Hunger Driven (Book 2): Fight the Hunger

by Allen, William

  BAAAAANG. The bullets from the three-round burst tore into my back, knocking the air from my lungs like a sledgehammer. I didn’t have the strength to cry out, but an agonized wheeze escaped my throat.

  “Gotcha, you fucker,” I heard, and absently, I recognized the voice. Ishmael.

  A kick to my ribs followed, knocking me over onto my side. I bit back a scream, my shock threatening to freeze me. I rolled limply, my NVGs slipping, so I could only see out of one eye. He stood over me, M4 cradled in his big paws, and I could see the old style NVGs covering his eyes.

  “Shaw, Hendershot, up here. I got Charlie. Second Squad, get ready to take the roof on my mark.”

  It only took a second of distraction as Ishmael played with his radio. I couldn’t feel my legs, and my head felt like it was full of concrete, but my right hand, still hidden behind my hip where I lay, found the butt of my pistol. Lifting my arm took every last bit of energy left in my body, but I got the barrel pointed in the right direction even as Ishmael jerked his rifle around. It was a race to the finish. Everything narrowed down to this moment, as the fear and pain and desperation drove me to burn through everything last reserve I had left inside.

  The slide racked back when I was done, and I couldn’t muster the strength to reload. The pistol tumbled from my cold fingers. Half my rounds had missed the target, zinging out into space to impact the walls of the building. Piss-poor shooting at this range.

  Half my rounds missed, but the other half walked up the big man’s torso, and one shattered those night vision goggles into a thousand crystal shards as the fat .45 ACP round burrowed into Ishmael’s brain. The race was run. I won, for values of winning. Ishmael was dead, and maybe I’d bought Casey some time with my life.

  As darkness rose up and claimed me there on the balcony, my vision narrowed to nothing, and then I saw the faces of those I’d lost. My wife smiling, her face whole again and radiating happiness. And my son, my little man, alive and reaching out with arms to hug again, instead of to devour. My family, together again.

  I let go of whatever I was holding, whatever force kept soul connected to body, and I leaned into that welcomed embrace.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  I woke to bouncing, and the first thing I did was look around for my wife.

  “Honey,” I croaked, and the sound of my own voice made me jerk. Lord, it was not the way I thought people sounded in Heaven.

  “Hey, none of that. We’re still on the job, you know.”

  The voice was familiar, but it wasn’t my wife. Where?

  “Here,” that voice again, and I felt something pressed against my lips. A straw. I managed to draw in a mouthful of water, and the tepid liquid tasted like honey on my parched throat.

  I finally opened my eyes, and saw the skinny blonde girl with the chopped-off bangs and the worried, tense smile leaning over me. Her eyes looked red and swollen in the dim lantern light, and I wondered what happened.

  “Casey?” I asked, tying the face to a name.

  “Yes, Brad, I’m here.” She paused. “You’re fine, I’m fine. We are all good, now.”

  “What happened?” I managed to ask, and I finally noticed I was lying on my side, and that my back was hurting like someone took a blowtorch to it.

  “You got shot. Do you remember that?”

  “Hard to forget,” I whispered, “How the hell did he get the drop on me.”

  “I think he climbed up the chair lift. That elevator on the other side of the balcony.”

  “Shoot. I didn’t even see it.”

  “I think it was something the store added, you know? One of those things the government said you had to put in for people in wheelchairs.”

  Fuck, I was almost killed by the Americans with Disabilities Act. I started to laugh, but the pain in my back flared and I swallowed it.

  “But what happened? Where are we?”

  I tried to look around, but all I could see without moving my head was Casey, and black metal walls around her.

  “Bill came back early. We might not have one of those ANVCR things,” Casey said, and I whispered, “AN/VRC-91,” which got me a tight grin as she continued. “Anyway, I figured if you managed to blow up one of their trucks, they might not be listening closely to the radio traffic, so I ran the antenna up the roof hatch and called Mr. Harrington and Mike to come bail us out.”

  “Very smart,” I said, praising not only her smarts but her timing as well.

  “Did we lose anybody?”

  “No, nobody dead. Sam Flores, one of the guys works for Mr. Fletcher, he got shot in the arm, but he just wrapped it up himself and claimed he’d cut himself worse shaving. It was a ricochet, he said. Anyway, most of the survivors of Mr. Ishmael’s group were out fighting the zombies when Bill’s convoy showed up. They still had all those folks from Mr. Isaac’s group with them, and they just came in shooting.”

  “And where were you when all this was going on?”

  “Well, after I killed the last two men Ishmael had with him, I was trying to keep the zeds off us until the cavalry arrived. And trying to patch you up. You were bleeding something awful, you know?”

  I just nodded, barely able to get my neck muscles to work now.

  Casey continued. “Man, we really should have checked those rooms behind us in the hallway. There were like, a dozen of them, and they kept opening the doors and just strolling out. Following the sounds of the shots, I guess. I kept running back and forth, shooting the ones on the stairs, then running back over and shooting the ones in the hallway.”

  “Whack-a-Mole,” I said.

  “Huh? Well, it was bad, anyway. Finally, Bill came in with some men from the convoy and killed the rest of the ones in the building, or at least enough to get us out. And yes, we got your precious gear, too. Took three trips, and now I think you owe Mr. Fletcher a whole bunch of favors. What he said, anyway.”

  I nodded. Clearly, Casey was done and she sat back, waiting for me to say something. I just gave her hard look and managed to speak, raising my voice above a whisper. “Good job, Hard Case. Best partner I could ever hope for.”

  One of the other ladies in the transport came over and injected something into my IV, and she must have put something good in there, because I felt myself fading out once again.

  I thought about what Casey said, about favors owed, and wondered how I was supposed to pay up. I hadn’t said anything, but I couldn’t feel my legs. Hadn’t had any sensation from the middle of my chest, really, since Ishmael shot me. Paralyzed, I thought, and knew right then I wasn’t going to be able to live with the reality of this injury.

  I wasn’t sad, not really, and I knew I’d need to find a way to end my existence after this. It wasn’t self-pity that motivated my decision, not in the least. In the before, being paralyzed would be a terrible inconvenience, a life-altering catastrophe, but not something to make a sane man take his own life. I knew a guy I went to school with who’d managed to make a good life for himself and his family while tied to a chair. No, not easily, but the guy had the willpower and guts to make it happen.

  Now I didn’t have the option. I thought about Mr. Adair, confined to a wheelchair and unable to get his family to desert him until the zeds breached their defenses. That could easily happen, either at the compound or in a Safe Zone. Even our own.

  Every day the monsters were getting smarter, and we were getting weaker. When we should be pulling together, groups like the one following Ishmael made us less than we were, and preyed upon those they should be protecting.

  As the lights went out again, I thought about that, and wondered if we shouldn’t be doing more to thin out the living, instead of the dead.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  The next time I awoke, I knew I wasn’t in Heaven. No, I was in the clinic. Not Dr. Singh’s House of Horrors outside town, but the real one, inside the Livingston Safe Zone. I recognized the pattern of the curtains, anyway. When the medical business was slow, Dr. Singh and I would use the room to
play poker with some of the nurses. Yes, I let the pretty ones win.

  My throat hurt, and I had a massive, throbbing hangover headache. The one you get when you’ve been on a forty-eight-hour bender, mixed Scotch with beer at some point, and realized your alcohol tolerance from college just doesn’t translate to the working man’s world.

  Oh, and my back hurt. Not in that “I’ve pulled a muscle” kind of back pain, but the “oh shit, they’ve cut out a kidney for the black market and dumped me in a bathtub full of ice” back pain. Yeah, that one.

  I was lying on my stomach, my head in some weird halo device, and I still couldn’t feel my legs. I was hooked up to monitors of some sort, but I couldn’t see the readout from this position. Just the steady beep, beep, beep that was gradually driving me insane. Insaner, if that is a word.

  After an eternity of listening to the heart monitor rhythm, and beginning to wonder if maybe there was a secret message hidden in the beeps, I heard something change. A door opened, I thought, and a white coated figure came into my view.

  “Ah, Brad, I’m glad to see you are finally awake,” this voice, like Casey’s was familiar, but it took me a moment to place. Ah, Doctor Gooden. Kelly. I suddenly remembered Casey’s shared confidence, her twisted, teen-aged girl suspicion about Dr. Gooden’s possible interest in a certain broken down old zombie exterminator. Well, this should put paid to those daydreams by my partner. Junior partner, I thought.

  “How long?” I croaked, and I was surprised at how weak my voice sounded. Hell, I sounded stronger just a couple hours after being shot multiple times and bleeding in a truck.

  She knew what I meant. “Twenty-four hours, give or take, since your surgery. We got you in just as soon as Bill could make the trip back, and I heard they were driving just as fast as their trucks could go.”

  “How bad is it, Doctor? I mean, I know …”

  “What? What do you remember,” Dr. Gooden asked, her voice carefully controlled.

  “I was shot; several times, I think. In the back. All I know.”

  Dr. Gooden sighed. “Three times. Your body armor stopped two of the bullets, but one got in under the protection. Dr. Singh removed that bullet from your lower back. He was worried about your left kidney but the bullet seems to have missed it entirely. He also had to perform some minor surgery to repair your fractured scapula from the blunt-force trauma of the impact from the second. He said other than a being nearly exsanguinated, you seemed to be good condition.”

  Exsanguinated. I knew what that meant. I’d nearly bled out. I guess I did owe Casey my life, such as it was at the moment. “Doctor, I’m not sure about that. I … I can’t feel my legs.”

  There, I said it. Maybe she would just let me overdose on morphine and get this over with. “Doc, without my legs, in this screwed up world, I’m pretty useless. Is there anything you can do …”

  Doc came closer, and knelt, so our eyes were on the same level. And I could see something there, some shadow of pain that ghosted over her expression, and it had nothing to do with her knees. When she spoke next, her voice was different, and I could hear the concern that was more than maybe just professional.

  “Yes, Brad. I know. The other bullet, the second one stopped by the body armor, well it didn’t penetrate, but struck in such a way… that has caused massive swelling along your spine. We think, Dr. Singh and I, we think that once the swelling goes down, then you’ll get the feeling back.”

  I tried to give her a smile, and failed. No guarantees, and nobody gets out of life alive. I tried to stow the self-pity and asked, haltingly, about the rest of the group, as well as the survivors we, or somebody, rescued. When I used the “or somebody” comment, I could tell I’d struck a nerve.

  “Everybody, and I mean everybody, knows you and Casey are the only reason they got a soul out of Houston. Bill said the horde piled up at the gate was over a thousand, and if the two of you hadn’t provided the distraction, none of those trucks would have made it through.”

  I closed my eyes, and I knew she was right. “I know, and we didn’t do it for the glory, Doc. Hell, on a good day I hate even being recognized on the street. I just feel like we failed. Never did get into Houston proper anyway. The Woodlands don’t count. It’s like making a run to Cleveland.”

  “Ha! That’s not the way the colonel is telling it. Or what Mickey has been saying on the radio. That fourteen civilians managed to rescue over forty survivors, without losing anybody; that is big news.”

  “Forty? How? Oh, yeah, the kids from Magnolia. I forgot about them. That kid, Keith, he’s the real hero. Should give him a medal.”

  “Yes, he was very brave. And so were you. I know you like to keep up this wall between you and everyone around you, but some of us know better. I know better. Casey thinks you’re a hero, too, by the way. She also says you are a senile old man who shouldn’t be allowed out of the compound without a keeper.”

  “That girl. What a joker. Just wait ’til I get a chance to hit her with my cane.”

  “You care for her, don’t you? Deeply. And she, for you. I can tell by the way the two of you talk about each other.”

  I thought about the doctor’s words, and the way she said them, for a long time before I answered. There was deeper meaning in what she said, but the drugs made clear thinking impossible. Somehow, though, the medication coursing through my system also acted as some kind of truth serum.

  “Yes, I do. I never thought I would again, you know? Never thought I could feel that way about anyone again.”

  “Yes?” Doctor Gooden, Kelly, said, almost a whisper.

  “I guess it’s because she’s a girl, and so much older than, older than my Travis. You know?”

  “What?” Kelly said, and her voice was louder now.

  “Yes, I guess I do love the little troublemaker. I never had a daughter, and I could never take her father’s place, but yeah, she’s become someone I care about that way. Just don’t tell her I said that. The daughter thing—not about her being a troublemaker. She knows that already.”

  Something about my answer seemed to buoy Kelly’s mood, and I thought I knew. I may be oblivious to women these days, and God knew I was not looking for any kind of a relationship, but there was something there. An interest that might prove to be more one day.

  “So how long am I going to have to lie here before my legs start working again, Kelly?”

  “Well, this is really outside either of our areas of expertise, Brad, but we think the swelling should go down in a week or so. Then we will see. In the meantime, we need to keep any pressure off your back and try to keep you immobilized for now.”

  “Thank you, Kelly. I appreciate you shooting straight with me. I need to get out of this bed as soon as possible, but in the meantime, I’ll try to be a good patient.”

  “Ha! Casey warned me already,” Kelly replied, real mirth in her voice. “She said you are impossible to get along with in the morning, and then only get worse as the day progresses.”

  “Yeah, well, consider the source. She is one serious shit-stirrer, that one is. Whenever she wants something, it’s ‘Brad this’ or ‘Brad that’ but whenever I ask her to do anything strenuous, like take out someone shooting at us, it’s always ‘old man’ from that one. ‘Old man, quit spoiling my aim’ or ‘old man, don’t mess up my hair’ or something along those lines.”

  I didn’t hear the door open or the footsteps, so the next voice threw a little catch into my heart.

  “Really, old man? Really, after all I did for you? Just like a man. I swear, all he does is bitch, bitch, bitch.”

  “Oh, hi Casey. How are you doing?” I asked weakly.

  “Oh, so that’s how it’s going to be? Nice to my face, is it? Well, I get the last laugh after all.”

  I was almost afraid to ask, but I did anyway. “Why is that?”

  “Because Doc here says you are going to be on either a catheter or a bed pan for the next little while. And I’m going to be here to laugh every time they ha
ve to change it. Or maybe I’ll just bring you a bottle you can use. That’s always good for a laugh, isn’t it?”

  Casey turned, addressing the next bit to my doctor. “He has the most atrocious bathroom habits. Like a caveman. And no sense of decorum, I swear,” Casey said, using her snootiest fake accent for this.

  Doctor Kelly Gooden turned and gave me a look then, and I had to smile a little bit.

  “All right, time for you to get some rest. And time for me to hear the rest of Casey’s stories.”

  The two ladies left my hospital room with some much needed laughter, and curmudgeon that I was, I didn’t have it in my heart to mind one bit.

  Somehow, I’d survived again. More importantly, I was starting to think there might be something worth living for. I remembered when I lay thinking I was going to die, knowing the living, not the dead, caused that death. I’d fought the hunger of the dead, but it was the living that nearly punched my ticket. Maybe it was time to start culling the living after all.

  Yes, the dead might be getting smarter, but they still had a long way to go before they replaced the living as the most dangerous predator on the planet. I would think on that in the days to come, and how someone really did need to get out there and start culling the living assholes who were screwing up the apocalypse for the rest of us.

  EPILOGUE

  I ended up spending two weeks in the clinic, and my left arm stayed in a sling for another six weeks as the broken bone in my shoulder mended. The wound in my back hurt, a lot, in those early days, but I healed up with a nice, jagged scar for my trouble. No matter, I thought, since I was never going to win any beauty contest anyway.

  My legs started tingling after the third day, and by the end of the week I was able to stand again, at least for a few minutes. I worked hard in my rehab to get back up on my own, and in the meantime, Casey spent most of her time on the line, culling zeds as they tried to gum up the works at our little Bypass to Hell.