Harvest of Ruin (Book 3): A Spring of Sorrow

by Mongelli, Arthur

  “Stop the fucking car!” she shouted from the back.

  Tires screeched on the roadway as Will did as he was bade. The sound of a gunshot was deafening in the vehicle, even without glass. Luna's earsplitting screams issued anew and Laura worked frantically to soothe the little girl.

  “Pop the rear, Will,” she growled.

  Hearing the latch release, Jen leaned forwards, pushing the hatch outwards, never taking her eyes off the dead soldier. She couldn't be sure that she had succeeded in ended the thing as the muzzle flash from her gun had deafened and half-blinded her. When the rear door drifted high enough the other soldier wriggled away and shoved the corpse out of the open hatch and onto the roadway.

  “Go!” Jen barked.

  Will did as she commanded and Jen shone the light onto the face of the remaining soldier. The man winced and shielded his eyes from the intense beam.

  “Sorry,” she lied as she purposefully moved the beam of light across the soldier's body, checking for wounds.

  She immediately saw the bloody wound on the chest of the man's flight suit.

  “Open your flight suit, I need to see that wound,” she commanded.

  “Fuck, was he one of those things? Was it?” the soldier started babbling, descending into panic as she moved forward and cut the fabric of his flight suit away from the wound.

  “Shhh!” was her only response.

  The wound on his chest was clearly a bite wound. Though not immediately fatal, Jen had enough knowledge of the infection at this point she knew it would be, in time. She settled herself down a bit, having no desire to feed into the man's panic. She also had no desire to let him know that he was already dead, he would figure that out himself in time. She instead focused her attention on patching up the gruesome wound. As she worked on him, the pain steered the man's complaints away from his worry and onto the immediate agony he was feeling. She doused his chest with water to wash the blood away and get a better picture of the wound. She then doused the wound in iodine before shoving a tennis-ball sized, hanging chunk of meat back roughly into the place it belonged. She awkwardly bandaged the wound around his chest. By the time she finished wrapping it the man was unconscious.

  “Is he out?” Tim asked as quietly as possible to be heard over the wind once Luna's shouts were quieted and the agonized moaning had stopped.

  Jen shined the light directly onto the soldier's closed eyes and assumed by the lack of flinching that he was.

  “Yeah,” she replied, her voice barely loud enough to register in the front.

  Jen doused her hands in rubbing alcohol and then washed them with the remains of a gallon of water to get the blood off as they spoke.

  “What are we going to do with him?” Tim asked.

  “I think you mean: What are you going to do with him? You're the one that brought them along,” she replied.

  “Well, I figured they might be able to help get us into whatever base they were flying to. Now. . .” he barked back defensively before trailing off.

  “Now he is infected. He is going to die and come back, just like his friend did,” Jen stated flatly.

  “We can't keep him around the kids,” Laura hissed defensively.

  Tim and Will were both shaking their heads in agreement with the statement.

  “Okay, so you want to pull over and leave him on the side of the road for the undead?” Jen asked incredulously.

  Will let off the accelerator and the Yukon started slowing.

  “Are you fucking kidding me, Will?” Jen screamed. “That was sarcasm!”

  “What then?” Tim asked, a bit sharply.

  There was no way he would allow his family to linger around someone that was bound to turn.

  “We can trade him some comfort in his final hours for the knowledge he has,” Jen said at length. “I assume that he might know something that might help us out, namely, where they were going.”

  The vehicle was silent for a long minute before Will spoke.

  “Well, if we are going to drive much further with him in the car, we are going to have to find some things to take precautions for our own safety.”

  “Handcuffs or zip ties, maybe a full mask motorcycle helmet to keep him in when traveling,” Tim continued as Will trailed off.

  “Okay, it's settled then, can we drive on please?” Jen finished.

  *

  “Ah, you're back then,” Yen said as Harold stepped into the barn, sliding the door closed behind him.

  “Yeah, we ran into some undead. We didn't want to let Tyler know we were on to him so we didn't use our firearms. Helluva fight, two fast ones and a dozen slow,” Harold replied edging around a huddle of Yen's people.

  “Everyone okay?” Yen asked, genuinely concerned.

  “Yeah, Robbie twisted an ankle on a tree root. No biggie, but the injury was enough to turn us around and send us back home.”

  Yen nodded and continued wringing out his wet laundry and hanging it to dry in the warm interior of the barn.

  “We're headed back out in the morning. Looked like we were within a day or two of them. It'd probably be a good time for you to come out with us if you wanted,” Harold said after a moment of watching the man engaged in the mundanity of doing his own laundry.

  “Yeah, that definitely sounds good. Let me track down Nala and make sure she doesn't need me for anything. I'm sure that won't end in an argument,” he replied sarcastically.

  Harold laughed heartily at that. Even though Nala and Linda were a couple, she and Yen acted more like it. They were unwittingly cast into the roles of 'Mom' and 'Dad' of Donner once Tar and Daltry were shot down. Yen wasn't a natural leader, it was a role he had taken out of simple responsibility to his own people. He had led the remnants of his clan through untold miles of terror to reach the safety of Donner and he was not about to risk being turned back out. They had been welcomed within the walls just days before the ambush and he figured that accepting more responsibility would ensure that his people were allowed to remain. He was doing well enough in his new role, the road to Donner had toughened him quite a bit. He had lost much on the road, including his own brother, and as a result had become more insistent on how things needed to be done.

  While Yen brought a single-minded need for security and safety to the role he had been cast into, Nala brought unmatchable tenacity and ability to think on the fly. Most of the community had heard and was in awe of her tale, of coming half-way across undead filled Colorado with a broken arm and shooting down a biker gang. Though neither of them were native to Donner and they had to work hard to prove themselves to the people of the town. This was something they had the opportunity to do many times over, during the course of the harsh Rocky Mountain winter. Their differences made them a formidable team, their similarities caused innumerable arguments earning them the nicknames of 'Mom' and 'Dad'.

  “Right, well, let me know how that goes for you,” Harold laughed out as he turned to head back out of the barn. “See you in the morning then, meet me at the workshop at daybreak.”

  Yen absently nodded to the man's back as he departed and turned his attention back to his laundry, finishing it in a matter of minutes. He dried his hands, cold and aching from wringing out clothes washed in snow-melt before dressing for the weather. The barn provided many things, but privacy and quiet were not among those. The remnants of the Ute went about their daily tasks with little more than bed sheets strung up to demarcate their 'private' living areas.

  Once Yen was fully dressed, still in his winter parka as spring had not yet relieved them of winter's grip, he climbed into Tar's old Silverado. The old truck crawled through the rutted, deep snow towards the main road that would lead him to Heartland Clinic, where Nala had taken up full-time residence with Linda. His was the only vehicle on the roads. The fuel rationing left him in the enviable position to be one of the very few people permitted to drive within the town limits. The community employed one snow plow to keep the roadways that led to the barricades clear. Ove
r the harsh winter they employed one school bus to ferry the kids to and from school. Everyone else was required to walk, regardless of age or the weather outside. This wasn't much of an issue as many people had been traumatized or were so terror ridden by the undead that they didn't venture out of their homes other than community meal times. After the sun went down, aside from the visible fires burning to light and warm people, the town appeared to be as dead as the rest of the world outside the walls and refugee camps.

  As he pulled up the driveway to the clinic he could see Nala coming out the front doors to greet him. Wonder what she has in mind, he thought to himself as he pulled the truck against the curb and slid it in park.

  “We gotta get this shit figured out, Yen.”

  “What are you talking about, Nala?” Yen replied, genuinely confused.

  “The camps are getting attacked by the undead on a regular basis and we aren't doing a damn thing to help them. That is going to stop, now!”

  “Okay with me. You're gonna have to work on that, though. I'm headed out with Harold and the trackers in the morning. They are close to catching up to the Peterson clan and I want to be there for it.”

  “You figure out what you're gonna do about it when you do get them?”

  Yen shrugged. For most of the winter, he had been hoping that the Peterson clan would succumb to the undead or the harsh mountain winter. Now that they were closing in on them, he hoped that Tyler would force his hand and make him kill him. It would be much easier than making the choice to execute a man and his family. If it came to the latter, he wasn't sure he could do it. Even if he was able to, and Tyler surely deserved it, he doubted that the community would allow him to stay in his role as a 'leader'. To them, despite the past few months of work and toil, Yen was still a stranger. The townspeople had known the Peterson family for most of their lives, and most of their families had known the family for generations.

  *

  They came across a CVS pharmacy shortly after dawn. They were able to get some supplies to care for both Luna and the soldier without incident. Luna's fever broke late in the afternoon and the child slept noisily and deeply on her mother’s chest for the remainder of the day. As for the soldier, he slept through most of the day, waking briefly to eat a handful of dry oats Jen fed him, before drifting back into a violent fever sleep. Whatever his dreams were about, his gasps and spasms were unsettling. The rest of the occupants of the Yukon cast numerous nervous glances back in the direction of the infected man, worried that at any moment he would turn undead.

  As the afternoon sun started its early descent to the horizon, Laura leaned forwards over the steering wheel and carefully guided the SUV onto a set of farm access ruts and into an empty pasture. Christine needed to pee again, for what was likely the seventh time of the day, though no one complained. Despite the numerous naps they took through the course of the day, they were all still exhausted from the ordeal of the last thirty-six hours. Once the SUV was a couple hundred feet into the pasture, with a hundred yard buffer of open land around them she slid the shifter into park. The mud was heavy, but with the dense, uncut grasses trampled down, the Yukon had no problems navigating it. The doors of the vehicle opened almost in unison and everyone slid out into the gathering chill of the late afternoon sun. The women moved as a unit to the reaches of the high brown grass, a lingering habit of the former world, where modesty counted for something. The men stood relieving themselves using the wheel-wells of the SUV as their urinal. Within a few moments everyone was gathered back around the vehicle, stretching and milling about before they started the work of setting camp.

  A loud moan issued from within the vehicle, stalling all conversation. Nervous glances told the tale of what everyone was thinking. Tim and Jen moved cautiously in unison around the side of the vehicle to the cargo compartment and hesitantly peered in through the shattered window. The soldier was pale and sweaty, his eyes were sunken and fluttered about, seemingly unable to focus on the faces that lingered a foot away. The man's eyes gradually settled on Tim's and a low moan escaped his lips. They both leapt back instinctively. Is he changed? Tim thought as he took a sidelong step and wrested a tire iron from Will's relaxed grip.

  “Get me out of here,” a weak voice rasped from within.

  The tension was still in Tim's arms as he moved back to the tailgate, tire iron at the ready. He carefully leaned in, bringing his gaze over the top of the rear door and as the man came into view, they locked eyes. Tim's shone with fear and trepidation, while the man's burned blearily with sick intensity. The raspy voice came again from the sallow sunken face.

  “Out, please,” he croaked, lifting his hand weakly towards the window.

  Tim grasped the handle of the tailgate, yanking it open. The stench of shit, urine and sickness hit him in the face as the gate came to rest. The man's hand was outstretched to him. Tim stared at it, frozen. He didn't want to touch him, he didn't want to look at him, he didn't want to deal with any of this. He wanted this man gone, now. The soldier had been a symbol of hope for a fleeting moment, but now he was a burden, and a dangerous one at that. He wondered at the changes in himself as a person briefly, as he considered smashing the man's head in with the tire iron. He wanted to do it, and might have if it weren't for the pending judgment from his family and the friends behind him. After a moment of staring blankly at the soldier, Jen and Will edged in front of him and helped the man out and onto a somewhat dry patch of dead grass. The man groaned heavily as he forced himself to a seated position.

  “I'm dying, aren't I?” he asked, looking directly at Tim.

  Tim opened his mouth as if to speak but the words wouldn't come, instead he just nodded soberly at the man.

  The man nodded in return and his eyes drifted down to the sodden ground in front of him. After a moment he spoke again.

  “I don't want to be in that truck anymore. The movement is nauseating and the smell is wretched. I want my end to be out here in the open, with a gentle breeze on my face.”

  The group stared at the man expectantly, as if waiting for him to die. All of them were grateful that they would not have to share the vehicle with the man again. With his impending death and return, none wanted to be in such a confined area with him. Jen broke the silent spell of the moment and started rummaging through the gear inside the SUV. After shifting things about for a moment, she produced two sleeping bags and a pillow. She set about making the man as comfortable as she could, in part to alleviate her own guilt at her feelings of relief.

  “What's your name?” Will asked hesitantly, uncomfortable with all the circumstances surrounding the dying man.

  “Franklin, Robert T., Lieutenant Franklin, if you wish,” the man barked back, wincing heavily as he tossed a snappy salute to Will, doing his best to force a smile through his rictus. “Call me Bob, please.”

  With him lying in the cargo area for the past two days, it was the first opportunity that most of them had to see Bob. The man appeared to be in his late forties with a brow furrowed in pain and numerous smile lines radiating outward from the corners of his slate-gray eyes. His face was perfectly clean-shaven, standing out in stark contrast to Tim's grizzled beard and Will's winter growth.

  “Okay, Bob, how are we gonna do this?” Tim asked bluntly.

  Bob looked quizzically at him.

  “Bullet to the head? Or are we just gonna leave you here?”

  Bob's chipper facade dropped and a sullen look came over his features, like a veil.

  “Tim!” Laura barked at him, fixing a withering look on him.

  Tim threw his hands up and shrugged in response to the look. He knew in the present situation it was a valid line of inquiry, they all knew it. Laura was still clinging to the social graces of another world, one that no longer existed. One where the dead didn't return to hunt and devour the living.

  “Would you all mind spending the night here with me, share some food and a fire?” Bob asked, interrupting the tense moment between Tim and Laura. “I'll
let you get back to it in the morning, but I'd appreciate one last evening with friends. If I'm being honest with you, and I know it doesn't make much sense in my condition, but I'm scared shitless to be out here at night by myself.”

  Will looked at Jen who returned the stare, offering nothing in the way of input. His gaze moved to Tim and Laura who were still gauging each other to see if a fight would ensue.

  “We can do that Bob,” Tim sighed out reluctantly, after a tense pause. “I'm Tim. This is my wife Laura, our daughter Luna, that's Christine, Sophie, Will and Jen.”

  “Pleased to make your acquaintance,” Bob replied politely, nodding his head around at the brisk introduction.

  Tim avoided looking back to Laura after he had spoken. He knew that she wouldn't be happy. He had a hard enough time getting her out of the house in Benoit to begin with. With the possibility of cannibals and having just barely escaped from being surrounded by the undead, now they would be camping down in a completely unfamiliar area with Bob, the ticking time bomb. What was more dangerous that both Tim and Jen realized, was that they had not taken the time to scout the area around their campsite whatsoever. Now with a scant hour or so of light left, there would be no time for more than a quick perimeter sweep. There would be no way to tell if a crowded shopping plaza or a hospital lay just on the other side of the pasture. That thought nagged at both of them as they moved to check the area.

  “We can talk later,” Bob stated, his voice thinning out to a whisper from the exertion, his eyes closed as he finished. “I need to rest a bit.”

  Having finished his statement, he lay down on the nest of sleeping bags Jen had set out for him. Laura began rummaging loudly through the packs in the SUV, coming out eventually with some camp gear to cook. As she moved towards Bob to set up for a meal she spoke quietly to Tim.