Decay (Book 2): Humanity

by Locke, Linus

  “Did I miss much?” he asked, but didn’t wait for an answer. “Probably not, huh? Not really much that can happen.”

  “Actually, Michael started a war with another group. That is something.”

  “It’s true. I did,” Michael said as if fessing up to doing something wonderful.

  “Another group–like the cannibal camp?”

  “No. They are not cannibals, but there is a treaty in place, so to speak. They violated it, Michael retaliated. Maybe a little too retaliated. Since then there have been numerous attacks on our camp here. There is a wall that surrounds us. They have tried repeatedly to burn it down, knock it down, blast holes in it. They actually succeeded a few times, but we have been able to patch it up quickly.”

  “Sounds like you dug us a nice little hole,” Guillermo said with a nervous smile as he patted Michael on the back. “As soon as I’m back on my feet, I’ll fill that hole in. Don’t you guys worry,” he insisted with a cocky attitude.

  “We should probably let you rest. Get well soon,” Jonathan said.

  They said their farewells and left May to do her thing. She would work with Guillermo on moving his arms and legs. Help him roll over onto his side, and help him eat, drink and clean up. It would only take Guillermo two days before he could walk on his own again. He was slow at first, but he knew Jonathan was serious about a war coming. There wouldn’t be enough time for him to take it easy. He had to help keep his friends, new and old, safe.

  The dead, frozen grass crunched under Guillermo’s boots as he walked stiffly out into the yard for the first time. The air was cold, and he instantly wanted to return to his warm bed. Perhaps he would slip back into a coma until spring. He stepped out further, listening to the sounds of the small town he had found himself in. The cows and chickens, even a turkey, could be heard somewhere in the back. The large yard appeared to house hundreds of people.

  Some of these people were up on top of the massive wall. Guillermo was impressed by its height. He didn’t have an estimate, but he doubted it would be easy for someone to climb over. The wall did block most of the wind. He could hear it whip by overhead. It ruffled the thick coats of the guards up top, and he was glad to see they were wearing thick layers over their bodies and faces. On the gentle breeze that did reach into the yard, Guillermo could smell the attempts to burn the wall down.

  Guillermo walked about, stretching his legs as he went. The last three days went by pretty quick. He was walking inside yesterday, and now regretted saying he wanted to go out. His nose hairs were already frozen, and he wiped snot away from his upper lip with a tissue. May had stuffed a wad of them in his coat pocket before he set out, and now he knew why. Looking back up at the guards, he now wished he had one of those masks to keep his face from freezing.

  The light snow and dead grass crunched under his feet as he walked slowly across the yard toward the driveway. The only familiar thing he could see was the BMW, and that seemed like the best place to go for now. He ran his gloved hand across the smooth hood and he could see the accident. Jonathan had told him everything, but the memories flooded back now. He felt the centrifugal force pull and push his body as the car spun. The glass of the window cracked as his head rushed to meet it.

  “Guillermo!” Jonathan (or was it Michael?) hollered from the other side of the gravel driveway. Guillermo raised his stiff arm slowly and waved. Stepping around the BMW, Guillermo caught his first glimpse of CREEPR 1 parked in front of the large garage. The black bus looked ready to destroy anything that stood in its way.

  “CREEPR 1,” Jonathan (Michael?) said when he caught Guillermo’s amazed looks. It was Jonathan, Guillermo was positive. He could just sense it as he moved closer.

  “Very nice,” Guillermo said through chattering teeth.

  “It is much warmer in here,” Jonathan stated and put his arm around Guillermo to help him walk. The warm air felt almost too hot on his cold face as he stepped through the wooden door. The torpedo heaters blasted the heat produced by their diesel fed flames. The loud fans roared. A group of men, including Michael, sat around on bench seats from different cars.

  “I’ve never seen anything like that,” Guillermo said as he pointed at the heaters. “I think I’ve used a heater one time in my life, and that was in my truck. Iowa winters must be terrible if you need heat canons like those.”

  “They get worse than this. I’m Mad Man Rob. My friends call me Mad Man Rob.” He reached out and shook Guillermo’s hand gently. “I’ll introduce you to these other assholes later. For right now, have a seat. You know, Jonathan is a great friend to you. The first time we met, he thought I was out to hurt you. Little bastard was gonna shoot me to death in the streets.” He gave a friendly smile.

  “We’re going over some plans for the semi,” Michael said as he pointed to the black beast in the back of the garage. The chrome grille almost sneered menacingly at him, sending a shiver down Guillermo’s spine.

  “What do you plan on doing with that?” asked Guillermo. He stared at it hard, knowing that as soon as he took his eyes off it it would pounce.

  “Protect ourselves and the people of the camp,” Mad Man Rob declared. “Jonathan says they told you, but in case you forgot, we are at war with another camp. We’ve lived alongside them since the beginning, but I wasn’t here in the beginning. That’s what I’ve been told. Many of them came from our camp. Differences in opinions, I guess, forced some of them to find another home.

  “We’ve had a fairly peaceful existence with them for a long time. A truce has kept things pretty civil. No one can take more than they need from the neutral zone. If we run into each other in neutral territory there will be no conflicts. Hell, for a long time we helped each other out when we met out there.” Mad Man Rob nodded to the north toward the city of Muscatine.

  “Then one day that ass-hat Bill showed up. Killed a few of our guys because they got to the supplies he was after first. He honored the truce though, and took his punishment.” Mad Man Rob smiled at Michael who scratched at his left cheek. “He has been a little … on edge ever since. Then Michael here carved the face of Randy, one of the camps leaders. Randy is a twisted man, but I have to hand it to him, he can be damn honorable. He may be fucked, but he’s tried hard to keep the peace, until the peace isn’t in his favor, of course.”

  “He now has a J carved right into his face,” Michael said before letting out a victorious snicker. “So anyway, now that we have ‘dishonored’ one of their leaders ‘against the treaty’, they, of course, left out the part where they destroyed supplies that we needed to keep you.” He pointed to Guillermo when he said that. “Alive. We are at war with them. They will do whatever it takes to kill us. Unfortunately for them, we don’t die. We are too smart for them to kill.”

  “Wow,” exclaimed Guillermo. He looked over at Jonathan, who was sitting quietly on a bucket seat taken from an old Mustang. Jonathan was deep in thought, his heavy coat folded in his lap. His gaze rested on the semi, but he wasn’t looking at it. He wasn’t even awake in the sense that he was consciously there. His mind was somewhere else, up in the mountains with Reese.

  “What’s the plan, Randy?” Bill asked as he walked into the dorm room that Randy inhabited at the college on the north end of the city. “We can’t get through that wall. They won’t let us get close enough at any time of the day. Also, people are starting to ask about the others. Jerry, Tim, Brian, Jennifer. They want to know where the other board members have gone. I certainly can’t tell them that we took them down to the Mississippi and dropped them off the bridge.”

  “Tell them the board never came back from a conference they had with the other group. They went to meet, to find a way to put this nonsense behind us. We just want to live peacefully, after all. Nobody has to know that those cowards wanted to avoid a war. A war with the tribe of insects that did THIS to my face!” Randy screamed, the bandage over his healing nose made his voice nasally, as he pointed to the white scar on his face. The scar stood out like a w
hite chalk line on a blackboard.

  Bill touched his own scar gently. Instead of thinking about the boy who did that to him, he thought about how Randy was going to allow him to do it a second time that day in the hospital. Randy–that damned coward–hiding in here while everyone else busts their asses for him. Randy couldn’t even pull the trigger on the board members. Bill had slit their throats, one by one, while they slept in their beds. Bill had assembled a few trustworthy men and took the bodies out to the river.

  While Randy barked orders from his cozy little room, Bill had done what he could to keep everyone together. It would be Bill who would go to everyone this morning, this vicious, cold morning, and explain to them that the board went to that meeting. Word was sent from the other camp. They had killed the members of the board, and they would soon be coming for the rest.

  “We have to act!” he bellowed as the small community looked on with sadness in their eyes. “We have to show them that we won’t stand for this injustice!” Applause started from the group, slowly at first, but interrupted by Bill before it could develop. “I don’t want a war. Randy doesn’t want a war. They marred our faces out of pure hatred for us! Even after what they did, Randy wanted peace, forgiveness, but they sent a clear sign that they don’t want peace. They … want … A WAR!”

  The crowd that filled the college campus erupted into a chaotic jumble of cheers, applause, and war cries. The roars drew fiends to the fences. The tall, thick fences that were built with chain link fence, barbed wire, rail road ties, steel beams, and utility poles torn from the ground. It couldn’t compete with the wall at the other camp, but it would do just fine in keeping the undead out of the community. The fiends rattled the chain link fence as they fought to enter. The metallic rattle only added to the terrifying rumble thundering from the campus.

  Chapter 20

  “Ok, stand right here,” Jonathan said to Guillermo as he walked him across the crunchy grass. They stopped thirty feet away from a small moving truck on the other side of the large yard from the garage, the doors were closed.

  “What’s this?” Guillermo asked.

  “Open the door,” Jonathan ordered Michael, who grabbed the handle, flung the door open and sprinted across the grass in a way that was made awkward by his thick clothing. They watched as light filled into the box. The fiend stepped out, almost tumbling over as he dropped down to the cold earth. “It is alright,” Jonathan assured Guillermo as he saw his friend take a step back. “Just watch.”

  The fiend’s sight finally fell on them, and he let out a shriek. The shriek reminding Guillermo instantly of little Sam from the BCRC lab, yet it was much weaker than Sam’s shrieks had been. It lacked the power that small child commanded. “I’ve never heard another one make a sou—“

  The fiend rushed at them, startling Guillermo and causing him to land on the hard ground. The undead man shrieked and ran, running as fast as the star of a high school track team. Maybe faster.

  Within feet of the three men the fiend came to a complete, jerking stop. His body stopped, anyway, his feet continued forward, swinging his legs out in a half circle. As soon as the dead man hit the ground he rolled over and was back to his feet, clawing and digging in an attempt to reach its victims. Blood trickled down from his mouth, and his gray-yellow eyes were filled with an intense hatred.

  “What the–?” Guillermo asked, trying to understand what just happened.

  “Some of them can run, Guillermo,” Jonathan stated. “I have captured a few. Setting up a lab, I was able to study them. Not as effectively as I would have liked, but I found that there is some kind of mutation that the chemical is undergoing. Perhaps evolving? It is incredible! The rate of speed some of these ‘runners’ can reach have been recorded at ten, to as much as fifteen, miles per hour. They are fast.”

  “You sound a little more excited than you should be by this, Jonathan,” Guillermo said. His laugh was really just a slow sigh. “This seems pretty bad. Can they, you know, can they evolve, beyond this?”

  “Evolution is perfectly possible when you think about it,” Jonathan explained. “As living bodies become harder to come across and even harder to catch, their bodies adapted. They have to move faster to keep up, but it can work to our advantage.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’ve been asleep for a while,” Michael said. “We’ve done quite a bit of work in the past few weeks.”

  “We have been collecting,” said Jonathan slyly.

  Guillermo knew right away what that meant and felt sick. “You know how that ended in Colorado, Jonathan.” He rubbed his temples with his middle and index fingers. “It ended badly for a lot of people.” He shook Jonathan from his arm and shuffled his way slowly toward the house.

  “I have faith in you, Jonathan,” Michael assured.

  “Thanks. He is right, though. We really should work on more fail safes. I wish I would have grabbed the journal from my experiments with the fluoroantimonic acid that we picked up from BCRC. I think the two of us could have really produced a powerful weapon. I just hope th—“ The explosion rocked the earth, and Jonathan saw Guillermo fall to the ground. He ran over to help his friend while Michael ran to the stairs that led up the wall.

  “What the hell was that?” he asked as he reached the top. One of the guards pulled his mask down from his face.

  “They are launching rockets at the wall,” the guard stated.

  “Shit.” Michael looked out from the top of the wall and into the field across the street. A small army marched through the field and projected another small rocket toward the wall. It emerged from the smoke, arching high before hitting the wall low. Three desert sand Humvees rolled up out of the tree row next to the field, followed by two tanks. A fourth Humvee sat out of sight on the far side of the field.

  The M58 Wolfs drove up onto the road in front of the wall and cut right down the center. The old tank’s tracks rattled and clanked on the concrete. A thick white smoke emitted from them, blocking out the entire field. Another rocket emerged from the smoke screen leaving no time to react. It hit high, just underneath where Michael was standing. He lost his footing and tumbled down the steel grated stairs, catching himself before he made it far enough to cause any serious damage to his body.

  Thunder roared from the Humvees as the Browning .50 caliber machine guns unleashed their volley of lead. Muzzle flashes looked like heat lightning behind the heavy smoke that blanketed the street. Guards on the wall returned fire with military issued M16s, aiming for the flashes or spraying out into the field, hoping for a lucky round to take someone down. Another rocket, this one shot high, dropped straight down into the camp.

  The explosive hit the pump for the well, causing water to spray wildly into the air. It pooled up, unable to soak into the frozen earth. Jonathan felt another rumble, and saw a chunk of the wall crumble away. Smoke from the M58s poured in through the opening. “Rob!” he screamed as he saw the Mad Man running toward the wall. “Mad Man Rob!” he screamed again, this time being heard over the sounds of gunfire, bullets, screams, and explosions.

  Mad Man Rob turned to look at him. Jonathan pointed to the large silver semi-trailer that was parked next to the moving truck on the opposite side of the yard. With a nod of understanding, Mad Man Rob ran toward an old yellow backhoe. Smoke rolled from the stack as the machine started. The smell of diesel exhaust filled the air.

  Driving over to the trailer, Mad Man Rob pushed it along. The flat tires slid across the frozen grass. He pushed it through the small pond that was forming around the well pump, sending small waves crashing at Jonathan’s feet. As the smoke continued to fill the air like a thick fog, Mad Man Rob sounded the horn on the backhoe.

  The blast sounded like a foghorn blaring somewhere in the cold mist. Jonathan looked down at the expanding pool of water that danced precariously around his black boots. Explosions and gunshots pelted out somewhere in the mist like a distant war. Frozen earth trembled violently beneath him, disturbing the wat
er’s tranquility. The experience was dream-like to him, almost like déjà vu. Pretty sure he had done this before, Jonathan turned his head to the sky, expecting to see the planes fly by, but there were none. Their chemicals didn’t burn his skin, causing large welts and bubbles and melting his skin off in thick layers.

  With the silver trailer backed up against the hole in the wall, Mad Man Rob hopped down from the backhoe and ran back to the garage. He still had tricks up his sleeves, Jonathan knew. Then the sound of lead piercing metal spread a smile across his face. The rat-a-tat-tat was followed by shrieks that echoed from a metallic planet far away. Those shrieks were soon followed by screams, which were followed by a fresh round of gunshots from further out from the wall.

  The undead in the trailer were illuminated by the dim light that seeped in as two men pulled the doors open and prepared to climb in. Their plan was to detonate a charge that would send shrapnel through the murdering devils inside the wall, using their own barricade as a weapon against them. Instead, the small horde, minus the few that had been destroyed by the penetrating lead, shrieked and charged out quickly.

  They moved faster than the two men could react. Tearing into flesh and breaking bones. Swinging their arms wildly, the fiends grabbed ahold of anything they could. The men’s bodies were crushed under the weight of the horde as the fiends trampled over them in an attempt to rip their lives away. By the time the fiends moved on, running into the smoky field to find their next victims, the men lay dead. Their torsos were flattened, and their guts spilled out onto the concrete, neither body had arms or legs, and their heads had been busted open.

  Through the smoke that continued to pour from the M58s the small army in the field slowly advanced toward the camp. They were slowed down by the screams that came from the thick smoke. Each man looked to the man next to him. None of them were soldiers, and they knew it. Trembling with terror, the men took slow breaths and listened. Their gas masks allowed them to breath comfortably in the smoke, but it hindered their senses slightly, as these scared man hadn’t worn anything like them before.