“And you’re numb now?”
“I’m done worrying. Whatever happens will happen. All we can do is wait and see.” Brass points at the double decker. “You’ll be on the Gunship. Civies will be on the buses, each with an armed driver and an extra soldier. Truckers will be armed. The whole show will be escorted by the bulls.” He indicates the tanks.
“We won’t be able to go any faster than 45 miles per hour with the bulls in the lead,” Abby says.
“Once the train hits no-man’s land, they may be needed to plow through obstructions and ward off any raiders desperate enough to take a shot at it. Keep that Oz and Carla with you. Maybe they can suggest the clearest routes since they made it here all right. It’ll have to stay tight. If anyone lags behind they’ll have to stay behind. I don’t want the whole population jeopardized for a few.”
“That seems wrong.”
“It’s logical. Get them to Florida. Once behind the walls of that magical kingdom, stragglers can be picked up easier than halting the whole precession.”
“I take it you’ll be riding in your old ass Riviera,” Abby says.
“Yeah, I’ll be in my Riv,” Brass’s voice lowers. “I don’t want anyone dying on the road collecting shells. Once the train leaves the station, forget the brass.”
10
Three hours before dawn, folks make final preparations for departure, running off of what little restless sleep they got. The line stretches from the motor pool to the encampment’s winding entrance. Fuel tanks have been filled, and small tankers of gasoline will feed the machines on the run. Drivers await order to move out, refueling their bleary eyed selves with steaming cups of coffee.
They have already pulled out of the power station, allowing the rising sun to light the remaining preparations. One of the outposts to the north has lost contact with Ruby. They’re uncertain if the new dead wiped them out, but they won’t be taking that chance.
“Pull the others in. Tell them to catch up on the road,” Brass says. “It’s time to go.”
“Rubies, start your engines! 5,6,7,8!” Abby says. The responding rumble of horsepower shakes the ground beneath his feet. About to head onto the Gunship as planned, Brass calls him over to the black Riviera.
Lady Luck will radio the order to start rolling once Abby is onboard. For now, everyone idles. Vida watches with Carla and Oz as Brass and Abby talk for a few minutes. After adjourning their secret meeting, they just walk to their respective rides.
“What was that about?” Lady Luck asks, but Abby changes the subject.
“Let’s roll.”
The long snake of steel slowly gains momentum as the leaders of the pack enter the ruins of their beloved town and head to the highway going south. They say goodbye to the camp that has cradled them since its formation, kept them safe and provided them with so much. Many wish they could take it all with them, from the asphalt plane that formed their yards, to the rubble walls that surrounded them like a mother’s embrace.
The Gunship and the Riviera are the last to leave the corridor. Brass’s car takes an unexpected right instead of following the rest, and his place is taken by a pair of tanks.
“Where’s he going?” Vida asks.
Abby can’t answer her right away. He looks to the black rubber floor of the top deck, unable to bring himself to meet her eyes. “Home… He’s going home.”
###
Simon Brass pulls up to the wall that hides his former life. A street that had been declared off-limits almost a year ago. Many would say he was born at a disadvantage, being a little person, though his parents taught him to be proud of who he is. Some would say he was a pushover in the world before, a man that hated to make waves, but once the plague struck he became caught in the swell. The world had changed, and so did he.
He was the first into work that day, as usual, at the grocery store that almost didn’t hire him when he first applied as a teen. His application garnered a phone interview that made it sound as if they were not interested, and it wasn’t until he had gone there with his mom to shop and accidentally met the manager that he was given a job. He often wondered if his mother had arranged it, shown them his condition and made them reconsider. Simon became their best employee. From bagboy to stock boy, soon he was proudly standing on a stool ringing sales as a cashier. Then he became assistant manager, then the full time manager. Though the store was operating on borrowed time and set to be closed, he still arrived early to greet his employees and what few customers who showed up.
With the holidays and low liquidation prices of the store’s wares, the market had been busy. It wasn’t enough to stop the closing, and the owners already had bulldozers on standby, plus a wall erected around the lot to contain the debris once it all came down. That day, no one arrived to shop. No employees showed up on time. He expected his people to be late, for they took advantage of his naturally easygoing nature and the fact the store would soon be no more. Many took off during their shifts to fill out applications elsewhere, and a few had filled them out while on the clock. The closer the store came to its final day of business the more liberties they took. Start and end time of shifts became suggestions, breaks became unlimited.
But there stood Simon Brass, at the door ready to say ‘hello’ to whoever walked through. He waited with unwavering hope, but no one appeared. On the main road that ran through town, a few people were out running, and a car sped well over the posted limit.
After an hour, he switched off the shop’s infinite stream of music via the local radio station and sat down behind one of the registers. It felt odd to sit down at work, it felt wrong. The speakers above him crackled with static and dead air until a loud tone startled him from his seat.
Impossible words came after the alert, telling him the dead were walking. He thought it a joke at first. Such an absurd thing to hear in real life. That’s when his first employee showed up. From across the lot, a young man by the name of Gavin came running.
The lazy bagger was uncharacteristically quick that morning. He sprinted over the asphalt, cradling his left arm. He hurried to the front door, too fast for the automatic arm to open it for him. Gavin hit the glass and fell backwards onto the sensor mat, leaving streaks of blood on the door.
The old pneumatic arm jerkily unlocked the entrance and Gavin crawled in. “Mister Brass!” the boy yelled. “My mom! My mom!”
Simon tried to calm his worker, encouraging him to take slow breaths. He had never seen such a mask of horror on anyone. This young man typically wore the serene, squinting expression of being constantly high. Sweat made his flushed face glistened under the white glare of the store’s lighting. A wound on Gavin’s arm bled profusely, soaking through his clothes and pooling on the floor beneath him. Attempts at controlling his breathing became a hyperventilating wheeze.
While waiting for the boy to calm himself, Simon listened to the radio’s report. “…advised to remain indoors. Do not venture out to reach loved ones…”
“My mom bit me,” Gavin said.
“…stay away from windows, lock your doors, and avoid contact with anyone who has been bitten…”
“Everyone is going nuts.”
Simon’s posture stiffened. Gavin had been bitten. Why should I avoid him? “Nuts how, Gavin?”
“They’re trying to eat me!” he said. “I slept in my car last night. I figured my mom would be pissed if I came in late. When I snuck in this morning, she bit me! I ran out, but I left my keys on the counter. I just ran here. Folks on the street tried to get me.”
From across the lot, figures shambled toward the store, more than would have likely shopped there that day. Simon was sure they had been following his bagboy, and he was sure he knew what they wanted. He turned off the automatic arm and locked the glass doors. The impossible was happening. Walking dead were on their way and all he could think about was getting home to his wife and daughter. The radio announcer had advised against going out, but he had also advised against contact with the bitten
, he had to choose which to adhere to.
As manager, Simon always parked behind the store so he could turn on the lights from the breaker when he arrived and turn them off again at night when he left. He had inherited the duties of both opening and closing after his assistant manager decided to take a job elsewhere. “Gavin, I’m going to the back to turn out the lights.” He slowly backed away from his dying employee. “And then I have to run home to check on my family. I’ll be--”
“Don’t leave me!” Gavin squealed, latching onto his boss’s shirt.
Simon freed himself without apology and left the boy crying on the linoleum floor. Gavin’s cries for him to stay went unanswered as Simon put the lights out. The bagboy would at least be safe from the lumbering menaces at the glass.
Now Brass walks along the road he had sped down that day. It’s been a long time since he last visited. He arrives at his home, the home he remodeled to accommodate the ‘mixed marriage’ he and his wife had. All of the fixtures, cabinets, and appliances, even the furniture, is slightly shorter than in the average home. He still had to reach up for things as his average heighted wife had to bend down a little, but they were equals.
He walks around the house across the overgrown lawn to enter through the back door. He entered through the back that day he came home early, yet he was too late.
Back then, hoping to hide his arrival from the zombies shambling along Main Street, Simon ran over his wife’s prized flower bed and parked on the concrete slab that was their patio. He reached in the house through a broken pane in their back door window and unfastened the hook lock.
The house was oddly quiet, with the lights still off, just as he had left them when he went to work that morning. Rachael, his wife, and Emily, their one year old daughter, should have been up by then. Little Emily woke up not long after her daddy left for work, and some days he’d hear her chattering to herself as he walked out the door.
His eyes adjusted to the gloom, and the kitchen brightened for him as the early light of day filtered in through the windows. Coffee he brewed that morning still scented the air, and he followed the red light of the coffee pot to the door of the dining room. That’s where he found Rachael.
The love of his life was on the floor. He rushed to her and slipped in a pool of her still warm blood on the hardwood surface. Feeling for a pulse with trembling hands, he found nothing. He couldn’t believe it at first, but the horror of finding his wife dead was overshadowed by the manner in which she died. Something had torn her apart and ate her flesh. The things that the radio warned about, that Gavin had mentioned, had eaten his beloved. He found himself unable to think, far too shocked to even cry. The fact that the killer could still be in the house didn’t register.
Vain hope that his wife may still be savable made him gently shaking her ravaged remains. He put his ear close to her mouth in hopes of hearing breath. He could swear he heard light crying coming from her, but the sounds were not his wife’s.
Simon rolled her over and found the baby monitor clutched in her hands. The light cries became shrill howls of pain that he hadn’t heard the girl make since her last set of shots.
He raced for the stairs at the thought of his little angel in pain. During her inoculations, he had sympathetically felt her agony. After her first shocked cry, she’d screamed silently with her eyes closed tight and her face as red as could be.
The howls came to him in stereo, from the top floor and from the monitor still attached to Rachael’s robe. He hopped over the toppled child gate that had been torn from the wall at the bottom of the stairs and he took the risers fast. He charged straight into the nursery to find his daughter limp in the hands of a shadowy figure as it held her to its mouth.
A feral growl of rage and denial erupted from Simon’s throat as he lunged at the beast that stole his family. The creature dropped the girl, choosing to go for the fresher fare that came at it. Emily’s frail body fell from its mouth to the floor, after hitting the railing of her crib like a ragdoll.
Simon lashed at the evil thing, taking it to the ground. He held its head down as he pounded his fist into its face repeatedly. The zombie resisted the small man, it tried to free itself enough to take a bite out of him, but he wouldn’t let it. His hands were not enough to still the corpse, or quench his fury. He grabbed his daughter’s lamp and bashed in the zombie’s skull.
Exhausted, mentally and physically, Simon felt like rubber. He crumpled backwards and fell to the floor, unable to think. He just stared at the mess that was his Emily. His world was lost.
Even when at his wit’s end over the looming closure of his store, he had his family. Rachael always held strong for them both, telling him everything would be all right as long as they had each other, and Emily. Now Simon was without either of them, and at a loss as to how to go on. He wasn’t sure if he’d even try.
Tears flowed down his numb cheeks in rivers as he sat in the dark nursery. Nothing seemed real. Life as he knew it had become a nightmare. His greatest fear had come true: he had failed his family. For a while, he struggled to provide for them, and now he had failed to protect them, the two people he cherished most in the world. He blamed himself for insisting on going into work so early, not getting home sooner. He blamed himself for the pain they had to endure in the last moments of their lives.
Guilt ridden, he wished he could turn back the hands of time and save them. That was impossible. He couldn’t even move at the moment, until Emily did.
Using the stool Simon stood on when putting her into her crib, Emily rose on uneasy feet. Hope almost made him rush to his little angel’s side, but she wasn’t crying. The radio had said to avoid those who had been bitten, but he was torn. Every parental instinct screamed to go to her, but practical thinking kept him at bay.
After receiving her shots, she had cried for a few minutes, once she had the breath to do so, until she was given a bottle to distract her from the sting. She wasn’t making a sound, and in the low light the extent of what the monster had done to her showed. Her nightgown was a torn, blood soaked mess at her midsection. Grown adults would be yelling in agony from the wound inflicted on her tender belly.
What if she’s in shock? he thought. Numb to the pain, or in too much to cry? “Emily?”
Calling her name shifted her attention, and she zeroed in on her father. The girl took her first steps now, into his arms.
Emily flailed and grabbed at him. She tried to bite him with the few teeth she had, and Simon knew Emily was one of them.
‘Shoot them in the head, or destroy the brain,’ the radio announcement back at the store had said.
“I can’t,” he said, while holding his baby girl away from his throat. She always had an impressive grip, but she was even stronger as her resolve set on satisfying a hunger no bottle could slake. “But I can’t leave her like this.”
Failing her in life, he couldn’t fail her in death and leave her as a crazed monster. He carried his child out of the nursery and into the bathroom down the hall. She deserves to be at peace, he thought as he opened the medicine chest. Emily clung to her father’s forearm like a koala, trying to bite the hand that was holding her face under her chin. Simon’s other hand wielded a thin pair of grooming scissors.
As she gnashed and writhed, the thing he held no longer looked like his sweet girl. She wasn’t the child he had put to bed the night before. With a shaky hand, he turned her to the side and put these slim shears to the small divot behind her ear. He hesitated, having a hard time convincing himself to go through with it, but he knew he had to be strong for his little girl. Gritting his teeth, he closed his tear swollen eyes tight as he drove the scissors in as far as they would go. She twitched a few times, then she moved no more.
Simon cradled his child and wept on the floor. A thump from downstairs indicated his work was not done, Momma’s up. With a kiss to her forehead, he laid Emily back down in her crib.
Rachael was at the bottom of the stairs, tangled in the fallen safety
gate. Her foot was caught between the vertical bars and she pulled against these, but one corner of the gate refused to release its hold on the wall. She clawed in vain at the carpeted risers, lunging up only to be pulled back down.
Simon just sat on the top stair, unintentionally taunting his departed wife. He felt sick over what he had to do to his daughter’s reanimated corpse, but now he needed to dispatch his dead wife. The grooming scissors wouldn’t be long enough to reach her brain, and he couldn’t fathom going in through her eye. Not the eyes he looked into the day he proposed, the day they took their vows, and every day since.
“You are not Rachael,” he told the ghoul, leaving it to retrieve one of his wife’s knitting needles. From beside a chair, on his wife’s side of their marital bed, he slid out a long metallic green dagger from a skein of yarn. He left the needle’s mate, remembering the sound of the pair at work together. Clicking and scraping against one another while the woman wiled the hours away making crafts. A comforting sound he would never hear her make again.
Sick to his stomach, Simon waited in the bedroom for the inevitable crack of the gate breaking free of its bracket. After the safety measure failed, she clamored up after him. She made it to the top with much ruckus, since the gate remained around her ankle, slamming and whacking into everything around it.
He stood in the bedroom, letting her come to him. She eagerly approached, limping and catching her entrapped leg on a small decorative table in the hall, spilling a bowl of plastic fruit. Simon was in no hurry to fulfill his husbandly duty. Death had parted them and he now had to keep them parted.
He wasn’t intending on living long after he dealt with her, but he didn’t want Rachael or himself to exist a minute longer than necessary as a zombie.
Life Among The Dead (Book 3): A Bittersweet Victory Page 24
