And the woman actually laughed. "Relax, it’s not loaded, remember?"
She reached into her pocket and pulled out a single bullet. Loaded it.
"Ah, now it’s loaded," Jack said.
She held up her wrist. "I’ve been bitten, remember. It has to be this way."
She spun the chamber again. Pulled the trigger.
Click.
We all took another step back and the woman laughed again.
If I had to take a guess, I’d say that the woman had lost her mind. Pushed over the edge by everything that she had been through. But then again maybe she had just come to terms with how messed up this whole situation was. A bullet to the head would be a quick, painless option. A lot less painful than starving to death, I thought. Or turning into an infected undead monster.
"You don’t have to do this," I said.
"Yeah I do," she answered. "I want to. I owe it to myself."
We pleaded with her one more time to tell us where the Fortress was. She said even if she told us, even if she drew us a map, we’d never find it. We’d never make it.
The last thing she told us was to be careful. Avoid this town. Best go around. Way around.
Unfortunately, we didn’t have a choice.
CHAPTER 10
We left the woman by herself, sitting against the banks of the creek, spinning the chamber of the gun, pulling the trigger. We climbed out of the creek bed and headed towards Hunter, sticking to the tree line that followed the creek. We made it to the hill outside of the town. We crouched down and watched.
The sun was setting. It was getting darker and darker.
From our vantage point we could see clearly that the dreadlocked woman was right about this town. The infected were everywhere. They completely filled the streets.
"This is not good," Kenji said.
"There’s way too many of them," Jack agreed. "That woman was right. We need to avoid this town. We can’t go down there."
"Great," Maria said. "So, we came all this way for nothing?"
"What about the Fortress?" Daniel suggested. "It has to be close by, right?"
"We don’t know that," Kenji said. "And besides, that woman said we’d never find it."
"I think we have to check it out," Jack added.
"No," Kenji said. "We stay the course. If we ration our food and water we should be fine until we locate another town."
"Barely."
"Yeah, I agree with Jack on this one," Daniel said. "We’re cutting it way to close."
"You heard the woman," Kenji said. "She said it was hidden. We can't waste the time and energy looking for a place that we might never find."
"I don’t think we have a choice," Jack replied. "We’re out of food. We’re out of water. If we skip this town, we might not make it to the next one. We have to take a chance."
Over the past couple of days I’d noticed that everyone was getting a whole lot more edgy and irritable. We were starting to argue and squabble whenever we had these discussions. I had to keep reminding myself it was because we were hungry and dehydrated. It was hard to think rationally. Hard to plan. We were still arguing about what to do and where to go, when all of a sudden, a gunshot erupted in the night.
The woman, she had finally done it.
The problem was the gunshot was loud. Very loud.
Daniel swore under his breath. He knew the danger the gunshot presented us. I don’t know why we didn’t think of this before she did it. I guess we were more concerned with honoring her dying wishes to take our own safety into account. Or maybe it was because we were all starving and dehydrated; we were starting to make mistakes.
Life or death type mistakes.
"We gotta get out of this area." Kenji said. "That gunshot will attract all kinds of attention from the town."
"No," Daniel said. "We need to wait for daylight. Observe the town. See how bad it is."
"Maybe Maria’s idea of spending the night up in the trees isn’t such a bad idea after all," I said.
"Bad idea after all?" Maria asked, surprised. "It was never a bad idea."
Kenji shouldered his rifle and looked back down into the town. "This is bad. Very, very bad."
"What?"
He shook his head.
I looked through the scope on my rifle as well. And that’s when I saw what Kenji was so worried about.
The infected people.
They were looking in this direction. All of them. It looked like the whole town.
Some of them had started shuffling towards us.
Some of them were running.
Kenji swore again. He was frustrated. This was our one chance to get food and water.
Daniel grabbed me by the shoulder. "We need to go!"
"Back to the creek bed," Kenji said. "Double time."
Another night without food or water. We were pushing our luck.
We started running. Once again, fear and adrenalin gave us a burst of energy. We made it back to the creek bed in world record time. But we still had a long, long way to go. About twenty miles. Practically a marathon. There’s no way we could run the whole way.
Throughout this journey Kenji had been quoting Sun Tzu’s ‘The Art of War’. I think he was trying to motivate us, lift our spirits. One of the quotes he’d repeated a couple of times was ‘a thousand mile journey starts with a single footstep’.
I thought about that quote as we ran through night, back to the farmhouse. We had taken that first, single footstep what seemed like forever ago. And since then, we’d been walking and running. Yeah a thousand mile journey starts with a single footstep, I thought. And then is quickly followed by a million more.
Next to me, Maria tripped. I caught her and helped her up. It was getting darker, harder to see where we were running. She recovered her footing and said thanks between deep, ragged breaths.
In the distance, the howling scream of the infected echoed and chased us. In our minds, they were right there, unbearably close. They were reaching out for us. They were just around the bend in the river, seconds away from emerging from the dark.
We continued to run.
CHAPTER 11
There’s no doubt we were dying of thirst. We weren’t thinking about this at the time because we were too preoccupied with not being eaten alive. But now that I look back?
Yeah.
We were slowly dying.
We had been running through the night, along the dried out creek bed for hours on end. Twenty freakin miles.
Eventually we stopped; we needed to rest, even if for just a few minutes. Daniel did not like the idea of stopping out in the open. He did not like it one bit. He wanted to push on. Of course he did, I thought. He's a Special Forces soldier. He's tough as nails. He'd been trained to deal with this kind of situation.
The rest of us? We were barely coping.
"They can't go on anymore," Kenji said, referring to the non-soldiers of the group. "They can't."
"They can," Daniel replied. "We have to keep moving. Staying still, staying in the one place will get us killed."
"They're not goddamn Navy Seals. We have to rest."
"Hey," I said, trying to catch my breath. "Did… did anyone see the dreadlocked woman? Did we run past her? Did anyone see her body?"
"I didn’t see her," Maria answered.
"It’s not important," Daniel said. "We need to keep moving."
Kenji held up his hand. "Just five minutes. That’s all I’m asking."
The brief argument was ended with a distant moaning howl.
Before the world ended, you might have mistaken this noise for a wild dog, or a lone wolf. But we all knew what it was. And we all knew we had to keep going. In the few months since the Oz virus took over and spread around Australia, I’ve seen the infected in action, I’ve seen them track down their prey, time and time again. They are amazingly successful hunters. It was terrifying to think that a virus could make a person act this way, turn them into such a highly tuned weapon, capable of f
inding their victims, in the dark, on the run.
It was as fascinating as it was terrifying.
Daniel got his wish. We pushed on. We followed the creek all the way back to the house. It was pitch black by the time we got back. I didn’t have a watch on me, but I’d say it was well past midnight. There was no moon. No stars.
As soon as we were inside, Daniel and Kenji pushed a bookshelf up against the front door and another one against the back door. They then moved a couple of couches up against the bookshelves, to reinforce these temporary barricades.
"Shouldn’t we board these doors up?" I asked.
"No," Kenji replied. "If board them up, we won’t be able to get out."
He had a good point. We did not want to turn the house into a tomb. We needed to escape if the infected broke through.
Most of the windows had been boarded up by Daniel the previous day. I was suddenly very glad for his foresight, his training, his strength. I had no idea where he got his energy from. Especially since I felt like I was on the brink of exhaustion. I was having trouble seeing. The fact that it was dark didn’t help matters, but I really felt like my vision was becoming more and more narrow.
I felt like I had tunnel vision.
And I couldn’t think straight at all. I was quite happy for the others to make all the decisions and tell me what to do. I didn’t care that these decisions would ultimately decide my fate. I was too tired and too exhausted to care.
Kenji pushed a rifle into my hands. "Hey, are you ready?"
He then gave me a plastic shopping bag that was full of ammo magazines.
"I’ll be upstairs," he said. "Daniel will be downstairs. We need you and Maria and Jack to run this ammo when we need it, OK?"
I took the bag of ammunition and nearly fell over. It was heavy.
Daniel was in the kitchen doing a brief check of our weapons, and our ammo supply.
On the table was shotgun, a two hand guns, five rifles and one sniper rifle.
Kenji had been out into the barn and retrieved a couple of crowbars, a couple of hammers, an axe, a baseball bat, and a cricket bat. He laid these out on the table as well.
"I’m pretty confident they’ll only attack from one place," Daniel said.
"How do you know that?" Maria asked.
"They follow one another, like sheep."
"What if they surround us?"
"Then we’re in trouble."
"He’s right," Kenji said. "If they surround the house and start trying to break in from multiple points, we’ll have to spread out. Hopefully they will attack from the front. That way we can concentrate our firepower."
"How many do you think there are?" I asked.
"If the whole town became infected, maybe two thousand people?" Kenji said.
"Maybe less if some of the people left early," Jack added. "Or if they were evacuated."
"Or if some of them died," I pointed out.
"Either way, there’s probably more infected people than we have bullets," Kenji said.
"So what the hell do we do?" Maria asked. "We can’t recycle our bullets can we?"
I think Kenji chuckled at this, even though it was a serious situation. "No we can’t recycle our bullets," as he handed one of the rifles to Maria. "If the whole town shows up at our doorstep, we will run out of ammo."
"And what do we do when that happens," I asked.
"When we run out of bullets, we bunker down. And then at first light, we make a run for it."
That was our back up plan. Our exit strategy. Like I said, over the past month, Kenji had been quoting Sun Tzu’s ‘The Art of War’ to us.
Know your enemy.
Know yourself.
Know the terrain.
Always have an exit strategy.
These were the golden rules of warfare according to a really old, really smart dude.
And our exit strategy?
Run for it.
"I think we need a better exit strategy," I said.
Kenji and Daniel just shook their heads.
"This is it," Daniel said. "There is nowhere to fall back to. This is it. This is the Alamo. We can’t go running off into the night. We need to defend this house. We can’t let them take it. None of them can get in here."
"Wait, didn’t everyone die at the Alamo?" Jack asked.
"Worst comes to worst," Kenji said. "We wait for sunrise and then we make a break for it. But we absolutely must hold the fort until then. Got it?"
"Well, what if they actually do break through?" I asked. "What if they get inside?"
Kenji thought it over for a second. This was the worst case scenario. But we needed to plan for it.
"If they break through," Kenji said. "Get to the top of the stairs. I’ll hold them off and buy us some time. The stairwell will create a bottle neck. If they make it up the stairs, we move back to the master bedroom. From there, we get out onto the balcony and then we climb up to the roof."
"The roof?" I asked. "What the hell do we do up there? We’ll be stuck."
"We’ll have to wait it out," Daniel added. "Like we said, we wait until daybreak. Then we move. It’s the only way. We can’t go running around in the night. They have the advantage. Running around in the dark will get us all killed."
"What are these for," Maria asked as she held up the baseball bat.
"Everyone needs a secondary weapon as well," Kenji said.
"Why?"
"Because a baseball bat won't run out of ammo."
It was at that moment the severity of our situation really hit home for me. Essentially what Kenji was saying, was that there’s a very good chance we will run out of ammo. Or maybe a situation where we wouldn’t have time to reload.
Either way, this was a scary thought.
We each chose a weapon.
Jack chose the cricket bat. Maria went with the baseball bat. Kenji had the axe. Daniel went with the crowbar. I went with the hammer. Plus I still had the blunt flick knife that Kenji had given me earlier. These two extra weapons did not make me feel any safer.
The rest of our plan went like this…
Kenji would be upstairs in a snipers position so he could take out as many infected as possible as early as possible.
Daniel would man the ground floor.
Maria, Jack and I were to do as we were told basically.
Shoot when told to shoot.
Move when told to move.
Run.
Hide.
I didn’t mind.
We were in the kitchen, looking out the windows over the sink, watching the creek.
"Wait," Maria said. "What if they break through? What do we do? Where do we go?"
"Weren’t you paying attention before?" I asked.
"I kind of spaced out after Kenji handed me the rifle."
"We can’t let them break through."
"But what if they do?"
"We have to hold this place at all costs. We can’t retreat. There’s nowhere to go. We can’t go running around in the dark. We’ll get lost. We’ll get eaten.
"Worst case scenario," Jack said to Maria. "If they do break in here, get upstairs to the master bedroom. That way we can lay down a suppressive line of fire at the top of the stairs. Then we head to the roof."
"The roof? Are you guys insane? That’s not a plan. That’s a suicide mission."
I nodded. "That’s exactly what I said."
"We get to the roof and wait until daybreak," Jack added. "Then we make a run for it. But we have to hold until first light. We have to."
"Do you think they’ll find us?" Maria asked.
"Yeah," Jack answered. "They always find us."
I suddenly realized we were in way, way over our heads. But we had to defend this house. To the very last bullet. So we prepared ourselves, we checked our ammo, we checked our rifles, and we waited.
We didn’t have to wait long.
They were coming for us all right. They were coming fast.
CHAPTER 12
&nb
sp; Kenji yelled something from upstairs.
Daniel was in the living room, looking out the front windows of the house. "Say again?" he shouted back.
"Group of three!" Kenji said. "Coming in fast. They’re heading straight for us."
Yep, Kenji had confirmed it. They were here. The Battle for the farmhouse had begun.
Jack, Maria and I were crowded around the kitchen windows. We were looking at the tree line of the creek, trying to see them, waiting for that first infected person to break through out into the open.
"I don’t see them yet," Jack said.
"How?" Maria asked. "How did they get here so fast?"
From in the living room we could hear Daniel swearing.
"They’re getting closer!" Kenji said from upstairs, "I’m gonna open fire."
This was one of the things we briefly discussed earlier. How close do we let them get before we start shooting? The creek was at least half a mile away, maybe further. This was a tough shot, even for a trained sniper like Kenji. Especially in the dark. And we did not want to waste any ammo.
Where The Dead Men Lie (The Secret Apocalypse) Page 5
