooms. He pressed his ear against the cold wood. The sound of a slow, croaking breath hummed through the door. He held his hand in the air and signaled for Jonathan to step back a bit. Michael stood firm and counted under his breath before kicking the door open and aiming his rifle through. The door was heavy and didn’t open as quickly as Michael was hoping it would. After taking a step back he kicked it open again. This time he followed through with the kick and the door open wide enough to see that the hallway beyond was empty.
“We both go in together,” Jonathan suggested stepping up beside Michael after the door had shut again. The brothers stood side-by-side and stepped up tightly against the doors. Peeking through the window, Jonathan didn’t see anything on the other side. He crouched back down and looked at his brother. He realized that it felt great to look at that face again. There were many times he found himself back home talking to his reflection in the mirror, pretending to be talking to Michael.
This may have been crazy, but it helped Jonathan cope with being alone. “We go on three.”
Just then the door burst open from the other side, knocking Jonathan to the ground and slamming Michael into the wall. Blood sprayed from Michael’s nose and ran from his busted lip. Jonathan’s head swam, the knot on his forehead was already forming and turning a reddish purple. There was no time for them to recover, the fiends burst through the door and swung their arms wildly. They came within inches of Jonathan’s face, but came no closer.
“How’s it going, Michael?” the deep voice asked. Jonathan’s head was fuzzy, and he was sure that the fiend just talked to him. He sat up, shaking his head and trying to focus. The fiend backed away, and behind it was a man. He held the fiend at the end of a pole. “Did you bump your noggin?”
“Who … ?” Jonathan tried to ask.
“You don’t recognize me, Mikey? You little bastard.” The man looked down at him, spitting a little as he talked. His face slowly came into focus. He was dirty with a thin black beard. A white scar was seared into his left cheek, running from his ear to his nose. “Has this damned scar changed my face so much that you can’t tell who I am?” he roared.
“Calm down, Bill. You slammed that door into his face hard enough to scramble his brain,” another voice said. This voice was much calmer, older, and somehow wiser. Jonathan caught a glimpse of Michael … hiding behind the door, scared. No, not hiding, he was waiting. The other man stooped down next to him. He was much older, his long white hair tickled Jonathan’s face. “That is quite the goose egg you got there, Mike.”
Jonathan let them run with the thought that he was his brother. His head had cleared, mostly, but he would keep them thinking it hadn’t. As long as they thought his head was messed up he wouldn’t be expected to talk much. With a little effort, he had confirmed that both men had been leading a fiend around at the end of a pole. The man named Bill was an asshole, and the older man seemed like he could be an alright guy. Probably just fell in with the first group he came across.
