Mark had followed the trio and their happy dog, trailing them from a distance until he watched them get into a car and drive off. It had been a rainy day, lots of mud, and he’d easily been able to follow the tracks. After breaking into their large house through a window, he had found some food to satiate his hunger and then had wandered upstairs and fallen into a deep sleep in the study.
He wondered if they’d returned.
Barking downstairs answered his question.
When he heard that, Mark scrambled out of the blanket and ran to the door. He bounded down the steps, not caring if he sounded like a herd of elephants.
Wait for me! he wanted to scream.
In his hurry, he collided with a woman turning the corner at the bottom of the steps. He grabbed her waist and clung to her for dear life.
She stiffened and gasped, but Mark couldn’t bring himself to let go. He had nothing, no one. He was all alone in a world where monsters sought to devour him, and bad people wanted to hurt him worse than the monsters did. These people were all he had, despite the fact that he didn’t even know them.
He squeezed her waist and began to cry. He was ashamed a boy his age would cry at all, but he couldn’t hold back. Once the tears started, it was as though the floodgates had opened, all of the trauma he’d experienced since starting his journey coming to a head. He felt a gentle hand on his head and another on his back, pulling him closer.
When he was finally ready, he stepped away and wiped snot across his arm. A young woman with long brown hair stooped down to his level and smiled, but her eyes were very, very sad.
His lower lip trembled, the tears threatening to spill again. It was the first time he’d had contact with a real human being in so long.
There were also two men in the room. The older one came over and knelt beside her. His smile was comforting.
“I’m… sorry I took your food,” Mark stammered, not really knowing the best way to start the conversation.
“I’m Houston,” the stranger replied, holding out his hand for him. “You can have whatever you want. This is my girlfriend, Haven, and her brother, Brett.”
“Hey, man,” Brett waved and walked over to join them. He handed Mark a granola bar and a small snack box of tuna and crackers. Mark took them hesitantly.
“Don’t worry about the food. There’s plenty more where that came from.” The woman pushed her hair behind her ears. “Here, sit down.” She motioned for him to sit at the dining room table, and he settled onto a plaid chair cushion.
He studied them for a moment before opening the snack box. The little plastic spoon within the box clattered to the floor, but he didn’t bother picking it up, instead using his fingers to scrape tuna onto the cracker and devouring it hungrily. He had gone without enough food for so long that he wondered if he’d be hungry forever, even when he was full.
Between bites, he noticed the dog was in front of him, happily sitting on its haunches and licking its chops in anticipation. Even though he could have eaten twenty of those cracker boxes, he set aside a cracker with tuna and gave it to the dog.
Haven smiled in spite of herself and let him get a few more bites in before asking, “How did you get here? Are you alone?”
“I’ve been looking for my mom and sister,” Mark managed with a mouthful of crackers. He stopped chewing as his eyes welled up with tears again. Gritting his teeth, he reminded himself that he had just met these people; he didn’t want them to think he was a baby, so he fought hard to be brave, to be a man.
Haven lowered her head, tears forming in her eyes. “I lost my sister, too.” Her eyes were red, dark circles under them hinting of many sleepless nights, and she looked exhausted and hopeless.
He understood. He knew that feeling all too well.
“What happened to her?” Mark asked tentatively.
When her lower lip started to tremble, he immediately wished he hadn’t asked. He didn’t want to make her cry. She was too nice and too pretty. “I’m sorry...” he told her earnestly. Straightening in his chair, Mark felt a surge of excitement and purpose bubble up inside of him. “I can help you find her! I’m good at finding things.” He wanted to help her, make her smile again. But then his face fell, and he became embarrassed and uncomfortable. “Well, not really. I like to think I am, but I guess I’m not. I still haven’t found my family.”
She looked down and took a deep breath.
Interpreting her hesitation as a sign she didn’t want him to stay, Mark’s gaze flitted to Texaco, and he reached out and scratched the canine behind the ears. Staring up at Houston hopefully, he said, “My mom says not to trust strangers. But you have a nice dog, and I was thinking... maybe I could help you guys. I won’t eat too much of your food, and you won’t have to worry about me. I can take care of myself. You won’t even know I’m here,” he persisted. “I won’t bother you or ask for anything.”
Houston looked at the others, unsure of what to do. It was another mouth to feed, another responsibility. But more than anything else, taking in Mark presented the risk of growing to love him and then lose him suddenly, tragically, unfairly, and without warning. He watched Haven, how tender she was with Mark, in spite of suffering a terrible loss the day before. Her eyes met his, and she nodded, extending her hand.
“Well, if you’ll have us, Mark, you’re one of the group now.”
When the boy took her hand, Haven felt the corners of her mouth lift into a small smile, and the tiniest flame of hope flickered inside of her.
Of course.
Of course there were a billion useless orange shopping carts and dozens of practically new sedans, SUVs, and pick-up trucks, but not one bloody vehicle that met the impossibly high standards of his new companions. Colin had suggested a perfectly good SUV, one that was old enough to still be hotwired, but no. Kennedy gave him a look and told him he was being “cute.”
Cute.
Was that supposed to be a compliment, a commendation of his vehicle-picking abilities? The look she had given him didn’t make it seem like it had been. He’d always figured the term “cute” was reserved for babies and puppies. Maybe calling someone “cute” in America meant something different than it did in Scotland. He didn’t know. It wasn’t like he kept up with what the kids these days were saying anyways.
He jabbed his finger at the SUV beside him once more, shooting Kennedy the best bewildered expression he could muster. Vehicles in the States were already massive, much bigger than most of the ones in Europe. He couldn’t imagine the quantity of what they needed that wouldn’t fit into the SUV and wondered if they were going to be feeding a refugee camp.
She waved him off, complaining about how long they were taking, how the other half of the team would be waiting for them, worrying if they were alive, and perhaps worst of all, how her half of the team wouldn’t have even accomplished their end of the run.
Before he had a chance to protest further, she took off in a jog beside Johnny B. and Grady to the parking garage.
“How exactly are you going to open this thing?” Colin asked as he approached them. He shook the gate, still grumpy about having his seemingly brilliant find shot down. Jamming the crowbar into the lock, he tried to pry it open.
Johnny B. pushed him aside.
“We’re doing this the old-fashioned way,” the large man asserted as he raised his gun and aimed at the lock.
“No, wait!” Colin warned, but it was too late. The crack of Johnny B.’s weapon echoed down the city streets.
“What the hell are you doing?” Colin yelled angrily, shoving the man backward. “You’re going to bring every single one of those things down on our heads!”
“Relax, man,” Johnny B. assured him dismissively.
Colin clenched his fists. “You half-wit son of a bitch. We aren’t in the Middle East. Cool it with the fucking gun heroics.”
“What the hell do you know about war? Leprechaun like you would never survive the shit we saw in Fallujah.” Johnny B. raised his hand
and extended his middle finger.
Grady stepped between them. “Come on, guys. Stop horsin’ around. Let’s get a move on.”
“‘Horsing around?!’ What does that even mean?” Colin asked incredulously. “These are our lives we’re dealing with here.” Turning to Kennedy who was already yanking the gate up, Colin gestured to Johnny B. “You let him get away with this shit?”
“Johnny is one of the best guys we have. We get in; we get out.” She stepped under the gate and started searching around them.
“When we get back to whatever location you call home, we’re going to have a nice, long chat about your tactics,” Colin told Johnny B. sternly.
The other man grunted and rolled his eyes.
Colin paused mid-step in front of the underground concrete structure looming before him, staring hard at the place on the ground where the sunlight disappeared, and darkness took over.
“You coming?” Kennedy called to him. He could see the shine of her eyes from where she stood in the shallowest depths of the garage.
With a resigned slump of his shoulders, he bent down under the gate. Johnny B. waited for him to start moving then took up the back of their line.
Colin held the flashlight given to him and waved it around in the darkness. The light bounced off the headlights of the vehicles still parked within. There were so many, most of them little coupes and sedans. He wondered what happened to their owners.
It was impossible to miss the swath of blood streaked along one of the white concrete pillars, but he strained to see anything beyond his beam of light.
There was a stray flip-flop on the ground a bit further away, bloody and discarded. Colin walked toward it hesitantly, putting the flashlight in his mouth so that he could grip his gun more securely.
A half-eaten torso lay on its stomach. He stepped around it, giving it a wide berth. As he did so, the head of the body moved ever so slightly. Crusty, dried eyelids slowly opened. The creature’s mouth attempted to open and close, the noise emanating from it hoarse, but unmistakable as the relentless, hungry moan of the undead.
Colin was starting to feel like they wouldn’t find what they needed here either and had only put themselves in a riskier situation that would yield no results.
“I’d rather spend a day locked in a jail cell with you than Rambo over there,” Colin grumbled to the zombie. “That should tell you something.”
He heard Kennedy’s light footsteps and turned to face her after he impaled the zombie’s head with the tip of the crowbar.
“I found it!” she exclaimed excitedly. “We’ll have to unload it because it’s full of two-by-fours in the back, but it’s just the right size, and it’s old enough that we can still hotwire it.”
They followed her to the far corner of the parking garage. A large, older model burgundy Ford F-350 was parked haphazardly between two pillars.
“Yeah, this is exactly what we need,” Johnny B. said. “Four-wheel drive, strong V8 engine. Big enough to smash through any of the rotters if we see ‘em.”
Colin rubbed his forehead tiredly. “That sounds like a great time.”
Kennedy placed her rifle down and, along with Grady, began hauling the two-by-fours from the bed and setting them down in the adjacent parking spot. Johnny B. reached up and tried the door, finding it unlocked. He climbed into the cab and started to pull apart the dashboard to hotwire it.
Colin tucked the gun into his belt next to the crowbar and went over to help Kennedy and Grady.
“Hey, I got a joke for ya. How do you get a nun pregnant?” Johnny B. called out from the cab.
Colin couldn’t help but roll his eyes.
“And here we go,” Kennedy whispered to Colin. “Brace yourself.”
“Dress her up like an altar boy,” Johnny B. finished. He chuckled to himself as he pressed wires together.
Colin groaned. “Oh, for the love of God…”
Grady grinned and shook his head. “J.B., is that all you did in the Marines, come up with shitty jokes?”
Johnny B. stared at him wryly. “Okay, ‘Chair Force.’”
“Chair Force, my ass. I was pararescue for the Air Force, putting two in the chest, one in the head of haji.” Grady held two fingers up to his head and mimed pulling the trigger. “I was yanking boys out of burning choppers while you were still suckin’ on your mama’s titty, son.”
While they continued to banter about which branch of military was superior, Kennedy hoisted herself onto the bed to hand Colin a few more planks of wood. “I know J.B. comes off as a douchebag, and,” she paused, shrugging her shoulders, “come to think of it, he really is. But beneath that jackass persona, he’s got a loyal streak running through him like no one I’ve ever known.”
“I hate to rain on your parade, but I don’t think that’s a front,” Colin responded dubiously.
“His methods don’t always suit this new world, I guess, but he’s rescued a lot of people, and I know I can count on him to have my back. Grady, Jackson, and Johnny are my best guys.”
Taking the last of the two-by-fours, Colin held out a hand for her as she hopped to the ground. “I’ll have to take your word for it because so far, all I see is a man-child jumping at every opportunity to shoot his gun.”
“Says the guy who wears a skirt,” Johnny B. interrupted. “Yeah, asshole, I can hear you.” He connected the ignition wires, and the engine roared to life. “Bingo.”
Colin gritted his teeth for what was probably the fiftieth time already that day. If he stayed around Johnny B. much longer, his teeth would be ground down to nubs.
When they had unloaded the bed, Kennedy turned to them and put her hands on her hips. “Alrighty, gentlemen. Let’s go shopping.”
They searched around the garage until they found the emergency exit leading to the hardware store. Johnny B. pushed open the heavy door, and they climbed up the stairwell two floors before finding themselves in a side entrance of the store near rows of light fixtures and doorknobs.
The power had likely died weeks before. The only lighting they had emanated from the rays of morning sunlight beaming through the automatic doors at the front of the store. There wasn’t much left of the doors, just shards of glass clinging to the frames.
Even though the place had clearly been looted, there were still countless rows of supplies, well-stocked shelves that seemed to go on without end. The hardware stores he remembered in Scotland weren’t anywhere near as big, but he considered that a negative. More space meant more room for zombies.
“Are you sure we shouldn’t wait for back-up?” Colin asked. “This place is massive.”
“We’ll be fine. Just stay alert,” Kennedy replied. She studied the signs above the aisles, mouthing the contents of each one. When her gaze landed on aisle eighteen to their left, she extended her hand to Colin.
“What?” He raised his eyebrows quizzically.
“We don’t use guns unless we absolutely have to. Only draws in more.”
Colin gaped at her. “Yeah, your henchman really seems to abide by those rules.”
“Your crowbar.” She opened and closed her hand impatiently. He handed it to her, still puzzled.
She walked over to the metal shelving closest to them and swung her arms back, the crowbar raised high above her head. Even Johnny B. jumped a little when she slammed the crowbar repeatedly against the metal.
“What the…” Colin murmured in shock. “You just rang the damned dinner bell.”
Stepping back to the men, she returned the weapon to Colin, a somber expression on her face as she listened and waited.
Colin looked down at the crowbar in his hands, feeling as though it was puny and useless against the onslaught that was about to come their way. He turned around until his eyes rested on something that caused his lips to curve upward.
Racks of hoes, rakes, shovels, and pitchforks sat near the checkout counters. Colin strode over to them, feeling more confident, and pulled out a pitchfork, the clean, gleaming ends of h
is new weapon begging to be bloodied.
But the ambush he was expecting never came. The zombies that did stagger down the aisles toward them were so brittle that they could have simply breathed on them and turned their bones to dust.
Once they put them down, Kennedy pulled out shopping carts and pushed one toward each of them.
Johnny B. shook his head and shoved his cart toward Colin. “I got something better in mind for my stuff.”
Before he went off on his own, Kennedy reiterated that just because a rotter couldn’t walk didn’t mean it wasn’t dangerous. Apparently, some members of her camp had died because they hadn’t watched where they put their hands or feet.
Sure enough, emaciated fragments of rotters were strewn all over, many of them mere torsos with shriveled up intestines dragging along behind them as they pulled themselves forward inch by inch in a pathetic attempt to hunt the new prey. A few feebly reached up to them as they passed by, their gaunt, starving faces contorted in expressions of permanent hunger. They dispatched them quickly, mercifully ending their soulless existence.
The three of them stayed together or at least nearby, only an aisle or two apart. Colin found an aisle stocked with weed whackers, soil, mulch, and endless varieties of seeds.
“What exactly are you looking for?” he asked Kennedy through the shelves separating their aisles.
“Pretty much everything you can think of for a small indoor greenhouse.”
Colin couldn’t lie—his curiosity was going to get the best of him. He was thoroughly looking forward to seeing their encampment.
Placing bags of soil in the undercarriage of the cart, he started to wander down the aisle, tossing pouches of seeds into the cart as he moved along. He paused, bent down to examine his most recent selections, and took one of the packets out.
Cucumbers were disgusting.
He placed it back in a cardboard box and reached for more of the carrot seed packets instead. By the time he added watering cans, hand trowels and forks, garden hoes, and a pick axe, the cart was pretty full. He’d wanted a chainsaw, but when he proudly showed it to her, Kennedy gave him the same look she’d given him earlier that morning when he had shown her the SUV.
The Good, The Dead & The Lawless (Book 2): The Hell That Follows Page 6
