Everything is crap now.
His psyche was at low tide. Which was why he was so surprised when he felt his spear go up and out through the top. When he pulled it back down, he closed his eyes as the dirt and dust coated his head and face. Then he opened his eyes and was rewarded with the piercing ray of light coming through a tiny hole.
“Liam?” His name was an echo.
“Liam!”
“What?”
“You're staring up. Are you in there?”
With even the drip of light coming through, Victoria was able to see what she was doing and clear a section of the dirt on her side so she could reach the top. Together, they widened the hole so they would fit through.
Liam hesitated.
“What is it?”
“I don't know if I can lift my arms above my head one more time. And to get out through that hole...”
“We'll need our arms. OK, let's rest for a minute.”
Liam wasn't going to argue, but he really wanted to do more than rest. He wanted to sleep. He tried to lean back against the rear wall of the grave so he could rest his upper body.
“Stay with me. Don't you dare.”
“Huh?” He knew what she wanted of him, but he really needed to just take a little breather.
“Liam, dammit, stay with me!”
That got his attention. “Why Victoria, I've never heard you cuss like that.” He knew that was a half-truth. She normally was very reserved in her off-color commentary, though she did lay down some foul language when they escaped the city and thought Grandma had died. “It isn't very ladylike.”
He was joking with her, but he saw the smile on her face too. She pulled out the big guns to keep him awake.
“Are you ready to get out of this grave? I sure as hell am.”
Liam, ever smiling, only replied with a long, “Umm,” as in, “Umm, I'm gonna tell.”
He had to admit, if she was trying to goad him into trying to climb, it worked. Not because of what she said, but that she'd said it at all. Her minor breach of language etiquette told him she was seriously worried about him.
He pushed up with his legs. He would have to use his arms, but first he could position himself a little higher on the wall. He'd gotten his head into the narrow part of the hole above, not quite poking out of the grave itself, but his arms soon would be.
“Wouldn't it be funny if there are a pack of zombies above us?” He said it to be funny. His dark humor was meant to ward off the bad thoughts, as odd as that felt to him.
“I doubt zombies would hang around in cemeteries. There's no fresh victims there.”
“You know, I was thinking the very same thing.”
He threw his spear up through the hole, then with all the energy he had left, he pushed his arms up as well. He had to work away some of the loose dirt, but he was able to use his arms while he pulled his legs up the sides of the walls. Like some sick worm, he slid out of the grave onto his belly. The headstone was only inches away.
“Charles Everett. U.S. Navy. Blah blah blah. 1943.” His eyes couldn't focus on all the words.
He slowly turned around to look back down the hole. A pretty face looked up at him.
“Victoria!”
“Yeah, I'm still here. Care to help?”
He hung his arms down and pulled up her wooden pick. What was once several feet long was now about the size of a dagger. It must have broken apart as she tore into the dirt.
“Hold on to me and use your feet to climb. The edge is too unstable to put too much weight with your arms.”
“That's perfect. My arms are toast.”
He knew the feeling. It took him a long time to get her out of the hole, but soon she lay next to him on the lush green turf of the cemetery.
Sleep sounded divine. As did water. A tall cool glass of Mountain Dew would be salvation.
“Liam!”
“Why are you screaming at me?”
“I called your name about five times. You aren't responding to me.”
He couldn't think of anything funny to aid his defense. All he could say was, “Oh.”
She continued when she had his attention. “Look, over there.” She pointed, though she didn't raise her arm from the ground.
A large hole had been excavated from the grave next door.
6
He took a moment to scan the cemetery landscape. Tens of thousands of white headstones stood in martial rows on every hillside as far as he could see. They'd emerged on a flat, low section of the cemetery. Slopes rose on either side, though he literally thanked God there were no zombies anywhere in his field of view. That, at least, gave them some time to rest.
The girls were nowhere in sight. He figured they made good on their plan to separate from him.
He rolled over toward Victoria. She was filthy. Her face was covered in dirt and mud, like she'd been at an expensive spa and had it caked on. Her white top was now mostly brown from all the dust and dirt that mixed with her sweat. The bottom half of each of the legs of her jeans were well-soiled with mud. That was from planting her legs in the muddy walls for—
He looked at his watch. It was late afternoon, but he had no idea how long they'd dug. He didn't think to check the time when they started out. For every minute of however long they were in the grave, he thought the climbing zombies were going to come up and grab him, but they never did. The creepy soldier guys just stood vigil, moaning and clawing upward, but the dirt that fell on them was spread out and compacted.
In the bright light, he could hardly believe such a scene was mere feet away. The sounds from below were muffled by the soddy edges and thick earth in the hole.
“Where do you think they went?” He could hardly talk.
“Where did they come from...where did they go?” She let out a giddy laugh, though her voice was dry like his. “I think I'm finally going crazy, Liam. I really don't care. I just climbed out of a grave! They saved us.”
“I thought that was my job?” It came out in a whisper.
She looked at him. He only saw her pretty eyes.
“You did your job. You got us out of there.” She nodded to the hole.
He was too tired to argue. Instead, he stood.
“Come on. We need water.” He enjoyed being on his feet, thankful that his arms hung to his sides at rest, while he looked for his target. “This way.”
He had gone ten paces when he remembered Victoria.
Good boyfriends help their girlfriends.
But she was already on her feet. He absently thought she was stronger than he was. She was more likely to pull him to his feet. This time was different because he was insane with thirst, and had a touch of delirium.
My excuse. I'm stickin' to it.
As he expected, the low point of the cemetery contained a small creek. He stumbled into the rocky depression—it was more of a drainage ditch than a natural creek—but it contained his prize. Years of Boy Scout warning blared in his head about drinking untreated water, but he threw all the books into the fire of his thirst. He was not going to be denied by science.
He nearly fell as he bent down to stick his face into a particularly deep section of the creek. He took long, dangerous gulps. The water filled his stomach until he could feel its weight inside him.
Victoria put her head in next to his. All was quiet for a long time.
Liam, finally sated, used the water to wash his face and eyes. When he was done, he felt like the proverbial million bucks.
Down the creek, and beyond the cemetery, he could see the dingy brown of the Mississippi. They had almost gone full circle.
He grabbed her and pointed where he was going. He was too tired to explain.
They stumbled through the cemetery, wary for the dead, and the undead. He was careful to go around the plots, as if to atone for the desecration they'd inflicted upon the robbed grave sites.
You had no choice.
Well, other than death.
He had no energy for moral di
lemmas. He'd done what was necessary to survive, though it didn't sit well with him once he'd made the realization. How many men and women used the same excuse in his zombie books? The one excuse that seemed to always exonerate any crime.
He hopped over the low stone wall marking the boundary of the cemetery. He then crossed the railroad tracks next to the river, and scrambled down the rocky bank. In moments, he stood alone at the edge of the wide river.
The quiet was only broken by small ripples along the shore, or birds in the distance. A woodpecker far away registered as the loudest noise until Victoria came tumbling down the rocky bank. He watched her on unsteady feet as she closed the final few paces to stand beside him.
“Are we safe? What do we do now, swim?”
He thought that sounded exactly perfect. He swooned a bit at the thought of the cool water around him. He'd last felt it jumping in to save Pink.
“We'll find some driftwood and float away,” he finally replied.
Overhead, far across the river, he saw the movement of a drone.
He pointed. “Can't we get some peace and quiet?”
Victoria said nothing.
Minutes later, still waiting for driftwood to float by, Liam's phone rang in his pocket. He'd absolutely forgotten about it since he pulled it out in the boat, not wanting to risk getting it wet when he jumped overboard.
From inside the plastic bag he could see the data. It was a text message from the same 435 area code that sent them to the quarry. It was brief and to the point. “Now you know truth. Swim away.”
He didn't bother replying. The person on the other end knew he was alive. That was all that mattered, for now. Patriots. Villains. Cures. Plagues. Life. Death. These all swirled through his exhausted mind.
“We're going to wait until a large tree floats by, we're going to grab on, then float with it until we find the boat parked downriver. If it's there, we're going to take it. If not, we keep swimming. They told me to find Jason up on that cliff, but I'm going to Camp Hope. I need to find my parents. My dad. I need to know if he knew about this place. I need to know—”
He spoke so only the two of them could possibly hear. “I need to know once and for all if my dad had anything to do with the Patriot Snowball movement. Maybe he knew the men who died helping us escape.”
“I'm with you. Always.”
She grabbed his hand and they steadied each other as they watched the water flow by. They'd jump when the time was right.
Together.
Epilogue
For once, things went exactly as Liam planned. They'd found the boat left by the captain. They had no way to know if he was coming back, but they left a note sticking out from under a rock saying where they were going. It said they were coming back.
The powerful boat made short work of the smaller Meramec River. It took less than an hour to speed up the increasingly narrow river until they reached the same point he and Victoria had first arrived at the river after leaving the Beaumont Boy Scout Reservation a week ago. From there, it was a mile walk to the front gate of the camp.
When he arrived, he was recognized by the Scouts defending it. His spear matched many of the spears carried by the guards. The Hope Spears were a specialty of the place. He was excited to tell tales of what his spear had seen and done recently. But first, he had to find his parents.
He vaguely recalled the cheering crowds. The fawning younger Scouts. The pats on the back. The camp had been emptying out when he left, but now it was back to its former size—and looked to be growing even larger.
Must find parents.
His dad had broken his leg, so the natural place to find him would be the infirmary. It was where he last saw him, though on the day he left, he only said goodbye to Mom because Dad was so badly injured and couldn't come out to see him. Though if he'd told them he was leaving the camp, he thought his dad might have tried to come out to stop him.
Word spread rapidly. His mom found him.
“Liam, thank God you're all right. Where have you been?”
The age old question. In the Old World, he saw the question as an invasion of his privacy. Where are you going? Who will you be with? Are girls going to be there? All the things that used to make him upset were tossed aside. Now he was glad to share his tale, because he'd made it back to tell it.
Finally, after all his “missions” to save Grandma and help find the cure, he would offload the task to someone who could actually make things happen. If anyone was more prepared for the Apocalypse than his father, he hadn't found him.
“Hi Mom. We found Grandma in the city—”
They hugged while they spoke.
“We left her in Cairo, Illinois, she's safe there.”
His head was dizzy at the feeling of security he felt in his mother's arms. But it couldn't last. He released her.
“We figured out something important about the plague.” He scanned the area, wondering if he would be shot by a mysterious assassin for revealing the secret. In the end, after all he'd been through, he fought away the fear. “It affects the dead. It apparently lasts forever. Like, literally forever.”
He conducted another sweep of the nearby camp. “Where's dad? I need to ask him some important questions right away. He may be in danger.”
He began walking to the bullet-ridden and boarded up administration building, as he assumed he'd be inside. When his mom didn't follow, he motioned for her to come to him. When she demurred, he turned back to face her.
“He's somewhere else?”
Her eyes were sad. Like she'd been crying a lot.
“The survivalists came back?”
A head shake no.
“Zombies?”
Another head shake.
He tried to force something positive into the mix. His heart warned him not to do it, but he wasn't going to listen to the warnings of his brain.
“He went to a hospital?” His voice was tentative, as if he knew it was a lie.
Her tears answered his question.
It was unfair, but anger spilled out, rather than sadness. “What then? Where the hell is he? I've survived a lot of stinking death out there. I climbed out of a freakin' grave. I really need to talk to him. The fate of the country is at stake. Maybe the world!”
His mom cried freely. It was obvious to any bystander why.
Still, Liam pushed. “Where is he, Mom? Where?”
2
His dad's grave was just a stick in a muddy mound on top of one of the nearby hills. The camp made a best effort to bury all the people who died during the recent attack by the survivalists. An attack made to find him, he was sad to admit.
I ruin every safe space I encounter.
Victoria walked with him up the hill. His mom followed too, but she remained behind—she seemed hesitant to get too close to Liam in his condition. The only thing she'd gotten out was that he died because of the wound on his leg. He'd shattered a leg bone and without proper antibiotics it had become infected and he'd caught something which made him burn up. He died suddenly, not long after Liam left the camp.
“Why! Dad, why?” He was mad now. A visceral anger at the suspicion his dad knew more than he let on, but more than that, he was mad his dad didn't trust him with that knowledge. It could have made all the difference in the effort to fight—
For what? The truth? For the cure? What could he have known that would have made any difference in the fact there was a massive cavern with hundreds of tanks in it? Did he know about that? Wouldn't that have been the first place he'd taken the family if he did?
He ran through a multitude of possibilities, but the only thing that made any sense was that his dad really didn't know about that place. Whoever was behind that great steel vault had to be someone other than the Snowballers.
He fell to his knees at the grave. Vertigo struck as he looked down at the ground.
Is he clawing up through the mud, like I did?
Without thinking about it, he moved backward on his knees. Just
a foot. Enough to not be in the way.
“Dad. I really needed your help.” He said it with resignation. Victoria took it as her invitation to kneel next to him. She put her hand through his arm, and held him.
He was reduced to tears. At some point, his mother closed the distance and stood next to him. She looked down at the grave with him.
“He was very proud of you, Liam. I think he knew he wasn't going to make it. He made me promise to tell you of his pride in you, though I refused to listen to him. I never saw the end coming.”
Liam realized he'd been a jerk. He'd lost a father. She'd lost her husband. If he lost Victoria now, it would destroy him. He'd been very nearly ready to kill himself back in the tank room when he thought she'd been bitten. His mom was stronger than he was. That became apparent once he took five seconds to think about it.
He stood to be next to her.
“I'm sorry, Mom. I had no right to yell at you.”
He held her, just as Victoria had held him. After a long period of silence, his mom spoke.
“Liam, your dad left you some notes I think you're going to want to see.”
The anger burst out, totally outside his control. “I knew it! He was involved.”
“Liam, before you say anything else, you need to see them. It's not what you think.”
He could think of a lot. His dad worked for the bad guys. He was part of the government conspiracy. He was part of the Patriot Snowball plot, and he did release the plague. He was in league with Hayes and Duchesne and everyone Liam hated right now. He stood against everything he'd taught Liam since he was a baby. The bad thoughts flowed like the river. His exhaustion, grief, and sour mood wouldn't harbor any thought his dad was really a good guy.
Was he good or bad?
He wouldn't be able to rest until he knew the truth.
“Let's go,” he said in a spiteful voice. Then, upon seeing Victoria's silent rebuke, and realizing he was being a complete jackass, he softened it.
“Please, Mom, I have to know.”
###
Please enjoy a brief sample of book 5, Zombies vs. Polar Bears on the following pages.
Last Fight of the Valkyries Page 26
