“Tommy, Timothy actually!” His mother said, ruffling his hair a bit.
“Grace Palmer.” She said introducing herself and extending a hand.
“Seth Palmer at your service,” the father of the child gave a courteous bow.
“Can I offer you guys something to drink?” Nate said in his surprisingly heavy voice. This was the first time Than and Penny had heard him talk. For them, it was like seeing snowfall in June.
“Please, if we could have some water. We were told that the water outside was not safe. We fled directly from the airport, and it took us almost three days to get out here. We had a car in safe keeping at the airport, and we rummaged for water and supplies throughout New York, the number of Zombies we had to run over and shoot... Thankfully, Little Tommy is too young to register violence.” Grace said, looking at her little boy.
“Day 30 and we already have a miracle.” Trevor said, handing out bottles of cold beer, and Bill followed suit, offering Tommy a carton of fruit juice.
“Fresh from the farms, or so the carton says.” Bill said, handing the carton to Grace.
CHAPTER TEN
All Guests should be Revered
Than was all smiles. All was not yet lost. He was glad for the company. The girls would have another companion, and they’d be less concerned about baring their fangs at one another. Also, now they had a baby to tend to. Penny had never been the child rearing type, with all her misgivings and tortured past, and Jessica seemed to be the type of girl who lived life as it came to her, never mind planning a wedding or bringing up a baby. Tommy would serve as a beacon of hope to them. Seth Palmer could join in with him in the watch for castaways and drifters. Than thought he’d be able to relate to them, being one of them, and understand at a better level.
Seth had looked a little disoriented the moment he walked into the bunker. Than put it down to physical exhaustion, but a night passed and Seth seemed no better. He also had this itch, and he kept picking at it, just under the knee. “But everyone can develop an allergy to anything, maybe it’s the new environment.” He thought, and brushed his misgivings aside. He was carving up a ham in the kitchen the next afternoon for lunch, it was his turn to cook and he was thinking steak with a side of chips and some gravy. This meant a lot of work. Feeding eleven people was no ordinary chore. He had all his tools beside him; a cleaver, a butcher knife and salt. He was just about to debone the piece, when he heard his name called. He looked around and it was Seth.
“Yeah, Seth my man, feeling any better?” he said, going back to carving the meat.
“Well, it’s just that I’m kind of feverish, probably ...ugh, the ...dehydra ...” His words were coming in slurs.
“Stop right there, Seth” Than said loudly.
All of the attention in the living space was now diverted to the kitchen. It seemed to all of them that Seth and Than were having an altercation. Than had a meat cleaver in hand at the ready. What was going on? Than wasn’t really impulsively angry. It took a lot to make him cross, and something didn’t feel right. Penny saw it first; Seth’s neck had drooped to one side and one of his hands was scratching at his neck, the other attending to his itch. In a split second they saw it happen. Than tried to back away but Seth lunged at him.
“Seth baby, what’s wrong?” Grace shouted.
For a moment, Seth looked back at her and the baby, his eyes were pained for just about the blink of an eye, and then the look was gone, replaced by abnormally dilated pupils.
Grace got up, almost throwing Tommy from her lap, trying to plead, to make a sound, but it seemed something got stuck in her throat and she was baffled beyond imagination. She just stood there as Seth jumped at Than, who had backed up to the sink. Seth's mouth was wide, as if to bite Than's neck off. Than’s hand moved upwards as if in slow motion and came down in a neat arc, onto Seth’s head. Seth fell on the ground motionless, his head chopped into two, spurting blood and what seemed to be a brownish mass of liquid, thicker and ominous.
Grace let out a wail and rushed towards the kitchen. Rick, who was midway between the kitchen and the living space, bringing around a pitcher of water, dropped it on the floor and, with bare feet on the broken glass, made for Grace, and stopped her from getting anywhere near the kitchen. She struggled in his arms, and then, when Seth’s body was completely motionless, she fell on the ground crying, unaware of the shattered glass that had cut into her shins and Rick’s feet.
William came out of his room looking confused and practically dazed. First, utter shock registered on his face which soon turned into a grimace; the deed had been done.
He asked Than to leave the cleaver on the floor, and walk out of the kitchen.
“Take your shirt off, Than!” He ordered. Than, too shocked to act otherwise instantly complied,
“I have killed a man!” He was trembling and repeating the phrase while he did so.
“Mr. Rogers, you have done no such thing. You have killed a monster, which if not dealt with, would have been the doom for us all.” William said loudly; firmly.
“Miss. Wilhelm, Come over towards me, my eyes fail me. Look at his torso for any marks or slashes.” William said, still very calm and collected.
Penny moved closer to the kitchen, a part of her wanting to embrace Grace on the way to comfort her, the other, worried about Than. She looked at his body, asked him to turn around and said that there was a blue mark on his skin on the back, from bumping into the sink, but apart from that he was clean.
Than still stood trembling, looking at his blood riddled hands, quietly, sardonically. He couldn’t bear to look at Grace or at Tommy, and kept his eyes lowered. Rick slowly picked Grace up into his arms and, with injured feet, walked with great difficulty to the living space. Grace was also bleeding from her wounds but only sobbed silently. Rick lay her down on a bed, and placed himself on the bed beside hers. Jessica immediately went to him. Silence prevailed in the bunker, except for little Tommy who cried and cried.
“Miss. Wilhelm, console the child.” William said and called Trevor, Bill, and Nate over to him.
“You three will wear plastic suits that I provide you, courtesy of Miss. Penny, she brought them along, and I thought they were worthless, but now things have changed. All of you will see to it that the kitchen mess is cleaned up, and the man Seth given a proper burial before sundown. You are to put his body in a plastic bag. I will give further directions when you have finished. This will be all for now.” William said, and wringing his hands, went back into his little room. That night was the hardest they had yet experienced.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
March Madness
Grace had become less talkative and more pensive. She stared into the ceiling, or knitted, a habit she had been forced to pick up. Her lips seemed to twitch constantly, and she was unable to take proper care of herself. Penny and Jessica tried to appease her, talking of Tommy, of his future, but nothing seemed to help. In the end, Jessica and Penny took it upon themselves to take care of little Tommy. He was the future, he was their only hope.
Than had started having nightmares, in spite of the Tylenol he had been chugging, on Penny’s advice. Life had become that much harder for him. He started seeing his wife in his dreams again. He did not want to sleep, and one day he broke down in front of Penny.
“I was a bad person, Penny; I didn’t care enough for my wife, when I could have. I could have averted that accident, why did I have to take the Palmers in?” He said, while tears cascaded down his chin.
“You couldn’t have done anything to save her, Than. What is meant to happen happens. As for the Palmers, we all took them in. You don’t have to blame yourself for that.” Penny said reassuringly, this time it was her putting her arm around his shoulder.
“Why did it happen to me? Why is it all so pointless?” Than said, his broad shoulders hunched, as if at the point of breaking.
“It happened to all of us, Than. I did not want it to happen the way it did. I did not want to be stuck here in confinement. In my
heart of hearts, I wanted to achieve greater things. Now look at me, the great neuro-psychologist responsible for isolating the advanced brain function awareness disorder, the zombie strand, so helpless in producing a cure for it.” She said, and this time she hugged him. Than started to cry, he felt safe with Penny. He felt as if he could bear anything if Penny was there. Months later, Than could be seen returning to his normal self, playing UNO and poker with the group, but some part of him had been lost, and he smiled less often. He couldn’t function at all around Grace, though. She always looked with wounded eyes while he was around. So he requested his bunker and Penny’s be placed in the midway and cordoned off with a sheet; also because of the fear of the nightmares. Penny agreed.
The watch became a moot exercise. Voting was suspended by William, no one else would enter the bunker now and that was clearer than ever. This went unopposed as the number of wanderers seemed to thin out day by day. It seemed that the Golden horde was no more. The news that used to come from William every day also came at a lesser frequency. The other bunkers and shelters across the globe only confirmed their survival, some falling in the process and never responding. One call from Sri Lanka was devastating though, as William made them listen to a tape of it.
“We have for the past year tried to persevere against the most stolid and terrifying living conditions. The attacks have become frequent and I don’t know what they want from two poor souls stuck in an eternity of solitude and gloom. My wife and I are going to embrace our fate rather than resist it. It’s of no use; we will become them until we remain no more. May God be with you all! Our fight is done!”
By the time the recording ended, they were all in tears, including Grace, who otherwise showed no signs of communicating any emotion whatsoever.
With the golden horde gone, the only visits had been from Zombies. Some of them banged into the door, others just ambled about the vicinity.
“I’m just worried that this might herald something bigger. I think all the ammo and the rifles, except for those in the sentry room, should be collected and kept in view, for a possible zombie onslaught. You are all aware that the repellent is weakening for whatever reason.” Than said to William one day.
“Mr. Rogers, the walls of the bunker are thick enough to keep off tanks, let alone a cavalcade ...” he finished his thought mid-sentence, and went off into his little room. The next day, he assigned all the men to building ladders and platforms from whatever wood they could find.
“They could assault us if they were hungry enough; try to climb up the walls, stepping on each other’s mangled bodies if their hunger drove them to it. Mr. Rogers has wizened us to that very possibility and I thank him for it.” He said.
The parties looking for driftwood around the springs, taking two trips every day, with Rick and Nate keeping guard fully armed, and the rest of the men gathering up and loading whatever branches and tree stumps they could find and fit into the designated vehicle, which was essentially a pickup truck. They were setting out for one such trip when they saw a large group of zombies coming towards the bunker. They had their rifles loaded but they did not want to take on such a number head on. They retreated to the bunker without firing a single shot, which would only have attracted the zombies.
“Lock down!” Rick shouted. William immediately pressed a button in his little room and the lights all went out, except for those in the sentry rooms. William came out of his room, like it had been watered down. He went straight for the sentry room. Having seen the situation outside, he ordered Bill and Trevor to bring the screens to the main bunker building, making sure that they were still connected to the cameras outside. Than knew what he was after. William was going to try to instil the horrors of the outside world in their minds, even deeper. He was determined not to let Penny face it all over again. The company stood huddled in front of the monitors now, as the cameras showed the movements of the zombies outside.
This was the largest group of Zombies they had seen thus far, amounting to between seventy and eighty - give or take. These included kids, women, men, old people, almost every colour and creed. The group moved closer, in rough lines. They were led by mostly young men, but there was nothing remotely human about them. The group ambled through the maize. The infrared field was weak, but somehow still there. They seemed to be uncomfortable to a certain degree, twitching their necks this way and that like rabid beasts. The closer they came, the more uppity they became. Behind them, they witnessed something unbelievably gory. An old lady in tourist clothes was ambling slowly through the crowd, around her shoulders - wrapped like a spare sweater - was a child of four or five. His eyes were filled with horror and he seemed to be paralyzed, too horror struck to move. To add to the desperation, he looked utterly famished, his cheeks sunken to the very bones, his eye sockets deep and dark with whites so white that it seemed they were staring from somewhere deep in the skull like two burning candles in a pumpkin; distant and far away. Than picked Penny up, who was staring at the screen wild-eyed, and brought her over to their room.
“You sit it out here, okay?” He said to her.
Just as he was about to leave to join the others who were watching the zombies march, she called him back.
He sat down across from her, on his bed.
“What is it, Penny?” he asked.
“I’m worried for everybody. I am trying to classify the state of that child into some category on the mental spectrum; PTSD, Shock, and I cannot categorise him anywhere. And the look in his eyes, I wondered how he was alive still. I mean, I never assumed human beings to be so base.” She said, her head in her hands.
“Look and listen to me very carefully, someone wiser than I am and far more adept at facing reality than I am, once told me that it wasn’t our fault, and there was no use in blaming ourselves for the greater scheme of things. It was you, Penny, and I have held your words of advice to heart until this day. So, chin up. It will pass. Everything does.” Than said, and instead of leaving, he lay on his bed, facing her.
“Let’s just stay awake for a while.” he said and smiled. This time however, Penny felt that somewhere deep down she saw the old Than. The real Than, normal and funny as ever, was looking back at her, if only for an instant.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Babies fall from a Stork’s Basket
Days went by, and the best thing about the passage of time was that it healed everyone. Grace had started to show signs of improvement, and that was brought upon by the silent and unsuspecting Nate who had been somehow able to break through her wall of grief and dilemma. The family feeling, the “us-feeling”, that Penny had looked for the day she had arrived in the bunker, was finally surfacing in the group. Even William had become tolerable. A year had passed since their arrival, and little Tommy had grown, and had even endeavoured to walk his first steps. He was attempting his first words, which were “Mama”.
William was playing with Tommy, when Than looked at them and asked Penny what she knew about him before coming to the bunker.
“Well, it’s a long story, but it goes somewhat like this; William Nestor used to be in British intelligence, and moved to America some ten years ago. My father had moved from Germany at about the same time, and it so happened that they worked together at the same company and became really good friends, you see? Now one day, my dad who was raised listening to the horrors of the great wars and the division of Berlin and JFK’s visit to the city, was filled with ideas about the apocalypse, and determined to build up a place like Berlin was then, for the free world. During the first waves of the cold war, he started working on this bunker and when William found out, he told him that he respected that. Well, by the completion of this establishment, they had become buddies for life. Dad died and in his will he made William the curator of this place. He didn’t take a cent for me, when shit hit the fan, and I told you it cost me half a million, I was just trying to impress you.” She said, careful not to meet his eyes as she finished. Than broke into a fit of laughter. They w
ere sitting like this when a beeping sound came from William’s little room. He immediately got up and almost ran towards the sound. After a while he came back with a confused expression on his face.
“What news?” Than asked, still in good humour.
“Well, Mr. Rogers, it seems that we are going to have company.” He said, and looked around the bunker, corner to corner, this time, looking concerned.
The next day they saw him on the radio, fighting with someone.
“That’s alright, but what of free will, I cannot force them to.” He almost shouted these words and threw the radio away on to an empty bed.
The radio kept beeping constantly that night, and William looked more and more distressed. Finally, he gathered all the members except Grace and Tommy and put a rather ridiculous proposition to them.
“I told you about how we guys were going to be receiving some people. The government, after much consultation with scientists and researchers, have come to the conclusion that, in order to increase the numbers of the unaffected, healthy people, we will need a baby boom of sorts. That means all fertile females will have to give birth to unaffected children within the next year. I have observed that some level of bonding already exists between at least two couples present. I am referring to Rick and Jessica, and Than and Penny.” Here he stopped to look at the four of them.
“We will have to hide this from Grace, considering her mental condition, but I have made my decision, and we are going to comply. If you guys want a marriage, I can accept the role of minister, and if you don’t, well, you know the deal, it’s not up to me, but this is all that I had to say. Also, seeing that we still have some room for lodging, we will be accepting already pregnant women from across the globe, and this place will look like a friggin maternity ward by the time the government has had its way, but you have to come to terms with the fact that this is a last resort and I was opposed to it from the moment I heard it. The government sadly has resorted to threats, and is planning to wipe out the Zombie population considerably using nuclear weapons, which they have been trying to access over the past year”, he said, and looked at the party expectantly as if wanting a reply.
The Golden Horde and the Zombies (Zombie Conflict Series Book 1) Page 5
