“This doesn’t make sense. Why would a car be inside of the tunnel?” she whispered to herself.
Colin took a few steps away from them and flashed his light up ahead. “What I want to know is how the hell did we manage to get stuck in a dark tunnel? First, the parking garage at the Home Depot place, and now this? You and your group are just plain old bad luck.”
Without looking away from the train, Kennedy said, “Look at how the car is positioned across the tracks. Sideways. It makes me think whoever drove that car in here didn’t have plans to take it anywhere else.”
“Maybe it just died, and they had no choice but to leave it,” he offered.
Shaking her head slowly, she turned back to Johnny B. “Alright, let’s move this thing and get back to the train. I don’t like not being able to see more than a few feet in front of me, feeling like a sittin’ duck.”
“Yeah, it’s too tight in here to push it off to the side of the tracks,” Grady told her, stepping back to assess the space. “The train will still hit the back end of the car and then drag it along the walls of the tunnel.”
“So what can be done?” she asked.
Johnny B. joined Grady at the rear of the Camry. “We’re going to have to put it in neutral and push it out of the tunnel.”
“That sounds tedious.”
Johnny B. wasn’t deterred. “With a couple more hands, we can clear it from here in minutes—”
Kennedy held up her hand. “Did you hear something?” Everyone paused.
“Must be the dark playing tricks on me,” she admitted finally.
“No,” Jeremy said, shaking his head. “I heard it, too.”
The familiar scurry of footsteps, the odd hitch and drag…
“Shit,” Kennedy muttered. “We have company.”
“We should have had our guards on top of the train,” Jackson hissed.
“It’s not like they’d have been able to see anything!” Jeremy retorted defensively.
Colin saw the whites of their eyes first, glowing when the beams from their flashlights reflected off them. “Get ready!”
There were maybe fifteen to twenty of them, manageable numbers if they each took a few.
“Johnny, I want you, Grady, and Jackson to get the car off the tracks. The rest of us will take care of the rotters.”
Colin gaped at her. “Just you, me, and Jeremy?”
“That’s right. We’ll form a semi-circle up ahead and advance together.”
Colin looked at Jeremy as Kennedy secured another magazine to her belt and ran forward.
“She’s got guts,” Jeremy remarked.
“Aye, that she does,” Colin conceded, and the two of them broke into a sprint to catch up to her.
At first, it seemed like firing into the throng of zombies would be easy. But with the inability to see clearly and the terror of knowing the undead were amassing in front of them, most of their shots went wide, missing their mark.
“I’m out!” Jeremy yelled, and he retreated a few steps to reload his pistol, narrowly evading the zombies closest to him as they entered the area he’d been shooting into before.
Kennedy, in the middle of Colin and Jeremy, speedily shifted to cover Jeremy while he reloaded, but one of the zombies Jeremy should have killed snaked up to her.
Its gnarled hands tangled in her ponytail, and she tumbled back with a scream.
With no bullets to stop them, the zombies in front of her took advantage of this and fell to their knees to grab her legs. She turned around and shot the zombie behind her in the head, but its hand was still wrapped in her hair. She pulled at it, ripping it free, and then starting scrambling backward, shooting as she moved away.
One of the fresher zombies shoved the others aside and dropped on top of her, its heavy weight smashing her flatly into the rocks below.
It gnashed its teeth at her, and she held its face back with her hands, but in the struggle, her gun was knocked out of her grasp.
Just as its jaws opened to bite her between her neck and shoulder, a bullet sliced through the air and hit the zombie through its left eye. It collapsed, and Kennedy gasped at the weight of its motionless body crushing her lungs.
Colin yanked her out and pulled her up, while Jeremy shot two others as she leapt to her feet.
“Are you okay?”
“No,” she breathed. “I lost my gun.”
Colin’s lips curved into a smile in spite of the situation. “You’ve got balls, woman.”
“There are more coming in!” Jeremy cried out.
A shrill scream erupted from the train.
“Get that damned car off the tracks now!” Kennedy shouted to Johnny B. Without thinking, she started running back to the train, the fear of imminent loss creeping into her heart.
“What the hell was that?” Stewart mumbled, taking the cigarette from his lips and tilting his head upward to blow the smoke into the air.
Cade was standing a few feet from him and did the same. “Sounded like screams coming from inside the train,” he answered calmly.
Stewart swallowed nervously, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down. His hand hovered over the gun on his hip. He had never fired it outside of the training he’d received from Kennedy and her men.
Cade watched him curiously. “Aren’t you going to check it out?”
His eyes fixed on the direction of the screams, Stewart barely noticed that the cigarette butt had burned down to the tips of his fingers. He yelped and flicked the cigarette to the ground.
“Screams are getting closer,” Cade warned, but his tone was unaffected and unalarmed. “Aren’t those your people out there?”
“Damn it,” Stewart whispered. He involuntarily stepped closer to Cade.
Cade smirked. “Well, shit, brother. You just going to stand here holding your dick in your hands?” Suddenly his expression changed. “Give me the keys.”
Stewart turned and stared at him incredulously. “Are you crazy? No.”
“Give them to me.”
Stewart took one step back. “No. I can’t.” He threw a nervous glance over his shoulder and gulped.
Faster than lightning, Cade sprang to his feet and grabbed the gun from Stewart’s belt.
“Give me the fucking keys, brother.”
Stewart shot him a scathing look of betrayal, but begrudgingly did as he was told.
With one hand, Cade kept the gun trained on Stewart while the other unlocked the chains around his ankles.
He patted Stewart as he moved past him. “Don’t take it personally.”
Stewart gawked at him. “Where are you going?” he stammered.
“I’m taking back what’s mine,” Cade replied.
Griffin pointed his gun at the group of passengers huddled in the corner of the train car.
His sons-in-law did the same while his wife and daughters sifted through the supplies in the dining car and began tossing items into pillowcases.
Gunshots had been popping all around them, and he knew the people outside moving the car off the tracks were fighting the same undead he and his family had passed when they drove the white Camry off the road and into the grass toward the train tracks.
He looked at the people around him, their terrified expressions cutting like daggers through his heart.
Griffin wasn’t a monster. He just wanted to keep his family alive. As long as everyone stayed calm, no one would get hurt, he assured himself.
Unable to stave off her hunger any longer, his pregnant daughter tore into a bag of beef jerky, her fingers desperately stuffing the dried meat into her mouth.
Griffin watched her, noticing how her skin had taken on a sickly pallor, stretched across a blatantly protruding belly atop her skeletal frame. She cast an embarrassed glance at her father, but continued to eat, uttering satisfied grunts and moans.
As he watched her, Griffin repeatedly told himself he didn’t have a choice. They had been hungry for a long, long time. He thought back to the day he killed old Cooper
, and he felt the familiar pang of sadness return.
Stealing from the train had seemed logical, easier and safer than going into town to get supplies. The town had been overrun weeks ago from the dead in the neighboring city, and going in would have been a suicide mission.
The train he’d heard pass by in the forest when he put Cooper down told him something very important: if they had enough manpower and fuel to keep a train running, they’d also have food and lots of it.
That same night, he decided he needed to do something even more drastic and sustaining than a couple of meals of stew made of dog meat. He spoke to the others, knowing that getting onto the train would not be a one-man job, and they stayed up late into the night mapping out a plan.
It had almost worked perfectly. The car he and his sons-in-law planted on the tracks the day before produced the exact result Griffin was hoping it would. Seconds after the redheaded woman and the men with her got off the train to remove the vehicle, he and his family climbed aboard, sneaking their way through until they arrived at the dining car.
Unfortunately, he hadn’t anticipated the car to be filled with passengers.
As the minutes wore on, Griffin could tell that their fear was beginning to wane, their features contorting into anger as they watched his family steal their supplies.
“I don’t mean you folks any harm,” he began. “I’ve been living not too far from these tracks, and my family is starving. We knew you had to have food, and I promise you we’ll just be taking what we need.” Griffin paused, hoping they would sense his sincerity and trust him. “I can’t make supply runs now. The dead have overtaken all the towns nearby, and they’ve been coming out to the sticks, too. Hard enough to keep them away from my house with just me and the boys. Getting on this train was our best bet.” He lowered his gun, extending his hands in a sign of peace. “We’re just here to get some food, then we’ll be—”
Griffin’s head snapped forward, followed by an explosion of brain and bone and flesh.
He collapsed to the floor, his body unmoving.
Behind him, as the faint cloud of blood dissipated, Cade Foster took a step forward, his expression cold and empty.
Some of the women started screaming, and the two other men with weapons stared in shock at the body of their father-in-law. When they recovered from their horror, they raised their guns at Cade.
He’d anticipated this. Before the sights on their rifles were set on him, Cade had already put bullets in each of their bellies. The screaming amplified, but Cade’s heartbeat stayed the same, never quickening.
He scanned the room, his eyes searching for one person as his finger twitched above the trigger.
While she wasn’t around, Cade did see something else he could use. He grabbed a walkie-talkie from one of the tables, snatched the bag of food from Griffin’s pregnant daughter’s hands, and wordlessly walked over the dead man’s corpse before darting out of the open door of the train and disappearing into the dark of the tunnel.
The air in Kennedy’s lungs whooshed out as she skidded to a stop at the entrance of the car where they’d pinpointed the screams.
Short, ropey bits of gray matter and bright red blood coated the hard floor beneath her boots, causing her to slip slightly.
Fearfully, she expected the worst, that somehow, zombies had made it onto the train and were tearing apart her passengers.
But as she searched the faces in the room, she didn’t see any rotting flesh or hear the tell-tale moans of the undead as they hunted and fed.
There were three bodies on the ground, all men, with three women surrounding them.
One of the men was missing most of the front of his face, as if he’d been shot in the back of the head. Another’s face was upturned toward the ceiling, and Kennedy knew he was dead from the way his eyes remained open and unblinking, as though they were fixated on something unseen. A young woman was sprawled out next to him, completely inconsolable as her body shook with sobs.
The other man groaned, his skin growing paler as blood streamed steadily from his abdomen.
“Help us! Please!” a middle-aged woman pleaded.
Kennedy heard footsteps behind her and the familiar voices of her men.
“What the hell?” Johnny B. exclaimed. He waved his rifle around wildly from person to person. “Who did this?” When he saw the newcomers, he glowered at them. “Who the fuck are you?”
“Please,” one of the younger women started. She cradled her belly, her face streaked with tears. “My husband is dying. Please help us. Please,” she cried. “I don’t want my baby to grow up without a father.”
Kennedy took a deep breath, trying to appear calm when she was anything but. She gestured for Grady and Jackson to clear the surrounding cars. “Who are you? Why are you on our train?”
The older woman took a few timid steps toward Kennedy.
“One more step, and I’ll put a bullet between your eyes,” Johnny B. told her.
“My husband... he heard the train. We were so hungry. He wanted to take care of us. All we wanted was some food.” Her features twisted angrily. “But your man… he shot him, and he killed him.”
Kennedy skeptically looked around at the other unarmed passengers in the car and shook her head. “My men didn’t do this.”
“You’re lying! Now all of our husbands are dead. My Griffin…” she wailed. “All we wanted was food!” she screamed through her sobs, shaking her fist at Kennedy.
“Mom!” the pregnant woman chastised. She sniffled and wiped her eyes. “We don’t have time for that now! We need to save Will.” Turning to Kennedy, the woman knelt down, her hands folded in front of her. “I’m begging you, please. Save my husband.”
She reminded Kennedy of Cheyenne, her sweet sister-in-law.
Kennedy shut her eyes for a brief moment, remembering how Cheyenne died in front of her, how little Oliver ripped into his mother’s pregnant belly after he had turned.
How she could have done something to stop it.
“Ma’am?” Johnny B. asked quietly.
Kennedy knew what she had to do.
She looked over her shoulder at him.
“Get Vetta.”
“Cade’s gone? You’re sure?” Haven repeated disbelievingly.
Houston nodded. “He snuck out tonight, when those people broke into the train to steal food.”
She ran her fingers through her greasy, uncombed hair, processing what she’d just learned.
Haven had become reclusive and even more depressed after her near-death fight with Cade. She hardly left the protective confines of her cabin other than to use the bathroom and shower. And when she did, she never went anywhere without her gun, which Kennedy returned to her after she was attacked.
But even her cabin didn’t feel safe anymore. Every now and again, she would find tiny specks of dried blood splattered along the wall, and it was a brutal reminder of how Cade had nearly crushed the life out of her.
She’d never contemplated her own mortality this much before. It was always the mortality of those she loved most, the fear of losing them, that kept her from reflecting on her own fragility. Since her parents had died, she’d held onto her family with a proverbial vice-like grip, willing to do anything to keep those she had left alive. But when Cade had pummeled her with his fists, when black dots and blood blurred her vision, countless memories of her life began to flash past her, like an old movie being played out on a vintage film reel.
And from that day forward, Haven clipped her own wings and let fear paralyze her.
She had been with Mark that evening when they both heard distant gunshots coming from somewhere on the train. The boy initially wanted to investigate, but when he saw Haven wrap her arms around herself and retreat into the corner of the room, Mark refused to leave her side and sat beside her on her bunk, taking her hand in his own and promising to protect her.
They stayed like that until Houston and Brett burst in not long after with the news of Cade’s escape
.
She wrung her hands nervously. “Are you sure he actually got off the train though? What if he’s just hiding in a different car?”
Houston glanced at her nails, noticing they were chewed to nubs and bloody. In all the years he’d known her, she’d never once bitten her nails. “People saw him jump out. The other entrances of the train were fortified. There was only one way on and one way off.” He gently brushed the hair out of her face. “There’s no way he could have survived what was in that tunnel. Zombies filled it on both ends. Johnny B., Grady, and Jackson barely made it back to the train.”
“How do you know? Did you see his body?” Haven persisted. “Cade is like a cockroach. No matter what happens, he won’t ever die,” she whispered.
“There’s just no way he could have survived, Haven. Kennedy said they were almost swarmed.”
“But he had a gun, didn’t he? I thought you said he killed that old man.”
“He did. He got it off Stewart… who did a great job of watching him, I might add. But he would’ve needed a grenade launcher to survive that mess.”
She cautiously unwrapped her arms from around her body, slowly feeling as though she could breathe again.
Houston said he was gone.
And just like that, relief washed over her like cool rain on a scorching hot day.
Chapter Sixteen
Brett taped another flyer to the window on the door connecting the two train cars.
There was cause to celebrate.
It had taken him a while, not only to ask Kennedy for permission, but also to find plain white paper, a black Sharpie, and tape. Kennedy was too busy with other things on her agenda to give his idea much thought; she did little more than shrug and wish him luck with his plans.
Brett chewed on the inside of his cheek in concentration as he attempted his best legible chicken scratch on the paper.
It wasn’t the first time he’d ever put together a flyer for an event, but he had always used a computer and a printer to do it. Writing them by hand felt antiquated, like he was thrust backward into a time before the internet.
The Good, The Dead & The Lawless (Book 2): The Hell That Follows Page 21
