by R. J. Spears
Cody waited, indecision rippling through him. Up until now, the group had faced down only the undead. Deep down, they hoped they wouldn’t have to face-off with the living, but they also knew it was inevitable. The dark side of human nature couldn’t be denied. Whereas optimists thought that the apocalypse would bring out the altruistic all-for-one, better nature of man, the truth was that it was more like the every-man-for-himself ideal predominated.
“Yes, we have things, and yes, you’re right about weapons; we have them. Lots of them. And we won’t hesitate to use them.”
“That’s not very neighborly of you.”
“It’s a dog-eat-dog world.”
“Isn’t that true?”
“So we have a stalemate. Why don’t you just back-off, and everyone will be better off for it?”
The man rubbed his chin in a theatrical manner. “Well, I don’t see a stalemate here because if I have to, I’ll huff and I’ll puff and blow your gate down.”
Cody reached up and pressed another button. When he started talking, an edge of fear was in his voice. “Steven?” He paused then asked again, “Steven?”
Another speaker squawked to life, “Yeah, Cody, what is it?” It was Steven.
“This guy wants us to turn over all our stuff: food, medicine, guns. Do you think the gate will stand up to that bus?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. He can’t go around it; the grounds are too soft. He’d risk toppling over with the steep angle of the hill.”
“Excuse me,” the man said, his breath steaming the camera lens in chilled air. “I don’t have all day. Let’s get this gate open and get this deal done before things get out of hand.”
Cody moved closer to the microphone this time. “For the last time, no. Now get the hell off our mountain before we blow you back down it.”
The man stepped back from the camera, crossed his arms, and shook his head in an overly dramatic fashion. “Guess we’ll do it the hard way.” He walked back around the front of the bus and got in.
“Steven, get Belinda down at the end of the hall with a rifle ready to shoot,” Cody said. “I think this guy is going to try to bust through the gate.” He pulled a walkie-talkie off the charger and handed one to Russell and said, “You take the entryway next to the garage, but stay out of it unless you have to.”
“I’m not a kid,” Russell said.
“I know, but just be safe for me, okay?” he asked.
Capitulating, Russell said, “I’ll try.”
Russell sprinted down the long hallway that ran perpendicular to the front of the house, spanning nearly its entire length. As he ran, he heard the crashing sound of metal-against-metal. He was positive that it was the noise of the bus smashing through the gate. When he got into position, he looked out the narrow slit of a window and saw the bus (no worse for the wear after coming through the gate) gently slide into the large paved area in front of the house and come to a stop, its back end sloped away from view. In all his years, he had never found a school bus that looked so menacing.
He ducked back and looked down the hallway and saw Steven and Cody talking. After a moment, they broke up their huddle and headed off to their pre-arranged positions. The group put on a good show of having a game plan, but in truth, deep down, they had more bravado than experience. Their uncle’s bunker had carried them this far, and they now hoped it would take them through the next hour. Only it wouldn’t.
A clattering sound drew Russell’s attention back to the window, and then he saw the folding doors of the bus open. The doorway stood empty for a moment; then, a woman appeared in it. She was gagged, and her hands were behind her back. A strange, yellow plastic collar was around her neck. In a quick series of jerky movements, she came off the bus with the man holding an assault rifle to her back. Unlike the bus, she looked worse for the wear. Her hair was matted with dirt and with what looked like blood. Her clothes were filthy and tattered.
The driver had angled the bus so that it could act as a cover, and he was smart enough to use it to protect himself from any shots the group in the house might take. Plus, he had the woman as a human shield.
“Okay, this is your last chance,” the man shouted from behind the woman. “If you don’t give me what I’m asking for, I’ll be forced to hurt this innocent woman.”
Russell drew his walkie-talkie to his mouth and keyed the talk button, “Cody, what do we do now?”
There was a long pause, and Cody came over the walkie-talkie, “Nothing. At least not yet.”
Sherry’s said “I know that lady. She works at the bank.”
“That doesn’t change anything,” Cody said.
“We can’t shoot; we might hit her,” Steven said.
“I know that,” Cody said with a sharpness in his tone. “Everyone pipe down, and let me talk to this guy.”
A moment later, Cody’s shout filled the paved turnaround area, “What do you want?”
“I already told you what I wanted,” the man shouted back.
“That’s a no go.”
“Are you telling me that you won’t trade what you have for the safety of this woman?”
The walkie-talkie fired to life again, “Cody, you’ve got to do something to save that woman.” It was Sherry, and her voice was edging up to near hysteria again.
“Shut up, Sherry,” Cody said.
Another moment passed; then, Cody shouted, “We can give you a small stockpile of food and medicine for the woman.”
“I’m truly sorry, but that just won’t do,” the man shouted, and he pushed the woman out into the open with the barrel of his rifle. Russell had the best view and could finally see that the woman was handcuffed. “You’re going to have to do a lot better than that.”
“That’s the best we can do,” Cody shouted.
“Well, that’s not good enough,” the man said as he yanked the woman out of view.
“What do we do?” Steven’s voice asked.
“Give me a minute to think,” Cody said.
But the man didn’t give the group any time. Two flashes of motion came from behind the bus and then a light clattering sound as two canisters landed and rolled across the driveway towards the house. A second later, smoke billowed out of them, and within ten seconds, the entire view of the bus was obscured with a thick cloud of slate gray smoke.
Frantic voices squawked across the walkie-talkies for the next several seconds. Panic was in the undercurrent of all the exchanges, and in the chaos, no decisions were made.
The man in the bus made up their minds. Being at the far end of the house, Russell had the best angle through the smoke and saw the woman stagger through a billowing cloud with the man shoving her ahead of him. Russell considered smashing out his window and taking a shot at the man, but he was afraid of the smoke, thinking it might be poisonous. He was rattled. Had he taken a moment, his mind would have made the connection that the smoke was just for cover because they had just walked through it. Panic overrode reasoning. A valuable lesson but one learned too late on that day.
Russell pressed his face against the glass so that he could see what the bus driver was doing. All of the man’s moves were deliberate and without any overt sense of fear or trepidation. None of what he did made any sense to Russell, though. He shoved the woman up to the front door and next to a set of barred windows. He grabbed the woman and pulled her to him, saying something to her that got her full attention. She went stock-still. He unlocked one of her handcuffs and attached it to the bars that ran in front and then pulled her gag off.
She tried to pull free but couldn’t as the handcuffs clattered against the bars on the window. As she struggled, he turned and jogged back into the smoke.
“Help me!” the woman screamed, “you people in the house, please come out and help me.”
“I’m going out,” Steven’s voice boomed over the walkie-talkie.
“No,” Cody shouted, “stay inside. We have no idea what he’s up to. He could pick you off in a second.”
&nb
sp; “But the woman…,” Steven said.
“Wait for the smoke to clear, and then we’ll do what we can for the woman.”
The woman continued to wail and keen, her pleas desperate and soul-wracking for the group inside, but they stayed put. It wasn’t something that any of them were proud of.
The smoke started to dissipate, and between the woman’s screams and the walkie-talkie chatter, Russell could make out noises from the other side of the smoke. When the last wisps of smoke seemingly evaporated, the bus stood where it had stopped, but there was no sign of the man. Russell saw several sets of legs moving on the other side of the bus, though.
“He could have a small army on that bus,” Cody said.
Russell was still partially paralyzed from fear but mustered the courage to say, “Yes.” His throat was dry as a desert. “I see a lot of legs on the other side of the bus.”
“Okay, people, I guess this is war. So shoot anything that moves out there,” Cody said with a sense of fear palpable in his voice, despite trying to cover it up.
Before any of them could react, the man popped up on the front fender of the bus with something on his shoulder that looked like a bazooka, but it seemed too small for that. It really didn’t matter what it was. They should have shot first and asked questions later. It turned out to be a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, and he did not hesitate. Not at all.
The front side of the house exploded in a fireball, and parts of the front wall collapsed into the house. Russell heard someone screaming, but he wasn’t sure who it was; he just was too rattled.
The woman shackled to the front of the house was the one who was screaming. Her earlier screams had been ones of panic, calling for help. These new screams had a wholly different tone. These were cries of agony.
Russell could see that she was desperately clutching at the yellow collar with her free hand as her body convulsed uncontrollably. It took him a minute to figure out what was happening.
A panicked voice came over the walkie-talkie, “He’s shocking her with that collar!” It was Sherry, again.
Russell became transfixed as he watched the woman’s body buck and twitch, the shocks coming at regular intervals. With each new round, she would scream.
“Can anyone see what’s happening on the other side of the bus?” Cody’s voice screamed from the walkie-talkie, jerking Russell out of the horror of watching the woman. “Russell, what do you see?”
Russell had the best angle. Or maybe it was really the worst angle. It came down to asking himself if he wanted to see death coming to take him, or whether he wanted to be surprised when it came.
Coming around the front of the bus was a small horde of zombies. Each one had a portion of its head shaved. Each wore a yellow plastic collar similar to the woman’s, but wires led from the collar to the side of the zombie’s exposed skulls. Zombies were never pretty, but this was grotesque. The wires were held tightly to their skulls by inexpertly placed duct tape.
“What the hell?” Steven asked over the walkie talkie to his stunned comrades.
“Oh, my God,” Sherry said next.
The zombies shambled towards the source of the screaming. The woman.
Russell regained his wits and smashed the barrel of his rifle through the window, sending glass into a set of decorative shrubs. There were so many of them that he felt overwhelmed and couldn’t make up his mind which one to shoot.
Someone else in the house didn’t share his confusion. A shot rang out from his right, and the top of one zombie’s head exploded in a plume of blood and gore. The dead thing toppled over backwards a moment later. That first dead zombie broke Russell’s spell, and he began firing, too. He dropped several, but the rest kept coming, trampling over their fallen comrades without a second thought.
Rushing into a hail of bullets held no terror for them. Watching one of their moribund colleagues go down didn’t deter them or lower their morale. They had no morale. No fear. Only hunger.
The residents of the house continued to fire, but the undead moved in on the woman. She screamed the scream of the damned, and they were on her. Russell felt a terrible tightness in his gut and fired into the backs of the zombies as they tore into the woman, but they were undeterred. The intensity of her screams increased, and then the screams were silenced.
Russell stopped to reload his rifle, and when he looked back up, he saw, between breaks in the throng of zombies, the man standing beside the bus as zombies streamed by him. In one hand he held an assault rifle, and his other hand stayed on the panel of buttons on his chest. The zombies seemed not to notice him as they came towards the house.
But after a few seconds, one of the zombies turned away from the frontal assault on the house and started towards to the man. It stumbled in his direction, arms outstretched. When it got within ten feet of him, the man’s fingers moved over the buttons and pressed one of them. The zombie froze in place and then started shaking violently, falling to its knees. This lasted for several seconds. It slowly rose, making another step towards the man, and the process repeated with the zombie only going to one knee this time. It stood, swayed in what looked like indecision, then turned and rejoined its undead comrades in their assault on the house.
Stunned, Russell fumbled for his walkie-talkie and screamed into it without depressing the talk button. He wasn’t sure anyone would have understood anything he said anyway. When he remembered to press the button, he didn’t do much better.
“Russell, what are you saying?” Cody asked. “Slow down, and breathe.”
Russell took Cody’s advice and took three deep breaths. “He’s controlling the zombies.”
Chapter 8
Life on the Home Front
It took a week for the bruising to go away and the stiffness in my side to recede. During that time, I moved around like a geriatric. Brandon and Aaron poked fun at me, calling me grandpa, but I waved the joking off. I didn’t have the strength to do anything else.
During that week, Kara led several worship meetings in the dining hall. I usually sat in the back but felt the urge to move up closer because of Brother Ed’s presence. Over the weeks, he continually challenged Kara on points she had made with her lessons, and today would turn out to be no different. The man clearly had an agenda.
“But wouldn’t you say that the recent events point to the End of Times more than ever?” Brother Ed asked.
Kara stopped and composed herself. She was a lot cooler about his questions than I would have been. “Some could see it that way, but don’t you think that God is trying to tell us that no one except He knows when the end is coming?”
“I think He speaks in his actions, too,” Brother Ed said, starting to work himself into a lather. “He sent floods and the plagues into Egypt. Now, the dead walk the earth. Could there be a clearer sign?” he asked playing to the audience. A few, nodded their heads in approval, but most did not.
“Even with the few instances of the dead being revived, I haven’t read anywhere in the Bible about a zombie plague being any sign of the End of Times.”
“Then, I think you’re plainly missing the point,” Brother Ed replied, his voice rising in volume.
Kara was silent for a moment. “Perhaps you and I can speak after we finished here?”
He started, “I think….”
“Who would like to lead us in prayer to end our time together?” Greg asked from a seat near the front, cutting off the discussion.
Hub Underhill, getting the cue, snapped his hand up and said, “I will.”
The meeting ended after that, but Greg, Kara, and I sat together later in the dining hall to debrief on the day’s events
“What a blowhard,” I said. “When will he learn to shut his mouth?”
“Everyone’s entitled to his own opinion,” Kara said.
“He’s challenging you every chance he can get,” I said.
Dinner was eating rice and beans with hard bread. Again. Greg sat across from us looking in our direction, no
t really tracking our conversation.
I waved my hand in front of his face, “Earth to Greg. What do you think?”
“About what?” he asked.
“The way Brother Ed is always picking at what Kara has to say in her lessons?”
“He’s a gas bag. Don’t pay any attention to him.”
“You mean in the same way you weren’t paying attention to us right now?” I asked.
He paused for a moment and then said, “Ahhh, sorry about that. I’ve got something on my mind.”
“Like what?” I asked.
He pushed his rice and beans around on his plate. “Like this. The supplies are getting low. This is the third time this week we’ve had rice and beans if you hadn’t noticed. The snow’s hampering our foraging parties, and I feel guilty going into town to find stuff because we’re taking away supplies from the people at the church. Along with food, we need to find some diesel fuel. Travis said we have three to four weeks left, and then we’ll really have to ration.”
“How so?” Kara asked, her face creased with concern.
“Maybe two hours a day of electricity for lights and other essential items like keeping the infirmary powered. He’d divert all of what was left to the fans that move the heat throughout the building. We really don’t know how well we have it. Heat will be a luxury. The geothermal plant has been a Godsend for us.”
Should we consider trying to get into the prison?” I asked. “It’s only a couple miles away. There might be supplies there.”
Lucasville’s claim to fame, if you could call it fame, was that it played host to Southern Ohio Correctional Facility. It was a maximum-security prison, which housed some of the worst of the worst. Murders, rapist, child molesters, and hard-core drug dealers.
“I don’t know if we’re that desperate,” Greg said. “That place is swarming with zombies in orange prison jumpsuits.” We had done a couple of reconnaissance missions of the prison, and it looked like the guards had abandoned many of the prisoners to a horrible fate of death by starvation or death by zombie.
