by Steven Pajak
“Are you hit? Matt are you hit, damn it?”
“My leg.” I indicated my wound but then grabbed Brian by the shoulders. “Kieran is dying. Help him.”
“Let me check you out first.” He tried to examine my leg, but I pushed him away.
“Help me up. Now!”
Instead of arguing, Brian got his shoulder under my arm and together we struggled up and got my feet under me. When I put pressure on the leg, the pain was horrible, but I gritted my teeth and took the pain. “I’m fine. Get Kieran on the trailer.”
Ian and Joshua were already lifting their brother. Together, they lay Kieran’s body gently onto the flat surface of the trailer. “Jesus and Mary,” Joshua said. His young eyes grew wide with shock and fear.
“The sniper?” I asked as I stepped gingerly toward the men. “Did you get the sniper?”
“He’s down. Justin is checking his body.”
I nodded my head and looked at Ian. He was staring at his young brother. When he turned to me, he asked, “Can you help him? Please, can you help him?”
The boy was unconscious, whether from pain or loss of blood, I did not know. Mindful of my own wounds, I shifted slightly so that my weight was on my right leg. Pulling his arm out of the sleeve of the coat and shirt, I was able to expose Kieran’s wounds. The mass of skin and tissue, the pulp of destroyed flesh that surrounded the wound, served to answer the question. Without a battlefield surgeon, Kieran was lost.
I couldn’t bear to see the hurt in the older man’s eyes but I couldn’t look away. Joshua was crying, his young voice still sounded childish in his anguish. Before I realized what I was doing, I pulled off my thermal shirt and jammed it against Kieran’s back, covering the gaping wound.
“Ian get up there beside him and apply pressure on the wound. Hold it down tight like you mean it.” I turned to Brian and Justin who stood beside him. “Justin, get on the tractor and get this thing moving. Everyone else, get on. Cody, up! Let’s go, move, move, move!”
Justin hustled, climbing up into the cab of the tractor. Joshua and Cody jumped up onto the flatbed. For a moment, he sat looking at his two brothers before he finally reached over and put his hands over Ian’s. Together, they held the stained shirt and applied direct pressure to the wound. Cody settled down beside the dying boy, his chin lying across his thigh as his sad eyes looked on.
Brian helped me up onto the trailer before plopping himself down beside me. In my ear he whispered, “No matter how fast we get him back, he’s not going to survive.”
“I know,” I said. Slamming my hand down several times against the trailer bed, I shouted, “Let’s go, Justin!”
The tractor engine revved and the trailer jerked and hitched roughly as Justin got us moving. While Justin turned the trailer to the north, Brian said, “We should burn the bodies. We can’t just leave them there.”
I nodded my head. “I’m hoping he can last long enough to say good bye to his mother. Those things can wait.”
* * *
Cleona Finnegan stood over her boy. Washed clean by his family, Kieran’s body lay upon the pyre, swathed in white linen. She stood with one hand upon the boy’s head and the other upon his heart. We all stood around her in silence, mourning our loss. The evening was cold but the sky was clear. The moon was bright and the stars were brilliant against the darkness of space. I stood beside Lara, my arm over her shoulder, her head against my chest. We all stood together, Finnegan’s and Randall Oaks residents, one family against the cold, hard world.
Cleona’s voice, still young and clear even at her age, broke the silence of the night. “God saw you getting tired, my son, and a cure was not to be. So He put His arms around you and whispered ‘come to me’. With tearful eyes we watched you, and saw you pass away. Although we loved you dearly, we could not make you stay. A golden heart stopped beating, hardworking hands at rest. God broke our hearts to prove to us, He only takes the best.”
She leaned forward and embraced her dead son for long minutes, her frail body bent over, and her tears staining the sheets. Ian stepped forward then, and whispered to his mother softly. She stood and looked at him, suddenly stern and strong, very much the woman I had come to know the last three months. She gripped his arm, gave him a curt nod, and then stood beside her eldest daughter, Maureen.
Now Ian laid his hands upon his brother, the same as did Cleona before him. With his back to us, his voice was loud and clear. “Brother, may the road rise up to meet you. May the wind be ever at your back. May the sun shine warm upon your face and the rain fall soft on your fields and until we meet again, may the Lord hold you in the hollow of his hand.”
And each of us, in turn, sent Kieran on his way with a prayer or words of our own device. When it was my turn, I was at a loss for words. Nothing I could say about the young man would bring comfort to his family and friends. I was out of speeches and prayers seemed to be ignored. I lay my hand on the cool sheet; it appeared to be tinted blue under the strange light cast from the moon.
“I’m sorry.” The words sounded hollow. I even began to doubt the sincerity in my words. I feared that little by little, day by day, I was losing my humanity. Every day I felt like I was standing precariously at the edge of an emotional void, just waiting for a catalyst to push me over the edge.
Later, the funeral pyre burned, we drank homemade beer and celebrated Kieran’s too short life. I stood on my own, watching the others and they talked and laughed and shared stories. I wanted to join them, really I did, but I could only think about the sniper that had killed the young man. I couldn’t help but wonder if he’d actually been the target.
* * *
Separate from the basement of the house, yet sharing one cold brick wall, the storm cellar was large enough to fit as many as fifteen men and women comfortably in the event of a natural catastrophe. In all of her years on the farm, Maureen shared that only one tornado had come close enough to drive them to the cellar to seek shelter. Now, the room stored their canning and other root vegetables. Wooden shelves lined the walls, filled with jars, cans, and other miscellaneous items. A large woodworking table stood at one end of the room. In the center a large wood table that sat ten, its top three inches thick, and its legs even thicker. The wood was the washed out gray of old wood. Battered and gouged, the formidable piece of furniture had lasted nearly one hundred years, if you believed Ian, and I had no reason to doubt the man.
Justin lifted the black backpack and upended it on the massive table, spilling out the items he’d taken off the sniper’s corpse yesterday. We gathered in close and spent a few minutes looking over the contents in the bag: a compass and snippet of torn map, two plastic bottles filled with water, some sort of dried meat wrapped in cloth, a peanut tin that contained some dried fruits, spare ammunition, a fixed blade knife and a battered black notebook.
I examined the last item carefully, but found it was written in code indecipherable to us. The code, written in hand, was a series of five letters per word, with four words per row. This pattern continued in this manner except for the last entry that was a four-digit number followed by a slash and a one-digit number. If given time and access to research materials, I probably could have figured out the code. Bottom line, the coded text in the journal was useless.
After taking turns examining the items, we spread them all out neatly in front of us, not expecting any miraculous epiphany, but hoping something would come to us to help us figure out why this man had shot Kieran, and more importantly, why he was scouting the farm. I had my doubts, though. The man was alone and scouts usually operated in pairs. Perhaps the shooter had made a mistake. There were crazies in the area and he could have mistaken Kieran for one of them. No, that didn’t make sense. He was using a scoped rifle and he fired on me when I tried to help Kieran. He should have easily been able to see that we were not infected. Last I checked, infected did not tend to repair fences or roll up on tractors.
After a bit of silence, Brian pulled out his own notebook and
flipped open to a clean page. He turned to Justin and said, “Tell me what this guy looked like. Whatever you can remember, anything will be helpful.”
With the dead man’s knife in hand, Justin said, “Well, he was about six feet tall. He wore jeans—dark blue with a tear in the right knee—and black steel toe boots. He had a leather biker jacket that had ‘Hoffman Estates Harley Club’ on the back. He had a knit cap on, but his hair was dark brown, pretty long, but not as long as your hair. Thick beard and mustache.” Justin snapped his fingers and continued. “Oh, yeah, he had a tattoo on his neck, it was the number 59 in a circle.”
“Wait a minute,” Brian said. He leafed through his ragged notebook as Justin continued to inventory the bag contents. He paged through it for a few seconds until he found what he was looking for. He held the notebook up in front of Justin.
“Did the tattoo look like this?”
Justin examined the crude drawing for a second. “Yeah, the same. Where did you see that before?”
Brian set the notebook down on the table so that we could all see.
“On the day we first came to the farm, I saw that tattoo on one of the dead bodies, about twenty yards from old man Finnegan. The kid was young, probably not yet in his twenties. He had that tattoo on his neck. I sketched it thinking it might be a clue to figure out what had happened that night.”
The story Cleona told of that tragic night was that a large group of crazies had appeared out of nowhere, without warning, and suddenly overran the farm. Finnegan and his brother Seamus had gone out with weapons to engage the creatures while the rest of the family retreated to the storm cellar. She heard the blasts of their shotguns and when neither of the men returned, she assumed they had succumbed to the creatures. That didn’t explain the expended cartridges in calibers the Finnegan’s did not own, or the other dead bodies, or the piles of burning crazies, but no one questioned the story, wanting to put that in their rearview mirror and move on with their new life.
However, Kieran told Brian a very different story one night while making rounds of the main house and the bunkhouse. Kieran told Brian that he went back into the house after being ordered into the cellar. He thought he could snipe a few of the infected from the window of his bedroom to cover his father and uncle and still have time to retreat. He said he turned out the lights in his room and as he watched from the windows, he saw men out there, running amongst the creatures. They were firing their weapons and he thought these men had come to help his father and uncle, although he admitted then it was a foolish thought because there was no one within miles.
As he watched, the men turned their guns on Finnegan, shooting him down along with the crazies. At that point, he fired a few rounds down into the mass of men and creatures, and retreated to the cellar. He said he didn’t see Seamus go down, so he couldn’t tell how his uncle was killed.
“My god,” Maureen said and grabbed for Ian’s hand. “The poor boy.”
“Why didn’t he tell us?” Ian asked. “Why didn’t you tell us?”
Brian shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know why Kieran didn’t tell you. I suppose he was ashamed that he didn’t do more for his father and uncle. I imagine he was worried what you might think of him, Ian.”
Tears formed in Ian’s eyes. He held his sister’s hand and his other arm slid around his younger brother. Joshua hid his face against his brother’s shoulders to hide his tears.
“As for why I didn’t tell anyone sooner, I made a promise to Kieran. The only reason I’m saying anything now is because of this new information.”
Brian passed his notebook to me when I extended my hand toward him. It was open to the page where he’d sketched the tattoo. The 59 inside of a circle looked more like a ball on a pool table than a road sign. “Are you sure this is the same thing you saw, Justin?”
“Same, boss. It was right here on his neck.” Justin pointed at the left side of his neck, in line with his ear.
To Brian I asked, “The body you found, the tattoo was in the same place?”
He nodded. I handed the notebook back to him and turned my attention to the items on the table, hoping to turn up some other clue. I studied the torn piece of map. It was a hand-drawn map of Finnegan Farms, very crude and not to scale, but it definitely ruled out the idea that there had been any mistakes. The farm was definitely the dead man’s target.
Two men with identical tattoos, both killed at the farm, was not a coincidence. The ambush of old man Finnegan and his brother must have been a first attempt at taking over the farm. This most recent attack was more likely a recon mission gone awry. The farm was definitely a target, which made sense. In this new world, those who could farm or live off the land would find it easier to survive. The farm was a place that could sustain many men and women for many years to come, if defended.
As I was about to share my suspicion, Lara said, “They’re after the farm, aren’t they? These two men showing up here with the same tattoo isn’t a coincidence. Whoever they are, they want to take the farm from us, right?”
Her words hung over the group like a thick fog. One by one, each of the men and women in the room nodded their head, confirming they all believed what Lara voiced. We were staring down at a puzzle and now some of the pieces were starting to fit. However, we were a long way from completing the puzzle, and the full picture had yet to be revealed.
* * *
It was a hard decision, but in the end, we all agreed it was necessary, although we each rationalized the decision in a way that made each of us feel good about it. I held no illusions that my decision was biased. There were people I left behind, good friends, and I wanted to get them back. Having them back would also serve the greater good of our new home by expanding our number and increasing our odds against the hordes of crazies and those men and women out there who wanted to take what was not theirs for the taking.
The leading argument among the others for returning the remaining residents of Randall Oaks into our fold was that Ravi had extensive medical knowledge and skills that we did not posses. In this new world, those skills could be the difference between life and death, and of the latter, we had recently experienced too much. Kieran’s tragic death was on all of our minds, and even I could not help but think that if Ravi were here, the boy may have had a chance. Also, farm living was not an easy life. Although it would be months before we would harvest, I expected there would be plenty of minor injuries associated with that labor.
On the down side, making the trip to Randall Oaks would mean leaving the farm with less protection in the face of the recent threat. With only speculation as to why the man was scouting the farm, or why he had shot Kieran, there were too many unanswered questions. Were there more men lurking out there preparing to descend on the farm? How long before whoever sent the man realized he was missing and would come looking for him? Or was he only acting on his own and had killed the boy for an unknown reason?
After several hours of discussion, we agreed that Brian and I would take one of the horse-drawn carriages, some weapons and a small cache of supplies for the journey. We did not expect to be gone long and with only two of us gone there were still enough capable men and women who would be able to hold down the farm if trouble should arise. I had complete faith in Lara and Justin to take the lead and organize a defense and counter-attack. They were good soldiers and each experienced in fighting the living and the dead.
We figured our travel time would be approximately an hour and half to two hours to make the 12-mile trip with the current weather conditions. Even with the weight of the buggy and our gear, the horses were strong enough to maintain a 10-mile an hour pace. Once there, we planned to stay the night at Randall Oaks, giving us time to reunite with our friends, answer questions, and get everyone prepared for travel the following day. Given the extra weight, I estimated the return trip would take about three hours with the horses pulling at a slower pace. All told, we would be away from the farm for about twenty-eight hours.
A lot
could jump off in that time; I was well aware of that. Less than twenty four hours ago Kieran was alive and well, a vital young man with his best years ahead of him. I felt it would not be prudent to leave so soon after. If there were others out there, they may be planning another attack. More than likely, that would happen within 24-72 hours, so I decided we would wait a few days. If all remained quiet, we would follow our plan.
Chapter 3
Time of Your Life
The following three days were uneventful, although busy. Lara and I spent as much time together, doing chores, standing posts and security patrols during the day, and then making love quietly in the ranch house in the evening. We were trying to keep our bodies and minds occupied.
It was clear that we all deeply felt Kieran’s loss and each person mourned the boy in their own way. Wesley was taking it harder than most. Kieran had taken the younger boy under his wing soon after our arrival. He took to teaching Wesley about farm living, as well as all those other things teenage boys should begin to learn about life; girls. The last several weeks the two had become practically inseparable. The morning Kieran was shot, Wesley pouted because I wouldn’t let him tag along. He said Kieran and he were a team.
At the time, I almost caved and allowed him to come. I could remember what it was like to be young and have a best friend you wanted to do everything together. I remembered Lara’s voice, telling me I had to start treating him like a son and not a friend, that I needed to be an authority figure, to teach him the things he needed to know, whether he liked it or not. So, I made him stay. Looking back three days later, I was glad I stuck to my guns and left the boy back at the main house.
