As quietly as he could, Mark crunched through the snow and ice rimmed puddles following the bickering duo back to the cabin. Their voices sunk to a hush as they stepped inside the house. Mark did his best to try and make himself invisible to the arguing couple. He avoided eye contact and skirted past, hurriedly ascending the stairs to the bedroom he and Amber shared.
Once he lay in bed, Amber made a dramatic show of rolling over and turning her back to him, taking the bulk of the sheets along with her as she did. I can't fucking win, he thought to himself, shaking his head and trying to calm himself enough to drift back to sleep. It was hard with the sounds of Jack and Esme hiss-fighting in the great room downstairs. After nearly half-an-hour, just as he was drifting into a fuzzy sleep he was jolted awake again. The exterior door of the cabin slammed shut, shaking the front wall of the house and jangling glassware on shelves in the room below. Mark listened closely, trying to make out exactly what was happening when he heard the distinct sounds of Jack mumbling curses as he moved away, outside the cabin.
What seemed like barely a moment later, due to the fuzziness of exhaustion, the cabin door slammed shut once again, jarring Mark awake for a second time. He groggily listened to the sounds below. Between the heavy footfalls and crashing of furniture in the room below, he couldn't be sure whether one of the infected got in or if Jack had just returned drunk. His whole body tensed and his eyes bulged as he struggled to discern which of those options was the truth. The clarification was made after a few moments, when a loud crash was accompanied by Jack's voice yelling 'Shit! Shhh!” drifted upstairs to his ears. Mark breathed an audible sigh of relief and lay his head back down and drifted back to sleep a few moments later.
The sounds of crashing and slamming down the hall awoke both of them some time later.
“Ugh! Not again!” Mark grumbled in exhaustion and anger as he pulled his pillow across his face.
He soon realized that he wasn't going to be able to go back to sleep with the questions left by the crashes. By the time he was finally able to drag his thoroughly exhausted head off the pillow, he could see Amber was already sitting upright in bed next to him. Her face was illuminated by the gloomy pre-dawn light coming in through the windows.
“What is it? What's going on Am?” he asked as he struggled to move his sluggish body upright.
“Gunfire and screaming,” she hissed back, her eyes wide with fright.
As Mark struggled to align his senses, the sounds of a window smashing and a series of crashes and thumps sounded from the great room below. A mixture of rushed, anxious voices, shouts of fear and a bloodcurdling scream pierced the early morning air as they sat trying to make sense of what was happening. Gradually, the sounds of moaning drifted to their ears. A chill swept down Mark's spine at the sound.
“Fuck!” came Jack's bleary voice, shouting from further down the hall.
Mark started to swing his legs out of bed only to realize that he and Amber were both clutching onto one another. As he started to will his hands to release her arm, the sounds of smashing and crashing of glass and furniture sounded from the room below. It sounded as if there was a fight of some sort. They both jumped simultaneously at the sound of a shotgun blast. Jack was screaming obscenities as he pumped out round after round from the 12 gauge. The roar of the shotgun echoed deafeningly throughout the cabin. A few moments later, the sound of a pistol firing punctuated between the blasts as someone, they assumed Esme, joined Jack on the balcony.
"Sammy, Junior, front and center, now!" Jack roared from almost directly outside Mark and Amber's room, hammering the heel of his fist on the kid's bedroom door.
Mark and Amber clutching to one another in bed were paralyzed by their fear. They could hear the sounds of the scurrying feet of the children running to their parents in between gun shots. After another moment, the firing outside the door petered off. Mark knew that they needed to act, but something stronger than Amber's grip prevented him from moving. The two could make out the sounds of Jack and Esme reloading their weapons as the family moved along the balcony. They could hear the footfalls outside, receding into the distance as they moved down the stairs to the common area below. Jack's heavy boots clanged heavily on the wrought iron treads of the circular staircase as he descended. Each footfall drummed in Mark's heart as their saviors moved further away. He again tried to rip his hands free of Amber, but she clutched him tighter as his own grip lessened.
“The bus is leaving folks. Stay or go, doesn't matter to me but we are getting out of here, like we all planned,” Jack called up to them from near the front door.
The spell finally broke for Mark and he slid out of Amber's grasp off the bed and moved towards the door.
“C'mon, Amber!” he hissed to her, starting the process of putting his clothes on.
Amber's only response was to sit there doe-eyed, hugging her knees and shaking her head.
“Amber! Come on, we gotta go!” he hissed louder. “I'm scared shitless too, but we gotta go!”
“I'm not going out there, Mark, no fucking way,” she replied, just as the tears started streaming down her cheeks. “I can't!”
“If we don't leave with them, we -”
Mark's statement was cut off mid-sentence by the front door of the cabin slamming shut. The hollow reverberation of the door lingered in his ears with finality. Mark's heart sank into his stomach, with the knowledge that he and Amber were without hope now, alone with no weapons. Jack and his family would take his Tesla, leaving them with no chance of escape. The sounds of the undead hammering on the walls of the cabin, which had been growing steadily since the first window smashed, paused briefly, accompanied by a smattering of gunfire, before continuing.
*
“What happened?” Jen asked, fully transfixed on Bob's story.
“At the end of the day, the armed services are a brotherhood,” Bob said with a deep sigh. “We look out for one another. We made a deal. We dropped the other servicemen off outside Southend-on-sea so they could see to themselves. This left us free to complete our own duty.”
“What about Ambassador Wringle?”
Bob was wrought with emotion again and took a few breaths to steady himself.
“Once the deal was struck with the guards, Wringle tried to stop us from leaving, one of the guards hit him in the head with the stock of his rifle. His head hit the floor. Never seen anything like that before, y'know . . . someone die like that. The constant death we witnessed all around us in the city, it was distant . . . remote y'know. Wringle was a prick, a petty, selfish little man, but he wasn't a bad guy, not evil, I mean. So much death already and he died a stupid, avoidable death. They had enough provisions in the embassy for another year or so, it didn't have to come to that.”
Bob trailed off, it was readily apparent to those gathered around that he held some amount of guilt for the man's death.
“Bob, people are dying every day for less reason than Wringle. I know that every death is tragic, but not so many are avoidable these days,” Tim began, trying to reassure the dying man, for no other reason than to ease Bob's own suffering as he too sloughed off toward his own death. “Who were you evacuating? And where were they?”
“Geneva,” Bob replied after a moment. “We flew in and scooped up a handful of European big-wigs, some royalty and a few civilians, blue-blooded ones, really wealthy. You know the type, the ones so far removed from seeing peasants like us that they don't even see us anymore.”
“Where were they holed up? Was it safe there?”
“Couldn't tell you, we flew in at night and barely set our skids on the pad before we were off again. We refueled at a small pad near Aith in the Shetlands before starting across the Atlantic. We stopped four more times for fuel to make the crossing, atop a carrier in the mid-Atlantic, in southern Greenland, in Labrador and Ontario.”
“There still a fleet in the Atlantic?” Will asked hopefully.
Bob shook his head slowly. Tim couldn't tell if his pallor was worseni
ng or the firelight was playing tricks as the evening deepened.
“We thought the same thing when we got the coordinates from Colorado. When we landed, a lot of grim-faced gaunt soldiers greeted us, holding lengths of pipe and a few pistols. They were scurvied, all of them, we could tell by the sores and bloody gums. We traded the rest of our food and water for some fuel. They looked desperate and I was worried they weren't going to let us leave or try and barter for one of the women or something. They looked grim. In the end though, they composed themselves well, like soldiers, and we took off again.”
Bob shook the memory from his head with a shudder and continued.
“It was in Labrador that we were forced to wait for a few hours. More heloes came in and we became a convoy. Apparently we weren't the only unit sent out to evacuate the rich and powerful. We were ordered to our bird and had no time to talk to any of the other drivers and crewmen, but we saw a great deal of varied garb among the occupants of the other heloes, all of it reeked of wealth.”
“These refueling stations were manned? Bases or something?” Will asked.
“Yeah, they had active troops, skeleton crews mostly. I'd guess most of the troops either got pulled for other duty like we did, or went AWOL. If we were stationed stateside rather than the UK, nothing would have kept me on base, I'd have been Texas-bound from the word go. Hell, if I had known what our mission was going to be, I would've talked Hank into staying with the others at Southend-on-sea. We figured we were going to be bringing scientists and people vital to controlling or countering this thing to a central location. That's what we thought VIP meant. Turns out that we were just chauffeuring the mega-rich and powerful to safety. I'd rather have stayed with the other men, brothers-in-arms, at Southend than spend my last few days serving the needs of some cheesedick fat-cats.” Bob took a swig of the whiskey and finished quietly. “Moot now anyways. We blew a fuel line and had to hard land.”
Bob spit at the memory, shaking his head in disgust.
“You all flew over Benoit? That's where we've been holed all winter. Had a bunch of helicopters fly over about two weeks ago. Was that your convoy?” Jen asked.
“Yeah, that was us. Those blue falcon mother fuckers, pardon my French, ordered all non-essential servicemen off of the other heloes to make room for our VIPs. Then they left us. We tried to hail Command to try and get them to send a turn-around to scoop us up, but they never returned our calls. Nothing but static for days. After a few days of cowering in the helo, we sent out a handful of men to scout out the area. We were parched and starving. They came back with a bit of food they'd scavenged out of cars. The next week or so went like that, until they stumbled across a sports stadium. They said all it took was one of the things to let out a roar and the whole mob came after them.”
“So there's really nothing you can tell us about the undead?”
Bob shook his head to the negative, remaining silent.
“So what are we going to find in Colorado? At Cheyenne mountain?” Tim asked.
Bob shrugged, his face nonplussed.
“You'll be shot on sight if you show up there,” he stated nonchalantly. “VIPs only. I don't know if they are low on food or just saving what they got for the long haul, but they aren't even letting service personnel in. We were told as much. So if they aren't letting soldiers in, they certainly won’t be welcoming random civvies in, that's for sure.”
*
With their hopes of escaping the house dashed by Amber's unwillingness to move, Mark moved to the window to watch Jack and his family as they moved out among the undead. Amber joined him after a moment and both looked out to watch the dim, shadowy shapes of Jack and his family moving off the front porch. The four ran toward the trail, hand-in-hand, moving in the direction of the main road. Mark and Amber were helpless but to watch in terror as they spotted three shadowy forms running through the trees, moving to intercept them. The morning light was just enough for Mark to see that one of the forms was stark naked. His heart sank into his stomach, knowing immediately that these were the fast ones everyone whispered fearfully about. They watched with mouths agape, in stunned silence, as the fiendishly fast shape descended on the family.
“Who is that?” Amber asked.
Instead of answering her, knowing what they were, he simply held on to her hand and pulled her head away from the sight, just as the first of the infected dove in. The infected collided with John Jr., tearing him out of his mother's grasp. The tears started falling from Mark's eyes as he watched the undead start ripping and tearing into the doughy boy. The boy and his mother's anguished screams split the air causing Amber to gasp in horror. The early morning gloom prevented him from seeing the massacre in too much detail, but what he was able to see forced the contents of his stomach onto the floor of the room. Jack spun quickly and fired the shotgun, blasting the infected from atop his son.
Sammy let out a bleat of terror and Jack spun again, firing a blast at close range at another infected moving in full flight towards him. The blast hit the thing in the shoulder, spinning it face down into the snow. It regained its feet immediately and sprung at Jack who attempted to keep it at bay, but its fury was too much. The sounds of the infected feasting on their bodies drifted up in the still air and could be clearly heard even over the sounds of dozens of undead moaning and pounding on the exterior of the house. Mark and Amber huddled against each other below the window and cried together, partially for the loss of Jack, Esme and the kids, but also for their own fate.
They stayed like that, curled up together in a ball of limbs and tears, for most of the morning. Finally, with the sound of more windows breaking downstairs, Mark pulled away from Amber. As quietly as he was able to, he started shifting the dresser across the floor. He paused, cringing at every squeak and creak it made on its way across the floor. Ever so slowly, he moved the solid oak bureau into position in front of the dead-bolted door. Even with his efforts at stealth, the scraping squeal of the heavy piece of furniture sliding across the wide plank floors seemed to rile up the infected outside the cabin. Their efforts to beat down the walls seemed more desperate, almost with a sense of urgency. Neither of the two voiced it because they couldn't be certain if it was a reality, or if their own heightened anxiety was playing tricks on them.
With the dresser fortifying the door, they spent the remainder of the morning and afternoon curled up on the floor, wrapped in the comforter. They did their best to remain completely silent. There wasn't much to talk about anyways, with the undead outside’s continued battering at the siding of the house. Late in the evening Amber stood to stretch when she finally broke her nearly day-long silence.
“Mark!” she gasped.
“Shhh! What Am?”
“Look at Jack!” she whispered back.
Mark's heart dropped; looking out across the breadth of the front yard he could see the bloodied, mangled form of Jack, rising from the blood-soaked snow. The man's innards trailed along behind him as he moved off at a lumbering shamble, leaving the bodies of his mutilated family laying in the snow behind.
“Did you see the glint Amber?” he hissed with his eyes locked on the ground where Jack had just risen.
“Huh?”
“I think I saw a glint from the Tesla key on the ground. Where Jack was laying.”
“I'm not going out there, Mark, and neither are you! Did you see those fucking things? They were so fast!”
Mark didn't push the issue any further just then. He figured that it would be best to wait a day or two anyways, in the hope that the undead would disperse on their own. He didn't figure the infected would be scooping up the key and the wide, blood soaked patch would remain as a place marker for where it lay in case they did need to escape. Even though they had designated the closet as their bathroom and kept the door closed, it wasn't long before the stench caused them to open a window. The early spring wind whipped in relentlessly, whistling as it came in.
The infected slapped and slammed against the cabin kee
ping the two from any rest through the night. Only towards the wee hours of the morning did the sound start to diminish. By the time the sun rose the next day the bodies of Esme, Sammy and John Jr. were gone as well, the only memory left of them was the crimson stained impressions they left behind in the snow. As disturbing as that was, they were heartened a bit by the fact that the only banging they heard from outside, was the sound of the screen door slamming into the house as the wind thrashed it about. Just after daybreak, they both were finally able to drift off into a fitful rest.
Early the following afternoon, Mark decided they needed to assess their situation and discuss what they were going to do.
“What are we doing, Am?”
“What do you mean?” she replied, playing dumb.
The truth was, she knew this conversation was coming and had been dreading it ever since seeing the aftermath of Jack's family butchered on the lawn below. She had no answers for him, just a sincere doubt that she would be able to force her legs to carry her out of the room they were in.
“You know what I mean, we have no food, no water,” he paused trying to gauge her reaction to their current scenario before continuing. “Our only hope is that the glint I saw is really the key to the Tesla.”
“Oh, so we just have to stroll on over there, grab the key, and then walk a mile and a half through a fucking zombie-infested forest to get to the car.” She built into a crescendo of panic as she spoke. “Then when we get there, we have to hope that we can drive it out of an entire winter's worth of snow before one of those things eats us? Sounds fucking brilliant, Mark. Can't wait.”
“It's been two days since we've eaten, Amber. We had one bottle of water in here and we finished that yesterday. Those things aren't beating on the house anymore. I'll give it one more day for them to disperse from the area, but I'm leaving tomorrow. We have to before we're too weak to run from them.”
Harvest of Ruin (Book 3): A Spring of Sorrow Page 11
